At the command of Anu of the Sky, Aruru, Mother of Creation closed her eyes and dreamed. She spit in her hands, formed a mold of clay and tossed it into the wild place, where she shaped it in the form of her ideal, and wrought a man, a killer, a striving soul.

So was born Enkidu the Bold, as forceful and fierce as war-hurling Ninurta in heaven. The hair of a beast covered his body, the hair of the woman hung from head to hips. He stalked the wild places, naked, far from the cities of men, grazed with the gazelles, and slacked his thirst with clear water on all fours at the waterholes alongside antelope and deer.

Came a day when a man—a trapper of beasts—saw him drinking with the wild things at the waterhole. The trapper turned gray, his heart pounding, his legs aquiver, frozen in terror.

The trapper returned to the waterhole the next day, and the day after. Fear gripped his belly and drained his spirit until he took on the look of a harried man returning from a long, harsh trek.

*To his father he went and pleaded. “Father, a savage man stalks the waterhole. He must be the mightiest man in the world, his muscles like stone. I have seen him outrun the fleetest beasts.

“He lives with the animals and grazes with the gazelles, and slacks his thirst with clear water on all fours at the waterhole. I dare not approach him. He fills in the pitfalls, tears out my snares and frees the animals. Unable to catch my prey, my living is at an end,”

*This passage indicates that the outlaying regions of Sumer were settled in dispersed kinship groups, extended families answering to a patriarch, who may well have been the father of many of the heads of household in the clan range, but who may have simply been the head of the extended-family, an uncle or cousin who effectively acted as the local father to heads of household.

In a region requiring irrigation for farming, but not yet denuded by ages of grain cultivation and overgrazing, the marginal ranges, wisely left to wild animals and hunted, would appear more like the modern Serengeti Plain in Kenya than our worn vision of desiccated Iraq. The lands of Sumer had yet to see 5,000 years of intense human activity, with all of its attendant folly, and would appear much more like a wilderness to us than the overused place it has been throughout our brief historic memory.