Ninti
Mesopotamian · deity · mythic · deity
Ninti is a pun that became a goddess. Enki eats eight of Ninhursag's plants, she curses him, and he sickens in eight places; brought back, she bears a healing deity for each part, and the one for the rib is Ninti — where the Sumerian ti carries 'rib' and 'live' in the same syllable, so that the lady of the rib is also the lady who makes live. Anyone who has read the second chapter of Genesis has met a version of this joke without the pun surviving the translation into Hebrew, where rib and life are unrelated words. She turns up again as the queen of the abzu and the mother of Ninkasi, which is how she earns her place here: the brewing goddess's hymn names her parents, and one of them was in this registry and the other was not.
Parentage
Children
Domains
- healing
Relations
- mother of: Ninkasi