Ninti

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

• parent: Ninhursag

Children

• Ninkasi

Domains

• healing

Relations

• mother of: NinkasiMother of Ninkasi by Enki, on the Hymn to Ninkasi's own testimony.A hymn to Ninkasi (ETCSL 4.23.1): 'Your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu'. (primary)

Sources

• Ninti is the goddess born by Ninhursag to heal Enki's rib in Enki and Ninhursag, her name punning on the Sumerian ti as both rib and life, and the mother of Ninkasi in the Hymn to Ninkasi.: Enki and Ninhursag; A hymn to Ninkasi (ETCSL 4.23.1). (primary); Reference treatment of Ninti, on the double reading of her name as 'lady of the rib' and 'lady who makes live', and its reinterpretation as 'lady of the month' in the myth. (secondary)