The Texts
The Myth of Etana survives in Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian copies, the last from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and no copy is complete. The Sumerian King List names Etana as a king of Kish after the flood, 'the shepherd who ascended to heaven, who consolidated all the lands', and credits him with an impossibly long reign followed by his son Balih.
A Broken Pact
An eagle and a serpent swore friendship before Shamash beside a poplar tree, the eagle nesting in its crown and the serpent at its roots, and they shared their hunting. When the eagle's young were grown, the eagle ate the serpent's young, though its own wise fledgling warned it against breaking the oath. The serpent appealed to Shamash, who told it to hide inside the carcass of a wild ox. When the eagle came down to feed, the serpent seized it, cut its wings, plucked its feathers, and threw it into a pit to die. There the eagle cried to Shamash for mercy.
The Childless King
Etana of Kish, first king after the flood in some king lists, had no heir. Shamash directed him to the eagle. Etana, who had prayed to Shamash for the plant of birth so that his wife could bear a son, found the eagle in its pit, fed it, and nursed it for months until it could fly. In return the eagle offered to carry him up to the heaven of Anu and Ishtar to find the plant. Dreams in the later version encourage the attempt.
The Ascent
On the eagle’s back Etana rose through successive heavens. The land shrank to a garden plot, then a furrow, then nothing. Fear took him; he cried to descend. Fragments break off (some imply a fall, others a return) but the image endures: a mortal king tasting the altitude of gods in search of a child.
The myth binds kingship, justice, and the longing for lineage.
Reading the Ending
Because the King List gives Etana a son, many scholars think the lost ending was happy, with the plant found and the heir born; others read the frightened descent as a fall. The flight on an eagle's back is shown on Akkadian cylinder seals of the late third millennium BCE, where a man rides an eagle above shepherds and dogs, which shows the story was known centuries before the surviving copies.