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CAIN created a city and laid its foundation, and called it Kish. But the people were without a king, so the gates were barred against the world. Then THEY searched the land for a king, and Inninna searched the land for a king, and searched the land for a king, and they found Etana, a shepherd, and led him into the city. They built his dais, and gave him his scepter, and made him king over all the land.
But Etana feared for his kingdom, for he had no son and heir. His wife Muanna, called Sherbi’anni, had an illness and could not carry a child to term. One day Muanna was visited with a powerful dream, and she spoke to Etana, saying unto him that only with the shammu sha aladi, the plant of birth that grows in the heavens, would she be able to bear him a son and heir
Etana returned to Kish and offered up many sacrifices to Shamash, and beseeched his aid, saying, “Mighty Shamash, god of the sun, god of justice, you have dined on the flesh of my fattest sheep and drunk the blood of my lambs, and inhaled the scent of my last fragment of incense. Deliver unto me the plant of birth, that my wife might bear a child!”
Etana appears on the Sumerian Kings List as the thirteenth king of the First Kish Dynasty, which was established following the great flood. None of the kings named before Etana appear in any other known source, and may be entirely mythical. In fact, there is no independent archaeological evidence for Etana, either. The first king with known archaeological evidence, En-me-barage-si, is the ninth following Etana, and ruled around 2600 BCE. If Etana was an actual historical figure, his reign would probably have been sometime between 2800-2700 BCE.
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