Don't know how current/accurate the following excerpt is, but use it to your advantage [the author is an uncontested authority on Sumerian history/arhaeology]:
From: The Sumerians, Their History, Culture and Character By: Samuel Noah Kramer The University of Chicago Press, 1963 ISBN 0-226-45238-7
It's a bit hard to find a copy. If you're in the NYC area, the Metropolitan Museum has it in stock.
Quotation about Sumerian creation mythology, from cuneiform tablets:
********************************************************************** In this paradise of the gods eight plants are made to sprout by Ninhursag, the great mother-goddess of the Sumerians.... She succeeds in bringing these plants into being only after an intricate process...without the slightest pain or travail. But probably because Enki wanted to taste them, his messenger, the two-faced god Isimud, plucks these precious plants one by one and gives them to his master, who proceeds to eat them each in turn. Whereupon the angered Ninhursag pronounces the curse of death upon him... she disappears....
Enki's health begins to fail; eight of his organs become sick. [Enlil, the air-god, the king of the Sumerian gods coaxes a fox to bring Ninhursag back. She comes back and inquires which eight organs of his body ache and brings into existence eight corresponding healing deities]. **********************************************************************
Note that this paradise, Dilmun, has parallels with the biblical paradise. It is located <east> of Sumer. Its fresh water is brought up from the earth.
Note also the painless intricate process, in this case the birth of goddesses who in turn produce plants. In Genesis recall the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the subsequent curses pronounced against women.
I now continue with another quotation from the book.
*********************************************************************** But perhaps the most interesting result...is the explanation which it provides for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story, the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, "the mother of all living", from the rib of Adam--for why a rib? Why did the Hebrew storyteller find it more fitting to choose a rib rather than any other organ of the body for the fashioning of the woman whose name, Eve, according to the Biblical notion means approximately "she who makes live." The reason becomes clear if we assume a Sumerian literary background...; for in our Sumerian poem one of Enki's sick organs is the rib. Now the Sumerian word for "rib" is <ti>...; the goddess created for the healing of Enki's rib was therefore called in Sumerian Nin-ti, "the Lady of the rib." But the Sumerian word ti also means "to make live." The name Nin-ti may thus mean "the Lady who makes live" as well as "the Lady of the rib." In Sumerian literature, therefore, "the Lady of the rib" came to be identified with "the Lady who makes live" through what may be termed a play on words. It was this, one of the most ancient of literary puns, which was carried over and perpetuated in the Biblical paradise story, although there, of course, the pun loses its validity, since the Hebrew words for "rib" and "who makes live" have nothing in common. ***********************************************************************
Rib, rib, why a rib? Fib, fib, it's all just a fib.
Skeptic, member since 1963.