Archaeological investigations were carried out in the 1940s. It appears that the earliest settlement was around 5000 BC. According to Oppenheim, "Eventually the entire south lapsed into stagnation, abandoning the political initiative to the rulers of the northern cities." and the city abandoned in 600 BC.

In the Sumerian king list, Eridu is named as the city of the first kings:

After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug. In Eridug, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years. Alaljar ruled for 36000 years. 2 kings; they ruled for 64800 years. Then Eridug fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira.

Adapa, caretaker of Eridu, was an exorcist, with mighty powers to combat the demons that bedeviled the Mesopotamian imagination. He took his place among the apkallu the seven famous sages. He was a mortal from a divine lineage, like many liminal Greek heroes, who stood on the threshhold between the two worlds. When he broke the wings of the South Wind that had overturned his fishing boat, Adapa was called to account before Anu. Ea, his patron deity, warned him not to partake of food or drink while he is in heaven, and thus cheated Adapa of the immortality that would have been his. There were jealous gods even outside Eden.

In the court of Assyria, special physicians trained in the ancient lore of Eridu, far to the south, predicted the course of disease from signs and portents on the patient's body, which we must not too hastily connect with "symptoms" in our world-picture, and they offered the appropriate incantations and magical resources.

In Sumerian Mythology Eridu was the home of the god En.ki, the Sumerian counterpart of the water-god Ea. Like all the Sumerian and Babylonian gods, En.ki/Ea originated as a local deity, who came to share, according to the later cosmology, with Anu and Enlil, the rule of the cosmos. His realm was the waters that surrounded the world and lay below it.

External links

• The Sumerian king list: translation
• The History of the Ancient Near East