Ninhursag, the lady of the stony mountain, is the Sumerian mother-goddess and one of the four great deities of the pantheon alongside An, Enlil and Enki. She is known under an unusual number of names, Ninmah (the exalted lady), Nintu (the lady who gives birth), Damgalnuna, and others, so many that it is not certain the tradition always understood them as one goddess, and her identity is somewhat fluid across time and place. Her essential role is as the shaper of living bodies, the divine midwife and maker of forms. In the myth of Enki and Ninmah, the two deities hold a contest at a feast: Ninmah moulds human beings with various disabilities and challenges Enki to find a place in society for each, and he does; then Enki makes a frail and helpless creature and challenges her in return, and she cannot provide for it, a story that reflects, among other things, on the making of human beings and the accommodation of human frailty.
In another myth, Enki and Ninhursag, set in the paradisal land of Dilmun, she creates plants and heals the ailing Enki by bringing forth deities to cure each of his afflicted body parts. As Nintu she was invoked in childbirth, and several early rulers called themselves her beloved or claimed to be nourished by her milk. Ninhursag is the Mesopotamian image of the generative, body-shaping mother at the origin of life.