The Atrahasis Epic opens not with a benevolent act of creation but with a labour dispute among the gods themselves. Before humanity existed, the junior Igigi gods were made to dig the Tigris and Euphrates canals and carry the earth dredged from them, work the text describes in terms of genuine physical suffering, forty years of it by the poem's own count, before the Igigi set fire to their tools and marched on the dwelling of Enlil, the senior god who had assigned them the labour. The crisis was resolved not by relieving the gods of work but by inventing a new class of being to do it instead. Enki proposed, and the birth goddess Nintu carried out, the creation of the first human from a mixture of clay and the flesh and blood of We-ila, described in the text as "a god who had intelligence," killed specifically to supply the mixture with a portion of divine will and awareness (temu).
The Enuma Elish, composed later and organised around the god Marduk's rise to supremacy after his defeat of the primordial sea goddess Tiamat, tells a structurally similar story: Marduk creates humanity from the blood of Kingu, the god who had led Tiamat's rebel army, explicitly so that humankind can be burdened with the gods' service and the gods can be at rest. Both accounts treat the mixing of divine and earthly material as the reason a human being is more than an animal, carrying a fragment of divine intelligence, while still being firmly a servant class created to work rather than a divine being in its own right.