Ancestors of Enlil or Enki-Ninki deities were a group of Mesopotamian deities. Individual lists do not agree on their number, though the enumerations always start with the pair Enki (to be distinguished from the water god Enki) and Ninki and end with Enlil. They were regarded as primordial, ancestral beings who were no longer active and resided in the underworld. They could be invoked in exorcisms. They are attested in various texts, including god lists, incantations, prayers and myths. Terminology The term "ancestors of Enlil" refers to a group of Mesopotamian deities. They are already attested in Early Dynastic sources. The same group is sometimes instead referred to as "Enki-Ninki deities" (German: Enki-Ninki-Gottheiten), an approximate translation of the plural (d)En-ki-(e-)ne-(d)Nin/Nun-ki-(e-)ne, derived from the names of the pair Enki and Ninki, and used to refer to all of these deities collectively in primary sources. Wilfred G. Lambert proposed the English translation "Enkis and Ninkis". He also coined the term "theogony of Enlil" to refer to the lists of these divine ancestors. The latter label is also used by Andrew R. George. The names Enki and Ninki refer to a pair typically opening lists of ancestors of Enlil. The names of the individual pairs which follow all contain the signs en, "lord", and nin, "lady". In each pair, the en name precedes the nin name. There is no indication that the individual pairs were meant to illustrate the stages of development of the universe. Not all of the names are possible to fully translate. The pairs occur in a different order in each of the available sources, and only the position of Enki and Ninki as the first generation and Enlil and Ninlil as the last is consistent, with no exceptions from the former rule and only one from the latter. The number of pairs varies from 3 to 21. 7 or 8 appear in Early Dynastic god lists, 9 (10 if Enmešarra is counted) in the Old Babylonian god list from Mari, 16 in the Old Babylonian An = Anum forerunner, and 21 in An = Anum (tablet I, lines 96–138). The unusual length of the sequence in the last of these sources was most likely the result of compiling variant traditions. While Enki and Ninki could be identified in older scholarship as Enki and Damgalnuna, this view is regarded as erroneous. As already noted by Thorkild Jacobsen in 1976, the