suggests this name might only be an uncommon spelling of the better attested dbe-munus/dBa-al6-tum, the spouse of Hadabal. In an earlier publication he also considered it a possibility that she might have been the spouse of the local form of Ea, Ḥayya. "Ninki" is also attested in Ebla as a part of the phrase nin-ki kalam timki, “lady of the country”, possibly the epithet of a goddess, and as a title of Tilut, one of the wives of the vizier Ibrium. According to Wilfred G. Lambert, after the Early Dynastic period a gap in attestations of the ancestors of Enlil occurs, but further sources mentioning them are known from the Old Babylonian period and later. However, Gonzalo Rubio lists a single possible Ur III example, a fragment from Nippur, N-T545 (A 33647), which might be either an incantation or a literary text. It is also assumed that a mourning festival dedicated to them -associated with the duku in Nippur took place annually as early as in the third millennium BCE. Walther Sallaberger argues that ezem dukuga, celebrated there in the Ur III period, can be connected with later rites associated with them. In later periods they appear in various versions of Udug Hul. In Šurpu, the pairs Enki and Ninki and Enšar and Ninšar are invoked. The ancestors of Enlil are also mentioned in the myth Death of Gilgamesh. The eponymous hero seemingly meets them in the underworld. Enumerations of pairs of ancestors of Enlil also occur in laments dedicated to him, which commonly include long lists of various deities associated with him. An unfinished text of this variety known from the Old Babylonian tablet CBS 10417 mentions a gift he received from the pairs Enki and Ninki and Enul and Ninul. According to Paul Delnero's interpretation of the text, most likely a goddess appeals to Enlil to spare her city from destruction, similarly as Bau does in another similar text, in this case by reminding him of the time when he himself received a city from his ancestors. A prayer to Enlil refers to Enki and Ninki as “the father who begat you”. Jeremiah Peterson has tentatively suggested that a recently published fragmentary text, “The birth of Enlil” (MS 3312), might be an account of the succession from Enki and Ninki to Enlil. However, according to its translator, Christopher Metcalf, the deities mentioned in it are left unnamed, and