th" is either
the method by which Ziusudu has already succeeded in appeasing their
anger, or the means by which he is here enjoined to attain that end.
Against the latter alternative it is to be noted that the god is
addressing more than one person; and, further, at Ziusudu is evidently
already pardoned, for, so far from following the deity's advice,
he immediately prostrates himself before Anu and Enlil and receives
immortality. We may conjecture that at the close of the Fifth Column
Ziusudu had already performed the invocation and thereby had appeased
the divine wrath; and that the lines at the beginning of the Sixth
Column point the moral of the story by enjoining on Ziusudu and his
descendants, in other words on mankind, the advisability of employing
this powerful incantation at their need. The speaker may perhaps
have been one of Ziusudu's divine helpers--the Sun-god to whom he had
sacrificed, or Enki who had saved him from the Flood. But it seems to me
more probable that the words are uttered by Anu and Enlil themselves.(1)
For thereby they would be represented as giving their own sanction
to the formula, and as guaranteeing its magical efficacy. That the
incantation, as addressed to Anu and Enlil, would be appropriate is
obvious, since each would be magically approached through his own sphere
of control.

(1) One of them may have been the speaker on behalf of both.

It is significant that at another critical point of the story we have
already met with a reference to conjuring "by the Name of Heaven and
Earth", the phrase occurring at the close of the Third Column after the
reference to the dream or dreams. There, as we saw, we might possibly
explain the passage as illustrating one aspect of Ziusudu's piety:
he may have been represented as continually practising this class of
divination, and in that case it would be natural enough that in the
final crisis of the story he should have propitiated the gods he
conjured by the same means. Or, as a more probable alternative, it was
suggested that we might connect the line with Enki's warning, and assume
that Ziusudu interpreted the dream-revelation of Anu and Enlil's purpose
by means of the magical incantation which was peculiarly associated with
them. On either alternative the phrase fits into the story itself, and
there is no need to suppose that the narrative is interrupted, either
in the Third or in the Sixth Column, by an address to the hearers of the
myth,