Before the great Flood, there appeared upon the shore of the Persian Gulf, where the freshwater of Eridu mingled with the saltwater of the sea, seven beings whom the Sumerians called the Abgal and the Akkadians the Apkallu — "the Sages." They had the bodies of fish from the waist down and the bodies of men above; they emerged from the water at dawn and returned to it at evening; and during the daytime they instructed the people of Sumer in the arts of civilization. From them, said the tradition, mankind learned the letters of writing, the measurement of fields, the founding of cities, the framing of laws, the making of bricks, the brewing of beer.

The first of these Sages was Adapa-Uan, who came up from the Apsu in the time of the first king Alulim of Eridu. There were six who followed him, each in the reign of a different antediluvian king; and after the Flood, the tradition continued in attenuated form, with sages of human birth taking the place of the divine instructors. The Babylonians compiled lists; they preserved the names; they fashioned protective figurines of the Apkallu in clay and buried them in pairs at the corners and thresholds of buildings — that the founding wisdom of the world might attend the foundations of houses.

The figures came down to the Greek world through Berossus, the Babylonian priest who in the third century BCE wrote a history of his civilization in Greek; he reported that the chief of the Sages, whom he called Oannes, had emerged from the Persian Gulf and had taught mankind "all things which contribute to a regular life, and to take away the rude and savage way of living." The Greeks read Berossus with curiosity; later writers, both classical and modern, have read the figures of the Sages with various imaginations, sometimes overheated.