Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (21 page)

Enlil
(
Ellil
) The son of An and brother of Enki, the god of wind and air, and for a time replaces his father as king of the gods and chief god of the Sumerians. As lord of the wind, he can be either destructive or benevolent. In one story, he watches
Ninlil
(see Ninhursaga), the grain goddess, as she bathes, and, unable to resist, rapes her. For this sexual assault, he is banished from his cult city Nippur by the assembly of gods.
Enlil descends to the underworld, but the pregnant Ninlil follows him there so their son can be born in his presence. The child becomes the moon god Nanna, but before they can leave the underworld, they must have other children who can survive there, which would allow Nanna to leave. This story of Enlil “dying” and then returning to earth is another of the earliest examples of the widespread concept of a dying and reborn god—the concept that so trans-fixed James Frazer in
The Golden Bough
—which is repeated many times in other myths.

Inanna
(
Ishtar
) “Lady of Heaven” is the most complex and in many ways influential Mesopotamian deity. The Sumerian goddess of love, sex appeal, and battle, she is significant not only in Sumer but in other, later mythologies. She is described in one text as the one whom not even 120 lovers could exhaust. She is adapted in later myths of Western Asia and reappears in other cultures as
Astarte
(Canaan),
Cybele
(Anatolia),
Aphrodite
(Greece), and
Venus
(Rome). Patron goddess of the city of Uruk, she is also identified with the planet Venus, the brightest object in the night sky, and the disappearance and reappearance of the planet were explained by Inanna’s descent into the underworld in one of the oldest versions of the universal myth of the journey of souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. (This central Mesopotamia myth of Inanna and her husband Dumuzi is told in detail below. See
How did an angry goddess make the seasons
?)
Inanna also figures prominently in
Gilgamesh
, and as the patron goddess of prostitutes, she is the most significant figure in the annual rite on New Year’s Day in which a priestess representing Inanna couples with the real-life king. This ritual was probably enacted by the living king with a temple prostitute who represented the goddess.

Marduk
The son of Enki; later emerges as the chief god of Babylon after defeating Tiamat, the she-dragon, in the epic battle described in the
Enuma Elish
.
Known in the Bible as
Merodach
and later as
Bel
(or
Baal
), Marduk essentially became one of the chief adversaries of the Hebrew God. Several actual kings with names related to Marduk (Evil-Merodach, Merodach-baladan) appear in biblical records.
After the conquest of Sumer by the Akkadians, Marduk became the supreme god of Mesopotamia, and his temple at Babylon contained the great ziggurat associated with the biblical Tower of Babel. (See below,
Was the Tower of Babel in Babylon?
)

Nanna
(
Sin
) The Sumerian moon god, also called Sin by the Akkadians. He is the firstborn son of Enlil, who had raped Sin’s mother, the grain goddess Ninlil. In some traditions, Nanna is the father of Inanna (Ishtar). He is revered as the god who measures time, and because he shines at night, is considered the enemy of wrongdoers and dark forces. Renowned for his wisdom, Nanna is consulted by the other gods when they need advice.

Ninhursaga
The Sumerian goddess of bounty, whose name means “lady of the stony ground.” As the Mesopotamian earth goddess, she takes several forms. As Ninlil, she is the wife of Enlil. As
Ninki
, she is the wife of Enki and bore his children on Dilmun, the island of paradise, and as
Nintur
, she is worshipped as a midwife. As a fertility goddess, she has power over birth and nourishes the Sumerian kings with her milk, giving them a measure of divinity.

Ninurta
The Sumerian war god and patron of the hunt; another son of Enlil and Ninhursaga. Called “lord of the earth,” he is god of the thunderstorms and spring floods, and began as a great bird but was later humanized. In one story, nature rises up against Ninurta, but some parts of the natural world, including some stones, take his side. The stones that side with Ninurta became the precious stones.

Tiamat
The Babylonian she-dragon of chaos; represents the saltwater ocean, as opposed to the freshwater of Apsu. In the Creation epic
Enuma Elish
, Apsu and Tiamat mingle and give birth to
Lahmu
and
Lahamu
, whose names mean “silt.” From them came all the other gods. Tiamat plays a central role in the
Enuma Elish
and the myth of Marduk, who kills her and turns half of her body into the sky and the other half into the earth. But her legacy goes past Mesopotamia’s myths.
The word for the “deep” in Hebrew is
tehom
, believed to be a version of “Tiamat,” and the conflict between the creator god and chaos, in the form of the sea, plays a role in later Canaanite religious ideas, which also influenced the Israelites. The “myth” of the Hebrew god defeating the chaos monster of the sea appears in several places in the Bible. Exodus 15:1–18, believed to be one of the oldest pieces of literature in the Bible, is a hymn or Song of Moses, which uses the ancient metaphor of the Divine Warrior and his victory over the sea. Psalm 74:13 is a poem that describes the Hebrew God dividing the sea and breaking the heads of the “dragon in the waters,” called Leviathan, before the Creation begins. The depiction of the primordial chaos as a dragon or sea serpent is one of the most universal metaphors in mythology.

Utu
(
Shamash
) The benevolent sun god of justice who gives the law code to Hammurabi. The son of
Nanna
and the brother of Inanna, he is thought to cross the heavens by day and traverse the underworld by night, in the same fashion as Egypt’s sun god Re. Utu constituted part of a divine triad of sun, moon, and the planet Venus with his father, the moon god Nanna, and his sister, Inanna.

How did an angry goddess make the seasons?

Men: have you ever gotten in trouble when you didn’t notice that the wife or girlfriend was gone all day? Was she a little peeved at being overlooked? Then you know what kind of trouble the shepherd king Dumuzi was in when he enjoyed his wife’s absence a bit too much.

Like most ancient cultures dependent on agriculture, the Mesopotamians were preoccupied with fertility—both in their lives and their myths. Just as the death of Osiris was the central myth in Egypt and was tied into Egyptian views of the seasonal crop cycle, the story of fertility goddess Inanna and her husband Dumuzi was the focal point of Mesopotamia’s view of the world. While the Osiris myth featured feuding brothers, Seth and Osiris, the family dispute in Mesopotamia starts out between sisters.

Inanna goes to visit her sister Ereshkigal in the underworld, where she is queen of the dead. The ambitious Inanna was in a constant quest for greater power, and she coveted her sister’s throne. She leaves behind her beloved Dumuzi, the shepherd god and her “honey man.” In a celestial striptease, at each of seven gates leading into the underworld, the beautiful and bejeweled Inanna must remove an article of jewelry or clothing, and finally, at the seventh gate, her remaining garment. Naked at last, Inanna stands before her sister, who stares at her with the “eyes of death,” and she dies instantly. For three days, Inanna’s corpse hangs, rotting on a hook.

Back in the land of the living, with Inanna in the underworld, sex takes a holiday. People stop coupling.

There are competing versions of how Inanna is released. But once restored to life, she must promise to send someone back in her place—which is another common mythic theme. When Inanna returns to Uruk, her cult city, she finds her husband, Dumuzi, sitting on his throne, looking far from mournful. Enraged that her husband did not weep for her, Inanna gives Dumuzi the same withering gaze of death that she had gotten from her sister, and he is taken to the underworld in her place.

Inanna later realizes that she misses her “honey man,” and begins to grieve for him. Her laments for her husband become popular Mesopotamian songs, and are the very songs that Ezekiel hears the women of Israel later singing, in what he considers an abomination. Inanna pleads with her sister, and Dumuzi is finally released for half the year, his place in the underworld taken by his compassionate sister, so he can spend half the year with Inanna.

To the Mesopotamians, the disappearance and reappearance of Dumuzi were connected to the seasonal cycles of fertility and crops—just like the story of Persephone in Greek myth, or Amaterasu in Japanese myths. (The later Akkadian version of this myth features Ishtar and Tammuz with slight variations, but the ultimate outcome is the same, and the story was a popular one, well known throughout the Near East.)

Was Inanna’s city the first “Sin City”?

“What do women want?” Sigmund Freud famously asked. In one modern pop-anthem, the answer is that girls just want to have fun. And Inanna may have been one of the first “girl power” goddesses to live that creed. Accounts of life in the cult cities of this hard-living, hard-loving goddess also give us a very different picture of ancient city-life. It wasn’t all-work-no-play back then. Mesopotamians, we know, were party people.

Best known as the goddess of sexual love, the Sumerian Inanna (and her Babylonian counterpart, Ishtar) was also a goddess of war, and she enjoyed battle as though it were a dance. Aggressively sexual, she knew few boundaries, and in poems she says, “Who will plow my vulva? Who will plow my high field? Who will plow my wet ground?”

Inanna was also, not surprisingly, the patroness of prostitutes and ale houses. According to historian Gwendolyn Leick, her city, Uruk, one of the oldest in Mesopotamia, was an ancient “Fun City,” and Inanna was a beguiling figure who “stands for the erotic potential of city life, which is set apart from the strict social control of the tribal community or the village.” Inanna prowled the streets and taverns in search of sexual adventure, and, according to Leick, sex in the streets was not an unusual thing in ancient Mesopotamia—in Inanna’s Uruk and perhaps in Babylon. The idea of sex as “immoral” was not widely held in ancient civilizations, including the Egyptian and, to some extent, Greek worlds. In many cultures, sex was viewed as part of the natural order, and was routinely made a part of the fertility rites that were celebrated openly. Many of the restrictive codes about sexual conduct began with the institution of Mosaic Law in Israel, which is one reason why Babylon gained such a reputation as a sinful place in the view of both the Israelites of the Old Testament—who were also held captive in Babylon—and New Testament Christians, who called Babylon the “great whore,” although they meant the hated Rome in the time of the Emperor Nero.

In his recent, modern-English version of
Gilgamesh
, translator Stephen Mitchell hints at this atmosphere in the streets of old Mesopotamia:

In every city of ancient Sumer, and other Mesopotamian cities, pairs of temples were dedicated to Inanna and her husband Dumuzi. In the annual marriage ceremony on New Year’s Day, the king of each city would impersonate Dumuzi, and a priestess—or possibly a cultic prostitute—would portray Inanna in a ritual intended to ensure fertility and prosperity. In some early accounts, this rite was actually a sacrificial one, and the figures representing Dumuzi and Inanna were killed every eight years. Some archaeological finds suggest that the king was killed along with a large group of family members and retainers. But over time that idea undoubtedly proved unpopular with the kings, who were stand-ins for Dumuzi, and the ritual evolved, with the “death” becoming ceremonial. In later times, the sacrifice was performed symbolically, and the king—or his stand-in—was merely struck.