by Georges Roux
An (Anu or Anum in Akkadian) embodied ‘the overpowering personality of the sky’ of which he bore the name, and occupied first place in the Sumerian pantheon. This god, whose main temple was in Uruk, was originally the highest power in the universe, the begetter and sovereign of all gods. Like a father he arbitrated their disputes and his decisions, like those of a king, brooked no appeal. Yet An – at least in the classical Sumerian mythology – did not play an important part in earthly affairs and remained aloof in the heavens as a majestic though somewhat pale figure. At some unknown period7 and for some obscure reason the patron-god of Nippur, Enlil, was raised to what was in fact the supreme rank and became in a certain sense the national god of Sumer. Much later he himself was in turn wrested of his authority by the hitherto obscure god of Babylon, Marduk; but Enlil was certainly less of an usurper than Marduk. His name means ‘Lord Air’, which, among other things, evokes immensity, movement and life (breath), and Enlil could rightly claim to be ‘the force in heaven’ which had separated the earth from the sky and had thereby created the world. The theologians of Nippur, however, also made him the master of humanity, the king of kings. If An still retained the insignia of kingship it was Enlil who chose the rulers of Sumer and Akkad and ‘put on their heads the holy crown’. And as a good monarch by his command keeps his kingdom in order, so did the air-god uphold the world by a mere word of his mouth:
Without Enlil, the Great Mountain,
No city would be built, no settlement founded,
No stalls would be built, no sheepfolds established,
No king would be raised, no high priest born…
The rivers – their floodwaters would not bring over flow,
The fish in the sea would not lay eggs in the canebrake,
The birds of heaven would not build nests on the wild earth,
In heaven the drifting clouds would not yield their moisture,
Plants and herbs, the glory of the plain, would fail to grow,
In fields and meadows the rich grain would fail to flower,
The trees planted in the mountain-forest would not yield their fruit…8
The personality of the god Enki is better known but much more complex. Despite the appearances, it is not certain that his Sumerian name means ‘lord earth’ (en.ki), and linguists are still arguing about the exact meaning of his Semitic name Ea. However, there is no doubt that Enki/Ea was the god of the fresh waters that flow in rivers and lakes, rise in springs and wells and bring life to Mesopotamia. His main quality was his intelligence, his ‘broad ears’ as the Sumerians said, and this is why he was revered as the inventor of all techniques, sciences and arts and as patron of the magicians. Moreover, Enki was the god who held the me's, a word used, it seems, to designate the key-words of the Sumerian civilization, and which also played a part in the ‘attribution of destinies’.9 After the world was created, Enki applied his unrivalled intelligence to the laws devised by Enlil. A long, almost surrealist poem10 shows him putting the world in order; extending his blessings not only to Sumer, its cattle sheds, fields and cities, but also to Dilmun and Meluhha and to the nomads of the Syro-Mesopotamian desert; transformed into a bull and filling the Tigris with the ‘sparkling water’ of his semen; entrusting a score of minor deities with specific tasks and finally handing over the entire universe to the sun-god Utu. This master architect and engineer who said that he was ‘the ear and the mind of all the land’ was also the god who was closest and most favourable to man. It was he who had the brilliant idea to create mankind to carry out the gods’ work, but also, as we shall see, who saved mankind from the Flood.
Side by side with the male pantheon there was a female
Mural painting from the second millennium palace at Mari. Above, the goddess Ishtar appoints Zimri-Lim king of Mari. by giving him the sceptre and the ring of kingship. Below, two unnamed goddesses holding vases spurting out water, as a symbol of fertility.
After A. Parrot, Mission Archéologique de Mari, II, 2, 1958.
pantheon composed of goddesses of all ranks. Many of them were merely gods’ wives whilst others fulfilled specific functions. Prominent among the latter stood the mother-goddess Ninhursag (also known as Ninmah or Nintu), and Inanna (Ishtar for the Semites) who played a major role in Mesopotamian mythology.
Inanna was the goddess of carnal love and as such had neither husband nor children, but she entertained many lovers whom she regularly discarded. Beautiful and voluptuous as she undoubtedly was imagined and portrayed, she often acted perfidiously and had violent outbursts of anger which made this incarnation of pleasure a formidable goddess of war. In the course of time, this second aspect of her personality raised her to the rank of the male gods who led the armies into battle.11 Dumuzi, the only god she seems to have loved tenderly, probably resulted from the fusion of two prehistoric deities, for he was both the protector of herds and flocks and the god of the vegetation that dies in the summer and revives in the spring. The Sumerians believed that the reproduction of cattle and the renewal of edible plants and fruit could be secured only by a ceremony, on New Year's Day, in which the king, playing the role of Dumuzi, consummated a marital union with Inanna, represented by one of her priestesses. Love poems where overt erotism mixes with tender affection celebrate this ‘Sacred Marriage’,12 while the ritual itself is described in some royal hymns, the most explicit of which is a hymn to Iddin-Dagan (1974-1954 B.C.), the third king of the dynasty of Isin.13 A scented bed of rushes is set up in a special room of the palace and on it is spread a comfortable cover. The goddess has bathed and has sprinkled sweet-smelling cedar oil on the ground. Then comes the King:
The King approaches her pure lap proudly,
He approaches the lap of Inanna proudly,
Ama‘ushumgalanna* lies down beside her,
He caresses her pure lap.
When the Lady has stretched out on the bed, in his pure lap,
When the pure Inanna has stretched out on the bed, in his pure lap,
She makes love with him on her bed,
(She says) to Iddin-Dagan ‘You are surely my beloved‘.
Thereafter the people, carrying presents, are invited to enter, together with musicians, and a special meal is served:
The palace is festive, the King is joyous,
The people spend the day in plenty.
However, the rapports between Inanna and Dumuzi were not always harmonious, as shown by a famous text called ‘Inanna's descent to the Netherworld’ of which two versions have been preserved, one Sumerian, the other Assyrian.14 In the Sumerian text Inanna goes down to the ‘land of no return’, casting off a piece of clothing or a jewel at each stage, in order to snatch this lugubrious domain from the hands of her sister Ereshkigal, the Sumerian equivalent of Persephone. Unfortunately, Inanna fails; she is put to death, then resurrected by Enki, but she is not allowed to return to earth unless she finds a replacement. After a long voyage in search of a potential victim, she chooses none other than her favourite lover. Dumuzi is promptly seized by demons and taken to the Netherworld, to the sorrow of his sister Geshtin-anna, the goddess of vines. Finally, Inanna is moved by Dumuzi's lamentations: she decides that he will spend one half of the year underground, and Geshtin-anna the other half.
The Sacred Marriage rite probably originated in Uruk, but it was performed in other cities, at least until the end of the dynasty of Isin (1794). After that date, Dumuzi fell to the rank of a relatively minor deity, although a month bore his name in its Semitic form Tammuz, and still bears it in the Arab world. In the last centuries of the first millennium B.C., however, the cult of Tammuz was revived in the Levant. A god of vegetation more or less akin to Osiris, he became adon (‘the Lord’), i.e. Adonis who died each year and was mourned in Jerusalem, Byblos, Cyprus and later even in Rome. In a Greek legend, Persephone and Aphrodite were quarrelling for the favours of the handsome young god when Zeus intervened and ruled that Adonis would share the year between the two goddesses.15 Thus, the old Sumerian myth of
Inanna's descent to the Netherworld had not been entirely forgotten: slightly distorted but recognizable, it had reached the Aegean Sea by some unknown channel, as did a number of Mesopotamian myths and legends.
Tales of Creation
The Mesopotamians imagined the earth as a flat disc surrounded with a rim of mountains and floating on an ocean of sweet waters, the abzu or apsû. Resting on these mountains and separated from the earth by the atmosphere (lil) was the sky vault along which revolved the astral bodies. A similar hemisphere underneath the earth formed the Netherworld where lived the spirits of the dead. Finally, the whole universe (anki: 9 sky-earth) was immersed like a gigantic bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of salt water. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Mesopotamia and the immediate centre stood for the Babylonians or, probably, Nippur for the Sumerians.
How and by whom had the world been created? The answers to the question varied, no doubt because they were founded on different traditions.16 One legend stated that Anu had created the heavens and Enki the apsû, his abode. Another attributed the creation of the universe to the general assembly of all the gods and yet another to only four great gods acting collectively. The beginning of an incantation against the ‘worm’ responsible for toothaches says that Anu created the sky, which created the earth, which in turn created the rivers, the rivers the canals, the canals the marshes and the marshes the worm. But this sounds rather like the nursery rhyme ‘The house that Jack built’ and
How the Sumerians conceived the world. The earth is a flat disc surrounded by an ocean; above and below the hemispheres of sky (heavens residences of the gods) and netherworld (hell) with special gods. The whole world floats in a primordial ocean.
From S. N. Kramer, L‘Histoire commence à Sumer, 1975.
should perhaps not be taken too seriously. More interesting is a version from the town of Sippar, according to which the great Babylonian god Marduk had ‘built a reed platform (or raft) on the surface of the waters, then created dust and poured it around the platform’, because this is actually how the marsh-Arabs of southern Iraq make the artificial islands upon which they erect their reed-huts.17 In general the Sumerians believed that the primeval ocean, personified by the goddess Nammu, had begotten alone a male sky and a female earth intimately joined together. The fruit of their union, the air-god Enlil, had separated the sky from the earth and, with the latter, had engendered all living creatures. The theory that the ocean was the primordial element from which the universe was born, that the shape of the universe had resulted from the forceful separation of heaven from earth by a third party was generally adopted in Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, and forms the basis of the most complete and detailed story of creation that we possess: the great Babylonian epic called, from its opening sentence, Enuma elish, ‘When on high…’ But the Babylonian genesis has still wider philosophical implications; it describes the creation not as a beginning but as an end, not as the gratuitous and inexplicable act of one god but as the result of a cosmic battle, the fundamental and eternal struggle between those two aspects of nature: Good and Evil, Order and Chaos.
Enuma elish is a long poem in seven tablets originally composed during the Old Babylonian period (beginning of the second millennium), though all the copies found so far were written during the first millennium B.C. In most copies the main part is played by Marduk, the patron-god of Babylon, but an Assyrian version substitutes the name of Ashur, the national god of Assyria, for that of Marduk. On the other hand, Marduk is once called in the poem ‘the Enlil of the gods’, and as we know that Marduk had usurped the rank and prerogatives of the Sumerian god Enlil, we may confidently surmise that the hero of the epic was originally Enlil, as in the Sumerian cosmogony already mentioned.18
The Mesopotamian mythographers took their inspiration from their own country. If we stand on a misty morning near the present Iraqi sea-shore, at the mouth of the Shatt-el-‘Arab, what do we see? Low banks of clouds hang over the horizon; large pools of sweet water seeping from underground or left over from the river floods mingle freely with the salty waters of the Persian Gulf; of the low mud-flats which normally form the landscape no more than a few feet are visible; all around us sea, sky and earth are mixed in a nebulous, watery chaos. This is how the authors of the poem, who must have often witnessed such a spectacle, imagined the beginning of the world. When nothing yet had a name, that is to say when nothing had yet been created, they wrote, Apsu (the fresh waters), Tiamat (the salt waters) and Mummu (the clouds19) formed together one single confused body:
Enuma elish la nabû shamamu…
When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter.
(And) Mummu (and?) Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body;
No reed-hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared;
When no gods whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined –
Then it was that the gods were formed within them.
In the landscape described above larger patches of land emerge from the mist as the sun rises, and soon a clear-cut line separates the sky from the waters and the waters from the earth. So in the myth the first gods to emerge from the chaos were Lahmu and Lahamu, representing the silt; then came Anshar and Kishar, the twin horizons of sky and earth. Anshar and Kishar begot Anu, and Anu in turn begot Ea (Enki). At the same time, or shortly afterwards, a number of lesser deities were born from Apsu and Tiamat, but of these gods the poem says nothing except that they were turbulent and noisy. They ‘troubled Tiamat's belly’ and disturbed their parents so much that they decided to destroy them. When they heard of this plan the great gods Lahmu and Lahamu, Anshar and Kishar, Anu and Ea were shocked and amazed: ‘they remained speechless’, no doubt thinking that the exuberance of Life was preferable to the peace of a sterile Confusion. However, ‘Ea the all-wise’ soon found a means of wrecking the evil scheme. He ‘devised and set up a master design’: he cast a magic spell upon Mummu and paralysed him; in the same way Apsu was put to sleep and slain. After this double victory Ea retired to his temple, now founded on the abyss of sweet waters (apsû) and with his wife Damkina engendered a son, Marduk, who possessed outstanding qualities:
Perfect were his members beyond comprehension…
Unsuited for understanding, difficult to perceive.
Four were his eyes, four were his ears;
When he moved his lips, fire blazed forth.
Large were all four hearing organs,
And the eyes, in like number, scanned all things.
He was the loftiest of the gods, surpassing was his stature;
His members were enormous, he was exceedingly tall.
Meanwhile, Tiamat was still alive and free. Delirious with rage, she declared war on the gods. She created a number of fierce dragons and monstrous serpents ‘sharp of tooth, unsparing of fangs, with venom for blood‘, and placed one of her sons, Kingu, at the head of the gruesome army. The gods were terrified. Anshar ‘smote his loins and bit his lips’ in distress, and declared that Kingu should be put to death. But who was to do this? One after another, the gods declined to fight. Finally, Marduk accepted under one condition: that he be made their king. ‘Set up the assembly,’ said he, ‘proclaim supreme my destiny, let my word, instead of yours, determine the fates.’ The gods had no alternative but to agree. They met at a banquet and, slightly inebriated, they endowed Marduk with the royal powers and insignia. Marduk chose his weapons: the bow, the lightning, the flood-storm, the four winds, the net. He clad himself with ‘an armour of terror, a turban of fearsome halo’, and mounted on his storm-chariot went forth alone to fight the forces of Chaos. At the sight of him, the army of monsters disbanded; Kingu, their chief, was captured. As for Tiamat, she was caught in Marduk's net and, as she opened her mouth, he at once blew the four winds int
o her stomach. He then pierced her heart with an arrow, smashed her skull with his mace, and finally split her body open ‘like a shell-fish’. Half of her ‘he set up and ceiled it as sky’, the other half he placed beneath the earth.
