Sumer's capital remained in Ur for just over a century after the death of Gilgamesh, and then shifted to several other cities. Circa 2400 B.C. Ur served again, for the third time, as the national capital under an important king named Lugal.zagesi. His many inscriptions included the claim that the goddess Nisaba was his mother:
Dumu tu da dNisaba,
Son born by/to divine Nisaba,
Pa.zi ku.a dNinharsag
fed [with] holy milk by divine Ninharsag
Nisaba, it will be recalled, was the astronomy goddess. In some texts she is called "sister of Ninurta," sharing with him Enlil as a father. But in the Great God List she was described as "divine Nisaba, a female, from the pure/sacred womb of divine Ninlil." In other words, she was an Earthborn daughter of Ninlil and Enlil, full sister of Nannar/Sin but only a half-sister of Ninurta (whose mother was Ninmah).
Here, then, in probable chronological order, is the picture that emerges from the nine kings of Kish, Lagash and Uruk whose demigod parentage has been verified:
Etana: Of same seed as Adapa (= Enki's)
Meskiaggasher: The god Utu is the father
Enmerkar: The god Utu is the father
Eannatum: Seed of Ninurta, Inanna put him on lap of
Ninharsag for breastfeeding Entemena: Raised on Ninharsag's breastmilk Mesalim: "Beloved son" of Ninharsag
Lugalbanda: Goddess Inanna his mother
Gilgamesh: Goddess Ninsun is his mother
Lugalzagesi: Goddess Nisaba his mother
These one-two-three punches reveal the significant post-Diluvial double shift in the affairs of gods and demigods: First, the 'Founding Fathers' progenitors who had come from Nibiru are replaced by the Earthborn generations. Then, through a stage involving the 'Sacred Breastmilk', the final change takes place: The female "Divine Womb" replaces the earlier male "Fecund Seed" and 'Pure Semen'.
It is important to understand these changes, for they had long-term consequences. When the role of parenting demigods was taken over by the Earthborn gods and goddesses, was it just a matter of nature (i.e., getting old) taking its course, or did genealogical succession—through demigods—become more vital for those born on Earth because their life cycles were shortened by Earth, not Nibiru, being their home planet?
The records show that the Anunnaki did realize that those who had come and stayed on Earth (Enki, Enlil, Ninmah) aged faster than those who stayed back on Nibiru; and that those who were born on Earth aged even faster. The changes from life on Nibiru to life on Earth apparently affected not only the longevity of the gods (and demigods), but also their physique, making them less giantlike as time went on. And then—we now know from advances in genetics—the switch of parenthood from the 'Fecund' Seed of the males to the female "Divine Womb" meant that the demigods from then on inherited both the general DNA as well as the specific Mitochondrial DNA of the female goddess.
These were changes whose significance will emerge as we follow the saga of gods and demigods to its concluding mystery.
In the biblical context, the crucial change in the realm of demigods from pre-Diluvial times can be summed up by us in a simple statement: Before, the sons of the gods "chose whichever they wanted from among the daughters of Man." Now the daughters of gods chose whichever they wanted from the sons of Men. The role of the goddesses in all that was epitomized by Sitar's six words. Where the mother was the deity, describing her as 'spouse' of the male no longer held true: It was the male father who was chosen to be the companion of the goddess. It was Inanna who said, "Come Gilgamesh, be thou my lover"; and with that, the Era of the Goddess had dawned.
* * *
Uruk's heroic age of Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh petered out after the death of Gilgamesh. His son Ur.lugal and then grandson Utu. kalamma reigned a combined 45 years, and were followed by five more kings with a total throneship of 95 years. The King List deemed only one of them, Mes.he, worthy of an extra word—noting that he was "a smith." All in all, according to the King List, "12 kings reigned (in Uruk) for 2,310 years; its kingship was carried to Ur."
The long reigns of the dynasties of what is now termed by scholars 'Kish I' and 'Uruk I' are recalled for their progress and stability, but not necessarily as peaceful times. On the national arena, as cities expanded to city-state size, disputes over boundaries, arable land, and water resources erupted into armed clashes. On the international stage, the hopes placed on the Inanna/Dumuzi union were dashed by Dumuzi's death and the ferocious war launched by Inanna against the accused Marduk. Of all the gods involved, the death of Dumuzi placed a tremendous emotional burden on Inanna; so much so that the ensuing events even led to her own death!
The tale is told in a text called Inannas Descent to the Lower World (misleadingly titled by scholars Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld). It tells how Inanna, following the death of Dumuzi, went to the 'Lower World' domain of her sister Ereshkigal. The visit aroused Ereshkigal's suspicions, for not only did Inanna come uninvited, she also came sto meet the god Nergal, her sister's spouse. So on Ereshkigal's orders Inanna was seized, killed with death rays, and her dead body was hung as a carcass . ..
When Inanna's handmaiden, who stayed back in Uruk, raised an alarm, the only one who could help was Enki. He fashioned two clay androids who could withstand the death rays, and activated them by giving one the Food of Life and the other the Water of Life. When they retrieved Inanna's lifeless body, "upon the corpse they directed the Pulser and the Emitter"; they sprinkled on her body the Water of Life and gave her the Plant of Life', "and Inanna arose."
Scholars have speculated that Inanna went to the Lower World to find Dumuzi's body; but in fact Inanna knew where the body was, because she had ordered for it to be mummified and preserved. She went, I have suggested in Divine Encounters, to seek from Nergal the fulfillment of a custom known from the Bible that required a brother (as Nergal was of Dumuzi) to sleep with the widow in order to obtain a son who will carry on the dead man's name; and Ereshkigal would have none of that.
Without doubt, these experiences profoudly affected Inanna's behavior and future actions; one of the notorius changes was the introduction by Inanna of the 'Sacred Marriage' rite, whereby a man of her choice (as often as not the king) had to spend with her the night on the anniversary of her unfulfilled wedding with Dumuzi; often, the man was found dead in the morning.
Thus, the transfer of the central capital to Ur was an attempt to gain respite by shifting responsibilities to Nannar/Sin—Ninurta's younger brother and Inanna's father.
* * *
Ur (pronounced 'Oor') was a new post-Diluvial city established as a 'cult center' for Enlil's son Nanna/Nannar (= 'The Bright One', an allusion to his celestial counterpart, the Moon). It was destined to play a major role in the affairs of gods and men, and its tale crossed t paths with the biblical Abraham; but that was yet to take place when Ur would serve as Sumer's national capital for the third time. In the . short span of what is called the 'Ur I' period, immediately following 'Uruk I', Ur—according to the King List—had four kings who reigned a total of 177 years; two of them are distinguished by their names—Mes.Anne.pada and Mes.Kiag.nanna.
Though Ur attained its most glorious—and tragic—time later on, in what is termed the 'Ur III' period, the archaeological evidence shows that the nearly two centuries of 'Ur I' were also times of high culture and great artistic and technological advancement. We know not whether it was cut short by mounting pressures on Sumer's borders by increasingly aggressive migrants, or by internal problems; the King List itself suggests that some turbulent events had taken place, causing the record- keepers to provide five (not four) royal names, amend one of them, and confuse reign lengths.
Whatever the troubling events might have been, the record shows that the national capital was abruptly moved from Ur to a minor city called Awan, and then in quick succession to cities called Hamazi and Adab, back (for a second time each) to Kish, Uruk, and Ur, shifted to cities called Mari and Akshak, then back again to Kis
h (III and IV)— all within a span of about two centuries.
Then, for the third time, the gods returned central kingship to Uruk, appointing as its king a strongman named Lugal.zagesi. His mother, it will be recalled, was the goddess Nisaba, an aunt of Inanna, which (presumably) should have been enough to assure Inanna's blesss- ing. His first priority was to restore order among the quarreling and warring city-states, not refraining from use of his own troops to remove troublesome rulers. One of the cities subjected to punitive action by Lugal.zagesi was Umma—a city that served as 'cult center' for Shara, Inanna's son ... So Lugalzagesi was gone soon after that, and the next King of Kings was a man of Inanna's own choice—a man who answered her call, "Come, be thou my lover!"
After all the millennia of gods in charge, a goddess was now in full command.
------------------------- +------------------------
'HERO' BY ANY NAME
Two of the names of Ur I—Mes.anne.pada and Mes.kiag.nanna—
are noteworthy because, as that of Uruk's Mes.he (He = 'Fullness/ Plenty'), they have as a prefix the syllable-word Mes that we have encountered before—in Mes.Kiag.gasher, the very first king of Kish whose father was the god Utu, and in the later king of Kish, Mes .Alim (Alim = 'Ram'), who claimed to have been the "beloved son" of Ninharsag.
This raises the question: Did Mes as a prefix (or Mesh a suffix, as in Gilgamesh) identify the person as a demigod? Apparently so, because the term Mes in fact meant 'Hero' in Sumerian—the very meaning of the Hebrew term Gibbor used in Genesis 6 to define the demigods!
Such a conclusion is supported by the fact that an Akkadian text catalogued BM 56488 concerning a certain temple contains the statement:
Bit sha dMesannepada ipushu
Temple which divine Mesannepada built
Nanna laquit ziri ultalpit
Nannar, the seed giver, destroyed
—a statement that both assigns the determinative 'divine' to Mesannepada, and, by referring to the god Nannar/Sin as "the seed giver," indicates which god was the procreator of this demigod.
One must also wonder, in view of other meaning similarities that we have already mentioned, whether the Sumerian Mes and the Egyptian Mes/Mses as in Thothmes or Ramses (meaning "issue of" in Pharaonic claims of divine parentage) do not stem from some common early source.
Our conclusion that royal Sumerian names starting (or ending) with /Mes indicate demigod status will serve as a clue to unlock varied enigmas.
------------------------- ♦------------------------
XIV
Glory of Empire,
Winds of Doom
One day my queen,
After crossing heaven, crossing Earth—
Inanna—
After crossing heaven, crossing Earth—
After crossing Elam and Shubur,
After crossing [...],
The hierodule approached weary, fell asleep.
I saw her from the edge of my garden.
I kissed her, copulated with her.
So did a gardener later known as Sharru-kin ('Sargon' in English) describe his chance encounter with the goddess Inanna. Since the goddess, weary from her flying about, was asleep, one cannot say that it was a case of 'Love at first sight'; but from what ensued it is obvious that Inanna liked the man and his lovemaking. Inanna's invitation to him to her bed, with the throne of Sumer thrown in, lasted 54 years: "While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love; for four and fifty years I exercised kingship; the Black-Headed People I ruled and governed," Sargon wrote in his autobiography.
How did Inanna persuade the Anunnaki leadership to entrust Sumer and its people—here called by their nickname Sag.ge.ga, the Black-Headed Ones—to the man whose kiss changed history, is nowhere made clear. His name-title Sharru-kin (= 'Truthful Ruler') was not Sumerian; it was in the 'Semitic' tongue of the Amurro, the "Westerners', of the 'Semitic' speaking region northwest of Sumer; and his features, preserved in a bronze sculpture (Fig. 101), confirm his non- Sumerian extraction. The brand-new capital city built for him, Agade, was better known by its 'Semitic' name Akkad—from which the term Akkadian for the language.
The Sumerian King List, recognizing the significance of this king, provides the information that from Uruk under Lugal.zagesi "kingship to Agade was carried" and notes that Sharru.kin, "a date-grower and cupbearer of Ur.zababa," built Agade and reigned there for 56 years.
The position of Cup Bearer was one of high rank and great trust, usually held by a prince, in royal courts not only in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the ancient world—it was so, it will be recalled, even on Nibiru (where Anu served as Alalu's cupbearer). Indeed, some
Figure 101
of the earliest Sumerian depictions that scholars call 'Libation scenes' might be depictions of the king (bare naked to show total subservience) acting as cupbearer for the deity (see Fig. 77).
Urzababa was a king in Kish, and the statement implies that Sargon was a royal prince there. Yet Sargon himself, in the autobiographical text known as The Legend of Sargon, chose to wrap his origin in mystery:
Sargon, the mighty king of Agade, am I.
My mother was a high priestess;
I knew not my father.
My mother, the high priestess who conceived me,
in secret she bore me.
Then, as in the story of the birth of Moses in Egypt a thousand years later, Sargon continued:
She set me in a basket of rushes,
with bitumen sealed the lid.
She cast me into the river, it did not sink me.
The river bore me, carried me to Akki the gardener.
Akki the irrigator lifted me up when he drew water.
Akki the irrigator as his son made me and reared me.
Akki, the irrigator, appointed me as his gardener.
The explanation for Sargon's odd avoidance of claiming prince- hood might be found in the fact that in time Sargon's own daughter Enheduanna served as high-priestess-cum-hierodule in the temple of the god Nannar/Sin in Ur—a position deemed one of great honor. By claiming the same position for his mother, Sargon left open the possibility that his 'unknown father' might have been a god—which would make him, Sargon, a demigod.
It is quite possible that Sargon's Amorite ancestry might have been a favorable consideration, in view of the pressures on Sumer by migrants from the west and northwest. The same thinking, of making adversaries part of the family, probably led to the decision to establish a new, neutral national capital whose name meant 'Union'; its location marked the addition of territories called Akkad, north of olden Sumer, to create a new geopolitical entity called 'Sumer & Akkad'; and henceforth, Inanna was widely known by her Akkadian name Ishtar.
Circa 2360 B.C., Sargon set out from that new capital to establish law and order, starting with the defeat of Lugal.zagesi (who, the reader will recall, dared attack the city of Ishtar's son, the god Shara). Bringing one olden city after another under his control, he turned his prowess against neighboring lands. To quote from a text known as The Sargon Chronicle, "Sharru-kin, king of Agade, rose to power in the era of Ishtar. He had neither rival nor opponent. He spread his terror-inspiring glance over all the countries. He crossed the sea in the east; he conquered the country in the west in its full extent."
For the first time since its inception millennia earlier, the whole First Region was firmly ruled from a national capital, from the Upper Sea (the Mediterranean) to the Lower Sea (the 'Sea in the East', the Persian Gulf); in that, it was the first historically known empire—and quite an empire it was: Inscriptions and archaeological evidence confirm that Sargon's dominion extended to the Mediterranean coast in the west, the Khabur River in Asia Minor in the north, lands in the northeast that were to become later on Assyria, and sites on the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf. And though Sargon acknowledged (when necessary) the authority of Enlil, Ninurta, Adad, Nannar, and Utu, his conquests were carefully carried out "by the order of my mistress, the divine Ishtar." It wa
s indeed, as the inscriptions said, the Era of Ishtar.
As an imperial capital, Agade was a grandeur to see. "In those days," a Sumrian text reported, Agade was filled with riches of precious metals, of copper and lead and slabs of lapis lazuli. "Its granaries bulged at the sides, its old men were endowed with wisdom, its old women were endowed with eloquence, its young men were endowed with the strength of weapons. Its little children were endowed with joyous hearts ... The city was full of music." A grand new temple for Sitar made clear which deity held sway over all of that: "In Agade," a Sumerian historio- graphic text stated, "did holy Inanna erect a temple as her abode; in the Glittering Temple she set up a throne." It was the crown jewel of shrines to her that had to be erected in virtually every Sumerian city, outshining even the sacred Eanna in Uruk; and that was a mistake.
Sargon too, growing haughty and overambitious, began to commit grave errors, including sending his troops into cities beholden to Ninurta and Adad. And then he committed a fateful act: desecrating Babylon. The territory designated 'Akkad', north of olden Sumer, included the site of Babylon, the very place where Marduk, seeking supremacy, had attempted to build his own launch tower (the Tower of Babel incident). Now Sargon "took away soil from the foundations of Babylon, and built upon the soil another Bab-ili near Agade."
There Were Giants Upon the Earth Page 23
