INTRODUCTORY NOTES
i) Several of the gods and goddesses listed here can be found on their own pages in the Dictionary of Names - usually because they are the very important ones. They are all linked accordingly and in most cases I have simply provided a link, and not an entry.
ii) Throughout the text, where scholars argue over rendering Sh as Š, I have generally chosen the former.
iii) The term "Mesopotamia":
It should also be noted that there is really no such things as a "Mesopotamian god and goddess", though there are gods and goddesses of the Sag-Giga (Sumerians), or the Akkadians in the earliest times of recorded history; the "Assyrians" and Babylonians (and even "Persians"), in later times; and various other peoples who
came and went across the Middle East, who also worshipped the same variants of
the same deities, by their own or different names, their own or different
spellings; and of course the region described as Mesopotamia also grew and
shrank and altered and found itself renamed throughout the epochs, the intention here is simply to list the deities of the region, and to describe them. A fuller explanation of this is appended at the end of this blogpage.
My references to ancient Sumerian texts sometimes come with links, sometimes without; in every case, if that text still exists, the ORACC website is the place to go to find it: click here and use its search engine. It comes under "Creative Commons", so it is free to use, without fear of patents, copyrights or any other obstacles; but please do give them the credit, as I am doing here, because it is an absolutely amazing scholarly project and deserves the acknowledgement.
ABGAL: The seven sages in Sumerian mythology, sent to Earth by Enki at the beginning of time to give human beings the sacred "Meh" (laws) of civilisation and to teach them wisdom (which may or may not be the same thing). They were also known, by the Akkadians and Babylonians, as the Apkallū or the Apkallū Fish, and are depicted with the body of a fish and the head of a man, or sometimes with the torso of a fish and human arms, legs and head, and sometimes with, but sometimes without wings. In the Babylonian tradition, the Apkallū also appear as Griffins, or simply as humans with wings - presumably this is the source of those strange non-cherubs of mediaeval religious Art. The Abgal usually carry a bucket and a cone of incense for purification purposes. Their individual names were Adapa (the first human), Uan-dugga, En-me-duga, En-me-galanna, En-me-buluga, An-enlilda and Utu-abzu.
ABSU (aka Apsu and Abzu): For my full page on him, click here. Absu is the Yehudit Ephes, nothing, the zero that preceded original Creation, and the consort of Tiamat, "the primordial sea" who would later become the serpent-goddess of the actual ocean. The two together then provide the elements and molecules and fermions and bosons without which life in any form is not achievable. In the Bible she will become Tehom and Tohu, her other half, when she is bifurcated to enable the cosmic egg to hatch, will become Behemot or Bohu, the serpent-goddess of the land, later the animals themselves.
ADAD: The Babylonian god of rain storms, he was a darker version of the Sumerian god Nin-Urta. Known to the Sumerians as Ishkur, he was depicted in company with a lion-headed dragon, or sometimes a mere bull, but always carrying a hammer or a lightning bolt. His consort was the goddess Shala. Adad is almost certainly a dialect vaiation of the Kena'ani (Canaanite) deity Hadad or Ba'al Hadad.
ADAPA: The Adam of Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, the first created human, he was the son of Ea (or Enki) who, in anger at the overturning of his boat, broke the wings of the South Wind, and then had to travel to the heavens to apologise to Anu. Ea, knowing that Anu would offer Adapa the food of immortality, and wanting humans to remain mortal, warned Adapa not to eat or drink anything while in the land of the gods, as doing so would surely kill him. Adapa heeded Ea's advice, and was thus tricked out of the opportunity for immortality. He was the first of the Abgal, the seven ancient sages.
ADRAMELECH: The Babylonian sun god (which is to say: the personification of the sun), the giver and sustainer of life. His consort was Anamelech, the moon goddess (the personification of the moon - this statement is true of all gods and goddesses across the Middle East, until at least the middle of the 6th century BCE). He makes a brief, if rather negative, cameo appearance in the Tanach (2 Kings 17:31), where he demands child sacrifice, and has a walk-on part as an extra in Milton's "Paradise Lost", where he is first mentioned as "an idol of the Assyrians", and then (6:365) as one of the companions of Lucifer overthrown by the good angels Uriel and Raphael.
AJA: The Akkadian goddess of the dawn, she was the consort of Shamash (himself identified with Tammuz). So far was she associated with youth, sexual love and marriage, she came to be referred to as "The Bride". Aja (also known as Aya and probably pronouned that way) developed from the more ancient and very popular Sherida, usually written in English as Šerida, of the Sumerians.
In Sumer, she was the goddess of light in general rather than just the dawn, and the wife of Utu rather than Šamaš; she was worshipped predominantly in the cities of Sippar and Larsa, and appears to have shared some of the judicial responsibilities with her husband, specifically "witnessing" legal documents (field and house rentals, temple loans, etc). Her shrine in both these cities was named "E-babbar", the "white house".
Her epithet, "The Bride", really belongs to the "Epic of Gilgamesh (Gilgameš) - Tablet III, obv. iii 6 is the specific reference - where Gilgamesh is planning to set off for the cedar forest to kill Humbaba, its monstrous guardian (the equivalent of the dragon who guards the Golden Fleece in the Jason story, Fafnir in the Nibelungenlied). Gilgamesh's rather tame and conventional mother Nin-Sumun blames the sun god for inspiring her son to go adventuring, and climbs onto the temple roof to asks Aya to implore Shamash to protect Gilgamesh on his mission, and especially - my reason for mentioning this - to do so herself at night, because the sun god cannot watch over him at that time.
She makes a significant appearance in another of the great literary works of Sumer, known as "Nanna-Suen's journey to Nibru" (circa 1800 BCE). The story is set in Larsa, where she was patron goddess. Along with several other female deities, she attempts to tempt Nanna-Suen (aka Sin) while he is making pilgrimage by boat to the temple of En-Lil in Nibru (Nippur). As he sails through the territorial waters of Larsa, she uses her wiles to persuade him to deposit the boat's precious cargo there, but he rebuffs her and continues on his way. It is not stated whether he had his crew-men tie him to the ship's mast and put wax in their own ears, but there are significant indications that these tales of Nanna-Suen may have been among the "common source" materials that Homer used when he wrote his "Iliad" and "Odyssey".
That her cult - like most Mesopotamian cults, so I shall not keep stating this - was also prevalent in the Levant is demonstrated by artefacts from Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of northern Lebanon. That she survived from ancient to late Biblical times is demonstrated in the god list An-Anum (Tablet III), from the period of the āyah conquest of Uruk (circa 550-331 BCE), which insists that several other goddesses of the region - Nin-Kar, Sudag, Sudgan, Nin-Mulguna and Munusulshutag - were really just local names for Aja/Aya (and yes, Ayah, but not āyah).
AMURRU: The Akkadian and Sumerian name for the storm/sky god of the Amorite people (themselves also known as the Amurru) who migrated to the Mesopotamian region around 2100 BCE. The god Amurru is associated with Adad, but is a much gentler version, always depicted with a gazelle and a shepherd's crook or staff, and watched over by nomads. He was also known as Martu. His consort is Beletseri, the scribe of the dead.
AN/ANU: For my full page on him, click here (that page is mostly about the surprising Celtic connections).
An in Sumerian, Anu in Akkadian. An in Sumerian means "the heavens" or "the skies", so again we have a deity who is really just a personification of an element of Nature, in this case the "king of the heavens", rather than King of Heaven, which is a much later concept. He was associated with thunder rolling across the skies, and depicted as a bull, roaring above the clouds. His consort was Antu, and together they parented the Annunaki, the judges of the dead, including the demons Lamashtu and Asag, and the Sebettu.
Originally the first among equals, he gradually became the primal chief of the gods, and his status as primal creator makes him the equivalent of Ouranos and Saturn. But in his rise to power he was more like YHVH Tseva'ot, the Lord of the Hosts of the Heavens in the Tanach, a Cabinet minister who rose to the Prime Ministership (YHVH would later complete the rise and become Life President with supreme authority), allotting Cabinet positions to the other gods seated around the Round Table, empowered to increase or decrease their status as it suited him. So we can read, in the Sumerian poem "Inanna and Ebih" (l.66), how "An has made me [Inanna] terrifying throughout the heavens". As with the Yisra-Eli kings, Chinese Emperors, and Catholic Popes, he provided a surrogate on Earth rather than rule himself, and the European concept of "divine right" also stems from this.
The centre of Anu-worship was the E-an-na temple in Uruk, which was replaced by a new temple, known as Resh, by the Achaemenids; his consort at E-an-na was always Inanna, but at Resh it remained Antu.
An was also the city-god of Der (Tell Aqar, near al-Badra in the Wasit Governorate of Iraq), and had a temple in his honour at Lagash, built by Gudea around 2000 BCE, with a garden added by Ur-Nammu a half-century later - an attempt, probably, to match, even to compete with, the famous hanging gardens at Bavel itself, where An had a "seat" in the main temple, Esagil; he also received offerings at Nippur, Sippar and Kish, while in Ashur there was a double-temple for Anu and Adad, known as E-me-lám-an-na, built circa 1350 BCE and later restored by Tiglath-Pileser I.
Just like Ouranos and Saturn, he was reduced, later on, to a lesser role, first En-Lil, then Marduk, becoming pre-eminent. An never lost his status though, and any god elevated to a position of leadership was still described as receiving the Anûtu, or "An-power" (cf Enūma Elish, Tablet IV, lines 4-6). In the earliest texts An/Anu is sometimes credited with the creation of the universe itself, either alone. or with En-Lil and Ea. Of the three levels of heaven, he inhabited the highest, said to be made of the reddish Luludānitu stone - the same red stone which gives Adam (the first human), Adamah (the red earth) and Odem (the red jewel) in Yehudit; the Odem is also the first stone in the breastplate of the Kohen Gadol, and associated with the tribe of Reu'ven (click here for more background on this).
An was sometimes equated with Amurru, and, in Seleucid Uruk, with Enmeshara and Dumuzi.
According to the "Enūma Elish" (Tablet 1:11-14) An was the son of Anshar and Kishar. Two thousand years before that, in early Sumerian texts, the goddess Urash is said to be his consort; but later documents have Ki, the personification of Earth, in this role, while Akkadian texts have Antu, which may be a sobriquet derived from his name rather than the name of any individual goddess. Those same Sumerian texts, forerunners to the Biblical Toldot, name most of the other deities as his children: an inscription from Lagash, for example, circa 3000 BCE, has An as the father of Gatumdug, Baba and Nin-Girsu. The list expands later on, with Adad, Enki/Ea, En-Lil, Girra, Nanna/Sin, Nergal and Shara all named as his sons, while several goddesses, including Inanna/Ishtar, Nanaya, Nidaba, Nin-Isinna, Nin-Karrak, Nin-Mug, Nin-Nibru, Nin-Sumun, Nungal and Nusku, are referred to as his daughters. In the epic "Erra and Ishum", Anu gives the Sebettu to Erra as weapons with which to massacre humans when their noise becomes irritating to him (Tablet 1:38ff).
Anu was the first to hold the Tablets of Destiny; later he passed them to En-Lil.
The "Paps of Anu" are highly significant in the culture of the Eirish Celts.
ANSHAR: The Babylonian god of the sky, his name is a combination of An = "heavens" and Shar = "complete", and really just a development of An himself; the difference was that Anu was only the god of the visible sky, but Anshar's realm extended beyond the the clouds, beyond that "firmament" which the ancients thought was the solid ceiling of the sky, on whose "curtain" the stars and planets were hung.
The Babylonians regarded Anshar as one of the sons of Apsu and Tiamat, and himself the consort of Kishar, who symbolised the Earth. The Enūma Elish, on the other hand, regards the pair as offspring of Lahmu and Lahamu - probably just another example of the same deities named in different languages (cf Gott and Dieu, God and Dios in the Christian world).
See also ASHUR, below.
ANTUM: The Babylonian goddess of the Earth, an early fertility goddess.
ANUNNAKI (singular Anunna, variant plural Anunnaku): The Mesopotamian "Fates" and judges of the dead, born of the union between Anu and Antu. In Babylonian mythology they were considered spirits of the Earth, but were still depicted in the role of judges, or "those who see". The concept of SHOPHTIM, which is translated as "Judges" in the Biblical Book of Judges, should be seen as a parallel of this, rather than in the modern judicial sense.
In the final millennum BCE, the perception of them changed again, the Anunnaki becoming underworld gods in specific contrast with the Igigi, the gods of the heavens, and now both competing to determine human fates - probably the influence of Zoroastrianism, which introduced the dualism that would then become predominant in Christianity. In the Enūma Elish, for example, (Tablet VI, lines 39-44), Marduk assigns 300 Anunna gods to duties in the heavens, and the same number for duties in the Underworld; and in the Sumerian "Enki and the World Order" (l. 207), the Anunna, the seven judges, pass judgement on the goddess Inanna for "trespassing" into the Underworld.
ANZU: One of my favourite gods, ever, anywhere. The Babylonian god of completed construction. He was worshipped at the conclusion of building projects, but presumably only after the architect had signed off that all elements of the design had been completed according to plan and law, with no short cuts.
ARURU: The Babylonian goddess of nature, an early mother goddess who created human beings in consort with Enki (sometimes En-Lil).
ASALLUHI: the son of Enki/Ea, he was a god of incantations and magic, sometimes merged with Marduk in the later texts, and also, in those later texts, with some sort of exorcist role, though exactly what is as unclear as the meaning of his name. He was probably the patron deity of the city of Kuara (see "Sumerian Temple Hymns", lines 135-146 and the Sumerian "Hymn to Asalluhi"), but also had some sort of status at Eridu, where Enki was the patron deity; this would make senss if he was Enki's son, but elsewhere we are told that he was the "son of Eridu" or the "son of Abzu, which suggests that "son" is being used, as so often in the Tanach, for a member of a craft-guild or a branch of the priesthood - so the healing power attributed to the deity would render him the son of whoever was the patron deity in that city, and in Mesopotamia there was no Omnideity until very late times, but each city had its own principal god or goddess.
The incantations were used in much the way anti-biotics and anti-bacterial bandages are used today, because in those days sin was regarded as a more likely cause of sickness than virus. In the "Hymn to Asalluhi" (lines 29-36) he is described as "supervisor of the purification priests of E-abzu", and the priests performing the surgical blessing would say ""This incantation is not mine, it is the incantation of Asalluhi." Today's Jewish equivalent can be obtained by clicking here (twice daily, after meals).
ASHNAN: The Sumerian goddess of grain. Ashnan and her sister, Lahar, were the children of En-Lil, born to provide sustenance to the Annunaki, the judges of the dead. It was found, however, that the Annunaki could eat none of it, and so human beings were created to eat the grains instead, and in that way the efforts of Ashnan and Lahar would not be wasted.
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ASHUR: Or sometimes ASSUR, and even Aššur: the Assyrian patron-god, usually identified with En-Lil, and among the Akkadians with Anshar. He was the supremo for all matters celestial and military, and was known as "The Lord of the Whole Heavens", which may well be an Assyrian equivalent of YHVH Tseva'ot - in Yehudit those Tseva'ot are, celestially, the stars and planets, but on Earth the human armies. As with Egyptian Pharaohs like Ra-Mousa (Rameses), who carried the god-name in their royal title, or Yisra-Eli kings who carried the goddess-name (Yah) in theirs, many Assyrian kings included Ashur in their titles, the most famous being Ashurbanipal, whose quadri-beast Keruvim can be seen at the British Museum in London, and in the adjacent illustration). Ashur is often depicted as a feather-robed archer, drawing a bow, and riding on what may be a serpent or a dragon. Most of his mythology and iconography (such as the serpent-dragon of Marduk, or his wife Nin-Lil) are borrowed from Sumerian or Babylonian works, and it is clear that Ashur in the Babylonian world, like Jesus in the Christian, was really just an ancient god borrowed and minorly modified.
For my page on ASHUR the nation, click here.
BABA: Nin-Girsu's wife, and a daughter of An, she was also known as Bau or Bawa, and she was the Sumerian goddess of the city-states of Girsu and Lagash, a local mother-goddess (which is to say a fertility goddess), and known by the sobriquets "Mistress of Animals" and "Lady of Abundance", or simply as "the good woman" or "the beautiful woman" - a variation of Chavah's (Eve's) title in Genesis 3:20. Texts from the beginning of the second millennium BCE show her as a healing goddess as well, but this was standard for the mother-goddess, so the date is simply because no earlier texts have yet been found, or possibly because she had numerous other epithets and sobriquets, of which the known among her healing properties were Nin-Isinna, Gula, and Nin-Tinugga.
In the city of Kish (this is not the same link as earlier on this page) she was considered to be the wife of the god Zababa. By whichever spouse, she mothered the gods Shulshagana and Igalima, and an inscription of king Gudea of Lagash claims a set of "septuplets" for her as well, though only three of their names are known, (and none of the encyclopaedia that I have trawled, on and offline, are actually able to do so).
At Girsu her shrine was called E-tar-sír-sír; at Nanna's temple at Ur, she had a side-chapel known as the Ekishnugal. Other shrines are also known from what is called the Ur III period (the 21st century BCE, at least two hundred years before Av-Ram's personal connection with the city), at Nippur, Isin and Larsa.
She appears, and the alternate name Bau as well as the animal conections seem to endorse it, to be a variation of Gula, the dog goddess, though I can find no one among the scholars who has ever posited this.
BABBAR: Another local name for Utu/Shamash, the sun god, meaning "illumination" or "The Illuminating One". A variation on Buddha too, though probably that was not intended!BASMU: The Mesopotamian great serpent associated, alternately, with birth and birth goddesses, or with Nin-Gishzida, a god of the underworld - though given the number of fertility goddesses across the world who spend their winter-time in the Underworld, eating pomegranetes for the most part, summoned back to Earth to bring the Spring, we have to reckon that this association is integral to the myth, and not a seeming clash at all. In his association with birth, Basmu is sometimes pictured horned while, like the symbol of Nin-Gishzida, he is entwined around a staff or pictured as two copulating snakes - which is confusing because one is the caduceus pole of Hermes, and the other is the Rod of Asclepius, and these are not usually the same thing (see why not under Nin-Azu and Nin-Shubur).
BEL: The Babylonian god of sages. Associated with Marduk, sometimes depicted as his brother, Bel was very clever and wise. He was the son of Enki (Ea), the god of wisdom. The name is probably a dialect variation of Ba'al, in the way that French has Dieu but Spanish Dios.
BELIT-TSERI: The Babylonian scribe of the underworld - and interesting that this ancient-primitive celebration of literacy was permitted to use her own name rather than forced to adopt a male pseudonym - she kneels by the throne of Ereshkigal and records the names of the dead as they enter the dark realm. She was referred to as the "Queen of the Desert". Her consort was Amurru, the Emorite god of the sky and of nomads.
BIRDU: The Babylonian messenger god from the Underworld.
CARA: The Sumerian god known as "Inanna's Beautician". He is one of those whom the Underworld demons try to carry off as a substitute for Inanna in the afterlife after she returns to Earth in the poem "The Descent of Inanna". He is spared because Inanna tells the demons that Cara is essential to her.
DAGON: For my full page on him, click here (that page deals specifically with Biblical references, and his status as a key deity among the Pelishtim).
Also known as Dagan, which became the Yehudit word for "corn", he was the Babylonian god of grain and fertility. He was especially popular in the mid-Euphrates region of Mesopotamia, where he also controlled the weather. His origins precisely here are extremely likely, given that this is where the evolutionary "miracle" took place (see "Ancestry of the Patriarch 2", Kesed 7,000 BCE), the emergence of the Emmer and then the Bread wheat, without which agriculture could not have been commenced.In the Middle Euphrates he is particularly associated with the cities of Tuttul (The Code of Hammurabi names him as "protector of the people of Tuttul") and Terqa, where he appears to have acquired rather more power than simply the corn: at least, several Akkadian royal inscriptions include what appear to be a military role. He also had charge of the seven children of the Underworld god Enmesharra, which fact makes for an extraordinary coincidence with the end of Sha'ul, the first king of Yisra-El, whose name means "the Underworld", and whose "seven sons" were brought for sacrifice at the very end of David's life, in a ritual slaughter of truly epic proportions (2 Samuel 21). A temple built in Dagon's honour by Shamshi-Adad I at Terqa, around 1800 BCE, and named the E-kisiga, or "Temple of the funerary offerings" adds weight to this Underworld connection, as do textual references at both Mari and Ugarit.
His qualities were eventually assumed by Adad, except among the Pelishtim, who worshipped him in Ashdod until Shimshon pulled down the pillars of his temple (Judges 16:29).
A shrine to Dagan and Ishara is known at Nippur from the Ur III period, and another is mentioned in Isin around 180 BCE, in a dedicatory inscription by its king Ur-dukuga. Many other shrines around the Levant have been attributed by scholars to Dagan, then transferred to El, then back again, and the dispute goes on - mostly, as far as I can tell, because the scholars get stuck in their particular boxes, and are unable to see that a corn-god is a corn-god is a corn-god, regardless of whether he is named Dagan or Osher, Bran or Jesus, Tammuz or John Barleycorn, Centeotl or Hun Hunahpu, and that he is worshipped everywhere that corn is used to make bread, which truly does mean everywhere.
Depictions of Dagan among the Pelishtim, both in word and icon, suggest a strong conenction with Oannes, the principal deity of the city of Ninveh (Nineveh); Oannes was central to the cult of the Samaritans,
and brought with them when they were forced into exile in northern Kena'an in the 6th century BCE. Oannes will reappear in the Yisra-Eli mythology as Yonah (Book of Jonah), and figures centrally in the Jesus myths, particularly through his namesake John the Baptist. See under Enki, below, but for a fuller account see my notes on this throughout The Ghetto of the Christians, and especially at Judges 16:23. DAMU: The Sumerian god of healing, son of Gula, herself a goddess of healing, and elsewhere known as Nin-Karrak. Damu was considered the intermediary between his mother and mortal doctors. As noted previously on this page, "healing" in the ancient world was more about "sin" and "guilt" than physical wounds or viral sicknesses (actually, in Europe, this remained the case until about the 18th century, and what is now called "Psychology" is probably its continuation). In the case of Damu, he functioned both as an "Asû", which is a "healer" ("Damu binds the torn ligaments" in one incantation), and as an "Ashipu", for which the best translation is probably "exorcist".
His siblings are the god Nin-Azu and the goddess Gunurra, both likewise healing deities - and the probability is that they were simply descriptions of different "schools" of medicine, Damu, so to speak, the Freudian, while Nin-Azu was, let us say, a Jungian, and Gunurra followed a more behaviouralist approach, akin to Rogers. There is also some speculation as to whether Damu was an aspect of, or variation of, Dumuzi/Tammuz; on this occasion it is probably just a coincidental similarity of names. Damu was the principal healing deity in Isin, Larsa, Lagash, Ur and Girsu.
DAMKINA: The Babylonian consort to the god Ea, mother of the hero-god Marduk.
DILMUN: The site of creation in Sumerian mythology, their equivalent of the Garden of Eden, though we have to be cautious about translating PARDES as "Paradise" - a PARDES in Persian, as in modern Ivrit, is simply "a fruit orchard", generally citrus. It was to Dilmun that Utnapishtim ("he whose spirit can revive itself" in a Hebrew translation) was transported with his wife, after the great flood, in the "Epic of Gilgamesh".
DUMUZI: For my full page on him, click here. The notes there combine Tammuz, Utu and Dumuzi, and deal with them in their relevance to the Tanach. In this catalogue I have de-syncretised the three, as they would have been originally, and given each of their histories.
In some of the regional variations of his story, such as Greek Dionysus, he was a mortal shepherd - elsewhere a fisherman - who was anointed king, and later became a god. In Yehudit he is clearly Tammuz, and in the Danite-Phoenician legends he is Shimshon/Samson, just as, under the name Utu, in Sumer, he was understood to be the counterpart of Semitic Shamash, the sun-god. In Christian mythology he is equally clearly the archetype from whom Jesus was moulded (though some of the Galilean Jesus myths belong to Adonis in his incarnation as Elisha). At different times he was known as Utu or Utu-Dumuzi, and eventually Tammuz. Utu in Sumer was the counterpart of the Semitic Shamash, the sun-god, who we have also seen as Dagon or Dagan. The life of the sun as corn is often depicted as a wheel, and of course with twelve spokes, because it is a horoscopal wheel, describing the sun's annual circuit through the heavens; Shimshon (Samson) was harnessed to precisely such a wheel at Azah (Gaza); Ar Thur in the Celtic world sat his twelve knights around it, while Robin Hood simply took them along as his followers, equivalents to Jesus' disciples (though for some reason Christian portraits of the scene generally rectangularise the table).
Dumuzi's wife was Inanna, and his younger sister Geshtinanna. Dumuzi took Inanna's place in the Underworld after she was trapped and killed there by Ereshkigal; Geshtinanna then offered to take his place. He remained in the Underworld for half the year, and Geshtinanna the other half - which may be the first example of Tanism, though in a more cosmological form than the later Celtic version - thus explaining the cycle of the seasons.
EMESH: The Sumerian god of, which is to say once again the personification of, the summer. He created the trees and fertile fields and was the brother of Enten, the god of winter. Emesh was depicted as a farmer. Is it just coincidence that Emesh = summer, Shemesh provides its sun, and Shamash-Tammuz gets to name the month of its solstice?
ENBILULU: The Mesopotamian water god charged with the care of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. (Did they flood?If so, he can't have been very good at it. Or maybe flooding was a part of the job - there wouldn't have been all that alluvial silt otherwise, and then the Bread and Emmer wheats would never have mutated. But surely that came from Enki-Ea bringing the sweet waters of the Abzu?) I am assuming that he should be written En-Bilulu, but I have found no evidence to support this. Ditto Enkidu, Enkimdu and the other En-names, below.
ENKI: also known as EA; the serpent god, En-Lil's brother, he came second in the hierarchy behind En-Lil. For my page on him in the Dictionary of Names, click here. ENKIDU: The Sumerian god of the forests and the wild. Created by the gods and sent to Earth to teach the proud King Gilgamesh a lesson in humility, Enkidu became Gilgamesh's best friend and brother. His death, following the slaying of the Bull of Heaven, is the impetus for Gilgamesh to embark on his quest for the meaning of life.
ENKIMDU: The Mesopotamian god of canals and ditches, he was, like Emesh, depicted as a farmer, complete with plough and yoke. He was also the god of farmers, the fields and the grain (as opposed to the ripe corn, which was the corn-god's property).
EN-LIL: The third of the trimurti with Anu and Enki, he was the Zeus of Mesopotamia, dwelling in Nip-Ur (Nippur) where he created the kingships of Sumer and Akkad. Far too important to be given just a brief entry, which is all that this catalogue is intended to provide; for my full page on him in the Dictionary of Names, click here.
ENMESSARA: A Sumerian god of the Underworld.
ENTEN: The Sumerian god of winter, he watched over the birth and health of animals during the cold, rainy season. His brother was Emesh, the god of summer.
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ERESHKIGAL: The Sumerian goddess of the Underworld and Queen of the Dead, her name means "Lady of the Great Place". Her consort was the Bull of Heaven, until he was killed by Enkidu. She was the older sister of the goddess Inanna, who she blamed for the Bull of Heaven's death, and who she killed when Inanna came to visit her in the Underworld for his funeral. As described in his piece, above, Enki tricked her into surrendering Inanna back to the land of the living, after which, unlike the Persephone and Proserpine versions where they were expected to spend a part of the year in the Underworld, Ereshkigal ruled the land of the dead alone (the Mesopotamians called their Underworld "The Land of No Return", a most dark and gloomy place), until the coming of the god Nergal, who then became her consort.
She was also known as Irkalla. Tales concerning her, such as "The Marriage of Ereshkigal and Nergal" or "The Descent of Inanna", bear similarities to the later Egyptian myth of Osher and Eshet (Osiris and Isis), and the Greek myths of Demeter and Persephone, especially in the motif of the Annually Dying and Annually Reborn Earth-God which is now best known from the story of Jesus.
Being female, where her consort is obviously male and therefore can provide the seed but has no further role in the creation of life, Ereshkigal was the goddess who received the bodies of the dead - flora and fauna as well as human - but who also provided the womb in which the biodegraded bodies could become compost for the growth of new life - this the reason why so many of the ancient burial-chambers were womb-shaped, or beehived.
In the complex genealogy of the deities, Ereshkigal was the sister of Ishtar (she too had a dual, seemingly but not actually contradictory role, being goddess of both love and war, the two main forms for the expression of human passion, war usually as a synonym for hatred), and also the mother of the goddess Nungal. Namtar, who served as her chief minister, was also her son by En-Lil, while Nin-Azu, who was her son by Gugalanna, her first husband. Just for the information, Bēlet-Sēri served as her official scribe (the equivalent, I take it, of a Secretary of State today), according to the "Epic of Gilgamesh".
Being the goddess of the Underworld, she obviously had no temple-shrines on Earth, though equally obviously every tomb, sarcophagus, pyramid, grave and even crematorium was sacred to her.
The iconography of Ereškigal remains unknown except for a possible representation on the so-called Burney Relief, a large terra-cotta plaque now displayed at the British Museum though its authenticity has been the subject of much dispute. That relief (see above) shows a winged nude female with talons for feet. Standing on two recumbent lions and flanked by owls, she sports the horned head-dress of divinity, and carries a rod and ring in each raised hand. The avian features may be linked to the netherworld whose residents are described as "dressed in bird feathers", but are more likly a representation of Lilitu, the Mesopotamian forerunner of the Biblical Lilith, who was also part of Ereškigal's circle. The lions are plausible, but the owls are unknown from any other iconography from the region, whence the authenticity dispute.
ERRA: The god of war and plagues, or possibly famines, who later became associated with the Underworld god Nergal. His wife was named Mami, though whether or not this is the mother goddess of the same name is much disputed; that his father was the sky god An is not disputed. The centre of his worship was E-meslam ("the Meslam House"), a temple in the city of Kutha in Babylonia. Other than some fragments of Sumerian hymns and inscriptions which have survived, and omen texts from Seleucid Uruk (c.305-64 BCE), which predict that "Erra will devour the land", the main text in which he appears is the narrative poem "Erra and Ishum" (usually known in English as "The Wrath of Erra", or by the variant of his name as "The Epic of Irra"), which dates from around the 8th century BCE. The poem (I am quoting from the Oracc Museum website) tells how
"Erra ravages Babylonia with plague after temporarily gaining control over the world. The text is a poetic portrayal of the eruption of violence and its subsequent effects on a society. It shows, among other things, how violence leads to disruption of order - even the divine order imposed on the world by the gods - and the potential to destroy civilisation. The thirteenth to ninth centuries BCE saw bloody invasions of Babylonia by outside invaders. The myth may be a reflection on the real-life consequences of violence within contemporary society as experienced by its author."
ERRAGAL: A Sumerian god of the underworld.
ERIDAN: The river which ran through the Underworld. Healthy and strong spirits of the dead could drink from the river, but weak spirits had to drink stale water from puddles, and eat dust.
ESEMTU: The corpse of a human being, the mortal remains which had to be cared for and buried in order for the soul of the dead to thrive in the Underworld.
ETANA: The hero of the Sumerian "Epic of Etana", which tells the story of King Etana, one of the earliest of the antediluvian rulers. Despairing of having a son because his wife is barren, he ascends to the heavens on the back of a great eagle which owes him a favour, to present his case before the gods. He is given the plant of birth, which he and his wife must eat together, and is rewarded with a son, Balih.
ETEMMU: The immaterial spirit released from the human being at death, not to be confused with the soul. The Etemmu was the animating spirit breathed into the first humans created from the remains of the god Quingu after his death. The flesh of Quingu was mixed with clay and blood but animated through Etemmu, a spirit of transience, so that, though created from an immortal god, human beings would still die. For Bible-followers, the difference between Neshamah and Nephesh.
GALLA: The Sumerian demons of the underworld who drag humans down to the realm of Ereshkigal. The Galla are featured in the "Hymn to Igalima", and in "The Descent of Inanna", where they are sent by Enki to help Inanna, and also to drag Dumuzi to the Underworld.
GARRA: The Babylonian god of fire, especially noted for the cleansing and purifying fires. Also known as Gerra. But see under GIRRA.
GESHTINANNA: So many variations on the same answer to the same question: why does winter happen? the winter of the annual cycle and the winter of human life and the daily winter of the life-giving sun itself, all of them going down into the darkness of the regenerative Underworld... Geshtinanna was the Sumerian goddess of fertility, and a sister of Dumuzi the shepherd, which makes her the sister-in-law of the goddess Inanna and the sun-god Utu. Her name means "The Vine of Heaven" and she was in charge of the fertility of the Earth from the spring until the autumn equinox, at which time she would go down into the Underworld to release Dumuzi, who was there substituting for the rather similarly named Inanna, and who would now return to Earth to oversee fertility until Geshtinnana completed her Tanist duties at the spring equinox.
In other parts of Mesopotamia she was named Belet-Sheri, "The Lady of the Steppe", which may in fact have been her original name, and Gesht added to Inanna when those two became syncretised. But she is also associated, by name at least, with the more obscure and long-lost goddess Ama-Geshtin "Mother Vine," so it is equally plausible that Ama-Geshtin was syncretised with Inanna, and Geshtinanna was the outcome. Geshtinanna was herself epitheted as as "mother", from "ama" (Em, or Ima, in Yehudit has the same meaning), and sometimes as "old woman" or "wise woman" (um-ma), which suggests to me that Geshtinanna the maiden and new moon has been fused with both Inanna the Madonnah and Ama-Geshtin the old crone or post-menopausal waning moon, and the three daughters of al-Allah have somehow become one.
To read more about her, the best text is "Dumuzi's Dream", a mourning song for the dead Dumuzi - which is to say, for the time when his belovedness descends into the Underworld, to spend his duty-time there, before rising again on whichever day the oestral egg is hatched that year, and taking his place at the right-hand of An or Enki or later Marduk.
Amongst the texts, there are also suggestions that she was involved with the art of writing, which was cuneiform in those days, and with singing. However, it can now be stated with scholarly authority that it was not Geshtinanna who took away the child Dumuzi's toys; that was an error in the translation of the original cuneiform and apologies have been duly made.Who did take away his toys remains a mystery, though probably one of his parents, the goddess Durtur (Turdur/Duttur) being their mother, Enki their father. There was also a third sibling, the goddess Belili. In Lagash she was regarded as the wife of the god Nin-Gishzida, and probably in Nippur, Isin, and Uruk as well, but we only have evidence of her worship in those cities, not of her marriage status.
GESHTU: Also known as Geshtu-e and We-llu, he was the god who offered his blood and intellect for use in the creation of human beings in the Akkadian/Babylonian myth "The Atra-Hasis".
GIBIL: Would that be a soft "G" on this occasion, as in Jibil? He was the Assyrian god who presided as judge over gods and men, and was known as "The Governor of the Gods", with a very hard "G", judging from his reputation. "He took a keen interest in punishing those who had been unjust judges in life" is one rendering that I have encountered. Gibil is also the name of a fire god, and it may well be that our judge is Gibil, but the fire god was pronounced Jibil.
GILGAMESH: The Sumerian hero of "The Epic of Gilgamesh", he appears as a mortal in the Sumerian king-lists, named as a king of Uruk, but this is probably a late historicisation, as happened with the David, Jesus, Arthur and other cosmological tales. In the various myths, he is always depicted either as a god or, at the very least, a demi-god. In the poem "The Huluppu Tree", for example, he is the brother of the goddess Inanna, while in "The Epic of Gilgamesh" he is propositioned by Inanna (as Ishtar) and rebuffs her, causing her to send the Bull of Heaven to Earth as a punishment, which results in the death of Gilgamesh's best friend and brother, Enkidu. Enkidu's death then inspires Gilgamesh to embark on his quest for the meaning of life and immortality.
GIRRA: The god of fire and light, the son of Anu and Shala (sometimes rendered as Shalash), he accompanied Mesopotamians in their daily lives, much as Loge and Loki do in the various Norse myths. He originated as a Sumerian god, but his cult transcended time. He was worshipped throughout Mesopotamian history until the Seleucid period, and because of his association with the consequences of fire - the refining of metals, blacksmithing; the positive consequences that enhanced human life - he became the patron deity of metallurgists. Brick-making too, because bricks require firing in a kiln. But alas fire also has destructive powers, and the burning of fields was generally attributed to him.
Above we had Gibil as a god of fire, and elsewhere we will also find Nuska; actually Girra and Nuska shared a temple in Nippur, the E-me-lám-hush ("The House of Awesome Radiance"), and eventually the three became syncretised as one, probably because they were always just language variations of the same deity, or aspects of fire so little different from each other that it was hard to tell. There are indications that, for example, Girra and Nuska represented different aspects, or phases, of the planet Nabu (Mercury), one perhaps the morning star and the other the evening. But elsewhere Girra is associated with Shamash - well, you don't get more fire in the cosmos than the sun, so no surprise there! And when Marduk replaced Shamash as chief god - in the "Enuma Elish" Girra, who by then has become Gibil, is simply one of the fifty aspects of Marduk - the same of course was true of YHVH when he completed his coup and became the Omnideity, absorbing all other deities into his Oneness.
Girra's symbol was the torch.
GISHIDA: The Babylonian god of the Tree of Life and early spring, another of the many whose tale is an endless cycle of dying and reviving, resurrecting, reborning - just like the day, the lunar month, the year, and most of Nature. Another such was Tammuz, and it is with Tammuz that he stands guard at the gates of the heavens in "The Myth of Adapa" - the function of Bo'az and Yachin at the earthly Temple in Yeru-Shala'im. The god Ea tells Adapa to acknowledge the "disappearance of two gods from the land" by way of paying respect to Gishida and Tammuz, both of whom leave the Earth for part of the year (thus explaining the change in seasons). He was also known as Nin-Gishzida, for whom see below.
GUGALANNA, the Bull of the Heavens: The principal deity of every cult, between 4400 and 2200 BCE, when the horoscope moved forward and the Ram (Aries) took over at the zenith, was depicted as a bull, because this was the epoch at which Taurus occupied the zenith - but that is a depiction of the status of the deity, and should not be confused with Gugalanna, who was rather more the Minotaur than King Minos.
The Bull of the Heavens (I reject the normal translation of his name as "The Bull of Heaven" because the ancients did not have that concept) was the consort to the Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal, and he was kept on a tight rein by the Lord of the Sky, Anu. In "The Epic of Gilgamesh", Ishtar, spurned by Gilgamesh, demands that Anu release the Bull of the Heavens to wreak havoc on Gilgamesh's kingdom in retribution. Gilgamesh kills him, assisted by Enkidu, for which act of treason to his fellow-gods it is decreed that Enkidu must die. In the poem "The Descent of Inanna", the reason why the sky goddess goes down into the Underworld is to pay her respects to her sister, Ereshkigal, after the death of her consort.
In Sumerian mythology there is also a figure known as the Bull-Man, who may or may not be an aspect or variant of Gugalanna. Modern scholars call him a "demon", but there is absolutely nothing demoniacal about him; indeed, the opposite: he works closely with human beings, as well as with the gods, to hold back the forces of chaos: so perhaps the scholars should spell "demon" with an "a", as "daemon", which is a word generally used for the creative spirit in writers and artists and composers etc. The bull-man is always depicted as a man above the waist and a bull below, never the other way around.
GULA: Also known as Nin-Karrak, Nin-Isinna ("Our Lady of Isin"), and originally Bau, she was a dog goddess (is that the same as Baba, earlier on this page?). To the Sumerians she was "Bēlet Balāti", "Our Lady of Health", or sometimes the "Azugallatu", the "Great Healer", an epithet she shared with her son Damu; other sobriquets include "Great Healer of the Land", "The Herb-Grower" and particularly interestingly "The Great Healer of the Black-Headed Ones" - the Sumerians called themselves Sag-giga, which means "black-headed", and you don't bother to give yourself a name like that unless it is unusual or uncommon; note, for example, how many redheads achieve significant prominence in the Bible (Yishma-El, Esav, David, Sha'ul,several others...)
She was at different times the consort of Nin-Urta, Pabilsag, Nin-Girsu and Abu, and as such she was also associated with agriculture and growth. She was the patroness of doctors and the healing arts, and is usually depicted surrounded by stars, with her dog by her side. She is associated with the underworld and transformation, but that, like agriculture, is inexorable, because these are all Nature deities, and the multiple aspects of fertility intertwine: flower rots into compost, compost generates flower. She was the mother of Damu, Nin-Azu, and Gunurra, all likewise healing deities, all likewise linked with transformation and transition.
The reason for her dog is less obvious, though goddesses identified with dogs usually means Sirius, the dog star, which is the brightest star in the night sky, and called the Dog Star because it is part of the constellation Canis Major, Canis being the Latin for "dog". Being a daughter of Anu, who was the heavens incarnate, means that she must have been identified with one of the stars or constellations, so the immense power of Sirius is as good a bet as any. She is said to have had a violent temper, tantruming like a raging storm, sufficient to make the heavens tremble, and as such was invoked for curses as well as incubatory incantations: a Sirius of personality, so to say!
And why three consorts? Probably because there are three major shrines where she was worshipped, and each of those had its own city-hero, Pabilsag in Isin, Nin-Urta in Nippur, and Nin-Girsu in Lagash. The fourth, Abu, was a vegetation deity, and had no city-shrine. She mothered with them (all four claim fatherhood) three other healing deities, Damu, Nin-Azu and Gunurra, and she is also identified with several other goddesses, including Nin-Tinugga, Meme and, yes, in answer to my earlier query, Baba as well, all of these latter acquiring their healing properties through her.
There must have been other consorts too though, for she was a highly promiscuous goddess, as you would expect a goddess of fertility to be, and worshipped wherever people were having babies and farmers were husbanding (and why do we not say wifing as well?) the crops. The major centre, whence her name Nin-Isinna, was Isin; her temple there was named E-u-gi-ra, "The Dog Temple". Other shrines to her have been located at Umma, Lagash, Larsa, Uruk, Borsippa, Babylon and Ashur, the latter three each boasting three separate temples dedicated to her, which opens a rather fascinating question: given her healing role, was she, so to speak "Our Lady of the Out-Patients", and these shrines, like the Bimaristanha of the Moslem world, and the ones run by the Hospitaller Knights in the Middle Ages, venues for the treatment of the sick?
Nothing in the texts confirms (or denies) this, but terracotta votive figurines have been dug up on these sites, depicting humans holding various body parts in such a way that they can only be indicating the source of ailment for which the aid of the goddess was being sought. Presumably the illiterate and inarticulate pointed to these, to show the infirmarer what ailed them, and then used the votive for petition before treatment, and thanksgiving afterwards (if it was successful!). Alongside these offerings have also been dug up the skeletons of large numbers of dogs, as well dog figurines inscribed with dedications and prayers to the goddess - thirty of them in what are clearly formal burial chambers, underneath the ramp that provided an entrance to the Isin temple.
Nin-Isinna's medical activities included incantations, but also more invasive methods - in one hymn (
ETCSL 4.22.1, line 11), for example, she is depicted sharpening her scalpel. During the Old Babylonian period she also acquired some warlike functions, perhaps due to her association with Inanna. Here her scalpel becomes a weapon to tear flesh, and she is described as a storm "whose mouth drips blood...from whose mouth spittle spews constantly, pouring venom on the enemy" (
ETCSL 2.5.3.4, lines 13-14).
In some versions of her specifically as Nin-Isinna, rather than Gula, she was the daughter of
An and Uraš, and married to the god
Pabilsag, with whom she had a son
Damu and a daughter Gunura. That syncretisation with
Gula/Nin-Karrak belongs to the early second millennium, and also includes Nin-Tinugga and
Baba. Later she came to be identified connected with
Inanna, probably during the Isin period (2017-1794 BCE) when Nin-Isinna rose in prominence as goddess of the dynastic capital. This situation is perhaps reflected in Enki and the World Order, where Inanna ascribes high status to Nin-Isinna: "She is to be the mistress of heaven. She is to stand beside An and speak to him whenever she desires" (
ETCSL 1.1.3, lines 404-5).
The é-gal-mah temple in
Isin was the heart of Nin-Isinna's cult. Probably within the complex was é-ur-giz-ra ("the dog house"), built by Enlil-bani around 1850 BCE. Thirty-three dog skeletons were excavated in é-gal-mah;many of them show signs of having been sick or injured, so it is possible that they were cared for by the temple (
Avalos 1995) functioning as a veterinary surgery as well as a human out-patients ward.
Gula-Nin-Isinna was also worshipped at temples in
Larsa,
Babylon,
Ur,
Uruk, and
Larak and was first attested in the Fara god lists from the Early Dynastic IIIa period. A number of Sumerian hymns in praise of her survive (
ETCSL 4.22.1,
ETCSL 4.22.2,
ETCSL 4.22.4,
ETCSL 4.22.5), as well as several royal hymns dedicated to her (e.g.,
ETCSL 2.5.1.4 for Išbi-Erra,
ETCSL 2.5.3.4 for Iddin Dagan,
ETCSL 2.5.5.5 for Lipit-Eštar). She also appears in city laments (
ETCSL 2.2.2, the Lament for Urim;
ETCSL 2.2.3, the Lament for Sumer and Urim;
ETCSL 2.2.4, the Lament for Nibru), Pabilsag's Journey to Nibru, which recounts her marriage (
ETCSL 1.7.8), and Nin-Isinna and the Gods, where she is equated with other city goddesses (
ETCSL 4.22.6).
After the Old Babylonian period Nin-Isinna is rarely attested, surviving essentially as
Gula with whom she is equated in lexical texts. Nonetheless the Kassite king Kurigalzu rebuilt the Isin é-gal-mah in her name, and she appears occasionally in first millennium sources, such as a litany from Neo-Assyrian Kalhu (
CTN 4, 110).
GUSHKIN-BANDA: The Babylonian creator of both humans and gods, who was depicted as a craftsman, most often a goldsmith - equivalent to Biblical Tuval-Kayin?
To continue to H-N and P-Z, click the links.
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