Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [72]
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