By the Gods!

a-world-at-war:

     Enlil “Lord of the storm.” was the name of the cheif deity of the Sumerians. He was the god of breath, wind, loft, and breadth (height and distance). He is said to have been created by an exhaled breath of An and Ki (God of heavens and goddess of earth) after sexual union. The myth of Enlil and Ninlil states that when Enlil was a young god he was banished from the home of the gods, Dilmun, after raping a godess named Ninlil. After his crime he was banished to the underworld, Kur, which is where Ninlil followed him and bore his first child Nergal, and/or the moon god Sin. Only after Enlil had fathered 3 more children (Underworld deities, replacements for Sin) he was allowed to return to Dilmun. Enlil was known as the inventor of the mattock (a key agricultural pick, hoe, ax or digging tool of the Sumerians) and caused plants to grow.

Alright, mythfans. New blog over here examining warfare in the most ancient of ancient worlds. Above is a recent post on Enlil, the Sumerian sky-god (notice the familiar fork-like things he holds: commanding lightning in the same style as Baal, and later Zeus).

Give the blog a look! It’s called A World at War. A lot of informative stuff there, already! I’ll be paying attention to the posts!

Utnapishtim

According to one version of the Mesopotamian flood myth, Utnapishtim was the wise man who alone survived the great flood that was sent to eradicate humanity. The gods Anu, Enlil, Ninurta and Ennugi decided to destroy humankind, having grown tired of their ways. Oh, those humans, with their ways!

However, Ea, the water god, warned Utnapishtim of the conspiracy, and told him to build a great boat, and in it store the seeds of all life. He did it, and loaded it with the said seeds, his cattle, his family, and an ass-load of birds. A filthy rain came for six days and six nights, and the people despaired. On the seventh day it ceased, and all that was left of humanity was a vast heap of thick mud, and Utnapishtim’s ship. He sent out birds to look for land, and eventually a raven found some, prompting Utnapishtim to place offerings to the gods in gratitude. Utnapishtim was granted the immortality of the gods in return for his saving of humanity and appeasing of the mesopotamian pantheon. 

Later on, Gilgamesh, (ever heard of him? He’s kind of a big deal) who was a descendant of Utnapishtim, tracked him down to learn of him the secret of immortality. Long story short, he gets rejected. 

Now, if this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Indeed, the biblical Noah is an analog of Utnapishtim, though the Sumerian/Mesopotamian/Babylonian deluge story was written long before the Noah of the Torah. Deluge myths are found all over the world. People move, stories move, and myths morph into other myths. An argument for cultural diffusion, if you look at it that way. Or, perhaps, we’re all just coded to have similar developmental paths, prompting similar stories to crop up in global religions? That’d be the parallel development argument. Me, I’m a diffusion guy.

Sumerian Religion

When it comes to bein’ old, the Sumerians take the ancient-cake. Sumer is the earliest known civilization in the world, and is known as the Cradle of Civilization. Centred in Mesopotamia (Greek for “the land between the rivers”) between the Euphrates and the Tigris and beginning in the 6th-5th millenium BCE, their empirical and cultural progress influenced mesopotamian development for thousands of years. 

Sumerian cosmology saw the universe as a closed dome surrounded by a primordial saltwater sea. Under the earth, which formed the base of the dome, existed an underworld and a freshwater ocean called the Apsu (a name we see in later Babylonian myth). The primordial saltwater sea was named Nammu, and may have later become Tiamat during the Sumerian Renaissance in the 21st-20th century BCE. They developed a pantheon of anthropomorphic deities representing cosmic and terrestrial forces that underwent some changes over the millennia. Some of the important deities were Apsu, An, (god of heaven) Enlil, (god of the air) and Enki (god of freshwater and male fertility).

[Amendment: a kind reader brought a few errors in this post to my attention, and after checking some other sources I’ve adjusted some dates and phrasing. I use a variety of sources and try to cross-reference, but the importance of a particular fact in one source doesn’t always mesh with others, so I try to to establish a middle ground that is as inclusive as possible without overgeneralizing. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks!]