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Sumer Mythology

Pah

Uber all member
Written and submitted by Kotaro, a Religious Forums member


Here are 2 important myths I finished,[pah - the second, in another thread] and an introduction to Sumerian Mythology. I'll take my time on them so that I can capture their essence. Would you like me to write all the 30 or so myths or just some of the most important ones?


Sumerian Mythology
Sumerian Mythology was the spiritual expression of its people, the Sumerians. The underlying essence of Sumer was their spirituality, expressed in every day life and on holy days by the remembrance of the pre-historic legends of mankind and the gods. Many of the stories in writing existed in pre-Sumerian times in the oral traditions of the sages, and when writing was invented, the legends of their culture were preserved on clay tablets for use by the priests, in schools, for religious devotion, calendars, politics, law codes, and a variety of other subjects.


Sumerian Cosmology
The Sumerians conceived the Cosmos as being "eternal" without beginning or end. And in this eternity existed the Primeval Sea, the "Nammu," and the empty dark space of Air, the "LiL." The abyssal waters of the Nammu and empty darkness of the LiL had always existed; meaning the elements water and air have no actual beginning or end and can be considered as the Primal Origin of all things. They stretch over the Cosmos infinitely.
Now when the Air and the Waters began to interact, a Great Mountain arose out of the Waters and into the Air. The Mountain was called the An-Ki, or Heaven-Earth. The luminous worlds of Heaven, Earth, and the "Ki-gal" (Great Below/Underworld) were all stuck together on this Great Mountain and was so gigantic it produced everything the formerly empty Universe would need for its enfolding/creation process. In some respects it sounds like a super-sized Planet. It was most likely in the very "center" of the Cosmos if there was such a concept.

Then arose from this Mountain the first pair of god and goddess, Anu and Ninmah. And together they produced Enlil. Then another god arose from the Waters, and his name was Enki. Soon there came others too, but not all of their names are known. Enlil separated from the Great Mountain all the celestial bodies, and the gods proceeded to order the Universe. Anu carried off Heaven to be an eternal Palace for the gods far above the sky, and so he became known as god of the Heaven. Enlil carried off the Earth and prepared to organize it with Enki and Ninmah, who became goddess of Motherhood. Enki would make his home in the Sea, where his Sea Palace was built, called the Abzu. And so he became known as god of the sea and all water.

Enlil became known as god of the skies and the vast expanse of air surrounding the Universe. This immensity branded him king of the gods, for his dwelling was far greater than any other. Enlil and his consort Ninlil found themselves in utter darkness in the space of Air between Heaven and Earth, so they together birthed Sin god of the moon, and Sin in turn birthed Samas god of the sun, Ishtar goddess of the planet Venus, Ereshkigal who became goddess of the Great Below (Ki-gal), and the rest of the Stars and Planets, making a beautiful luminous Sky.

Sin travelled across the sky in his crescent boat and Samas rode in his chariot with a team of four horses. Ishtar rode in her chariot pulled by seven dogs. The stars and planets surrounded the Moon, moving about gracefully in the skies. All of these luminous bodies the Sumerians thought were made of the same elements of Air and Water, in various types of density.
 

Rakovsky

Active Member
I would be interested in reading in depth about the God of the heavens, An, and literature by Sumerians about him.

For example, was he made by the primordial seas Nammu, and did Sumerians always believe that Nammu preceded An or was that just an idea that eventually developed?
 

Rakovsky

Active Member
The Enûma Elish, which reached its final form in the Late Bronze Age, has Apsû & Tiāmat emerging from chaos and An & Ki, Heaven and Earth, are their descendants.
Main problem here is that Enumah Elish is Babylonian, whereas I am looking for Sumerian mythology about the relationship of An with Nammu, rather than Anu with Tiamat (kind of the same thing, but different myths maybe).
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
Main problem here is that Enumah Elish is Babylonian, whereas I am looking for Sumerian mythology about the relationship of An with Nammu, rather than Anu with Tiamat (kind of the same thing, but different myths maybe).
In one account, Nammu is the mother of An and Ki. Her name was written with the same symbol as engur which is believed to mean the same thing as abzu in the sense of the abyss, chaos. I'd guess that she was the Sumerian original for the Akkadian Tiamat. The name Ti-yam-at means something like "she of the sea", so if Nammu's name was written with an abyss-character, that would fit. For the Western Semites, the sea is male — Yamu — and Tiamat may have been changed to fit Nammu. But this is all very speculative!
 

Rakovsky

Active Member
In one account, Nammu is the mother of An and Ki. Her name was written with the same symbol as engur which is believed to mean the same thing as abzu in the sense of the abyss, chaos. I'd guess that she was the Sumerian original for the Akkadian Tiamat. The name Ti-yam-at means something like "she of the sea", so if Nammu's name was written with an abyss-character, that would fit. For the Western Semites, the sea is male — Yamu — and Tiamat may have been changed to fit Nammu. But this is all very speculative!

It is nice writing to you, David, and to see that you are so knowledgeable on this.

Feel free to answer as many of these as you like:


1. What do you think the etymological meaning of Dingir might be?
Some claims I heard were that it is broken into "di-" and "-ngri", and has associations with day, shining, bright, deity, star, heavens, and chariot (-gri).

2. What do you mean by "engur" in your message above? Please write a bit about this.

3. Was it universally held by Sumerians that Nammu was the source of An? And how did An come out of Nammu? Did Nammu give birth to An, or did An emerge out of Nammu?

4. Do you think Sumerian religion or Sumerians could have included monotheism?
There are two theories about this.
One is that the farther back you go in Sumerian mythology, the fewer gods there are, and so they must originally have been monotheists. The Anthropologist A. Custance notes:
The Sumerian religion in its latest development before the people disappeared as an entity swallowed up by the later Babylonians, seemed to have involved about 5000 gods. The inscriptions of circa 3000 B.C. or perhaps a millennium earlier show only 750. The 300 tablets or so known from Jamdet Nasr in 1928 when Langdon published these texts, contained only. three gods; the sky god Enlil, the earth god Enki, and the sun god Babbar. The 575 tablets from Uruk translated in 1936, which Langdon dated about 4000 B.C. but are now believed to be more accurately dated 3500 B.C., contain the names of only two deities: the sky god An and the mother goddess Innina. Meek's criticism of Langdon's essay was that the number of gods he mentions for the earlier tablets is in error. In the Jamdet Nasr text there may have been as many as six, not three.

Henry Frankfort wrote in his official report:
  • ...we discover that the representations on cylinder seals, which are usually connected with various gods, can all be fitted into a consistent picture in which a single god worshiped in this temple forms the central figure. It seems, therefore, that at this early period his various aspects were not considered separate deities in the Sumero-Accadian pantheon.

This raises an important point; namely, the possibility that polytheism never did arise by the evolution of polydemonism, but because the attributes of a single God were differently emphasized by different people until those people in later years came to forget that they were speaking of the same Person.
http://custance.org/Library/Volume4/Part_II/chapter1.html

Another theory is that the ancient peoples had a simple concept of "God" Himself, as distinct from various gods. In Hinduism, this is Svayam Bhagavan ("The Blessed One Himself"). Thus the Egyptians sometimes wrote poetry about "God", in their language "Neter", without indicating a specific deity. Also the Greeks, although commonly writing in their poetry about various gods, would on occasion write about "God" simply, as in the destiny that "God" ordained.

Following this line of thought, one could ask whether the Sumerians ever wrote about Dingir by Himself, without indicating a particular deity. This might be hard to discern, because the sign of Dingir was in fact the same name as "An", the God of the heavens. So if in some place they wanted to simply talk about "God" and used the sign Dingir, this might come across to the reader as if the writer was indicating An in particular. Thus perhaps "An" is the closet god to "God" in the Sumerian pantheon.

5. Are there any indications of advanced technology that the Sumerians had, that is, advanced by our standards of today?
There are myths that the Ancient Astronaut theorists focus on , like an idea that the Annunaki were ETs, but outside of such interpretations of the myths themselves, there does not seem to be any direct evidence of this.
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
I'm afraid that I'm far from being an expert on the Sumerians — just an endless reader with a good home library. I will offer some thoughts on monotheism, though.

I cannot trace any report of a person having an experience of the Creator. The Bible says Moses did, but we don't have his personal account, and at the time he was supposed to have lived Yahweh was not yet equated with the Supreme Being (see Deuteronomy 32.8). Muhammad claimed that God wrote the Quran, but he only claimed to have talked to Gabriel.

Many polytheist religions do acknowledge a Creator. Africans, most Native Americans, and western Semites did, although ancient Europeans didn't. Indians and Greeks acquired the idea in historic times, while the Chinese have lost it. Basically it's a philosophical idea: where did the universe come from and why is it so convenient for us to live it? It must have been designed and built for that purpose.

The Mesopotamian references to the primal waters matches the Egyptian idea and is characteristic of those who regard the universe as just emerging from chaos. I suspect that if the idea of a creator is based on human creativity, the emergence theory is inspired by the apparent emergence from nothing of worms in mud or corpses. Belief in heaven and earth as divinities, or myths of how they came to be separated, are also characteristic of emergence theories. This is quite different to the ideas like those of the west Semitic Ilu or the Yoruba Oludumare, Supreme Beings who are explicitly described as creating the universe and all the lesser divinities. So, no, I don't think the Sumerian were monotheists.

There is a tendency among some scholars to try to make their favourite people, whether Egyptians or Mesopotamians, "respectable" by Judeo-Christian standards!
 

Rakovsky

Active Member
I'm afraid that I'm far from being an expert on the Sumerians — just an endless reader with a good home library. I will offer some thoughts on monotheism, though.

I cannot trace any report of a person having an experience of the Creator. The Bible says Moses did, but we don't have his personal account, and at the time he was supposed to have lived Yahweh was not yet equated with the Supreme Being (see Deuteronomy 32.8). Muhammad claimed that God wrote the Quran, but he only claimed to have talked to Gabriel.

Many polytheist religions do acknowledge a Creator. Africans, most Native Americans, and western Semites did, although ancient Europeans didn't. Indians and Greeks acquired the idea in historic times, while the Chinese have lost it. Basically it's a philosophical idea: where did the universe come from and why is it so convenient for us to live it? It must have been designed and built for that purpose.

The Mesopotamian references to the primal waters matches the Egyptian idea and is characteristic of those who regard the universe as just emerging from chaos. I suspect that if the idea of a creator is based on human creativity, the emergence theory is inspired by the apparent emergence from nothing of worms in mud or corpses. Belief in heaven and earth as divinities, or myths of how they came to be separated, are also characteristic of emergence theories. This is quite different to the ideas like those of the west Semitic Ilu or the Yoruba Oludumare, Supreme Beings who are explicitly described as creating the universe and all the lesser divinities. So, no, I don't think the Sumerian were monotheists.

There is a tendency among some scholars to try to make their favourite people, whether Egyptians or Mesopotamians, "respectable" by Judeo-Christian standards!
Ok. Can you please try the other questions?
 

Liu

Well-Known Member
Hardly an expert either, but I visited some university lectures on Mesopotamia a while ago and some of it might help to answer your questions, albeit I can only say something about the last two.


Regarding monotheism, most of the Sumerian deities were personifications of a city, besides having additionally also other attributes. They could (and often had) also temples at other cities, but the main temple was of the city god/dess. There is even one city that has two city deities since it was originally two cities that grew together.

Also the myths can in many cases be interpreted as allegories on the dealings of the cities with each other, i.e. there is a myth of one deity defeating another in a battle which seems to have been written on the occasion of the historically documented victory of the city of that deity over the city of that other deity.

So it might actually have been the case that every tribe of Sumerians had only one deity representing their tribe (a bit like an egregore, actually), but due to contact with each other they also adopted the deities of the other tribes/cities and formed a pantheon out of them.


Regarding advanced technology, well you probably wouldn't hear such theories from a university lecturer anyway as they'd fear for their reputation.
But the lecturer there was an archeologist himself and not any of the objects he showed to us that were found there looked like they'd be a sign for the kind of advanced technology you are referring to.
The most advanced objects were wagons and harps and mass production of standardized clay pots for food distribution. But nothing atypical for the time.
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
The existence of a patron god for each city or tribe is a common feature in the ancient Near East, and in Greece for that matter. Inanna at Uruk, Kubaba at Sardis, Aphrodite at Corinth, etc.
 

Rakovsky

Active Member
To the best of my limited knowledge, the Sumerians equated An, meaning "the supreme/high one", with Dingir, the word for god. This reminds me of how in Judaism, the Jews equated Jehovah, "the existing one", with El, the word for God. As such, I might think that An for Sumerians was God (Dingir), just as for Jews, Jehovah was God(El).

However, this entails a major difference. For the Sumerians, An was born of the motherly goddess (Dingir) Nammu. But Judaists would never say that Jehovah was born of another god. Or to put it another way, in the Jewish scheme _God_ is _God_ with all that implies - he is _the_ Creator, not a god created by another god.
 

Liu

Well-Known Member
As far as I know, "an" simply means "sky" and also refers to the deity of that name. Its cuneiform symbol, a star, however, was also used to write the word dingir, so I agree that there might have been some equation. It is interesting that many religions make a sky god their main and/or creator deity.

Nammu, An's mother, was, in part, equated with Tiamat among the Babylonians and had a much worse reputation among them (in a way she could at that time be compared to Leviathan from Hebrew mythology). Well, she, the chaotic ocean out of which creation arose, can certainly be seen as both beneficial and harmful to humanity, and so the myths got shaped and changed.
 

Rakovsky

Active Member
As far as I know, "an" simply means "sky"
It can mean the heavens/sky. Etymological dictionaries said that An as a root word means high. For example the Sumerian word for an ear of corm uses the root word En at the beginning to show that the ear is high off the ground.

Ear-of-corn-demonstration.jpg

Sumerian/Iraqi "corn" was basically a kind of Old World grain
 
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