Inanna of the Sumerians/Akkadians, and the bible...

by ziddina 6 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  ziddina

  The following excerpts are from the book, "Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth - Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer"... Published by Harper & Row, copyright 1983, by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer...

  Text from the book and general, explanatory commentary will be in black; quotes from the bible will be inblue - the Holman Christian Standard bible; my personal comments will be in dark red to make them easy to distinguish from text...

  A bit of background on the two authors...

  Diane Wolkstein: http://dianewolkstein.com/

  Samuel Noah Kramer's biography can be found at this link - and you will notice that he was a world-renowned expert on Sumerian culture, history and language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Noah_Kramer

  To give you an idea of the antiquity of these songs, the culture of Sumer dates back around 5,000 years - to approximately 3,000 B.C. ... This area "was first settled during the fifth millennium B.C., by a people speaking an unknown language that has left its traces in the names of places and occupations. Archaeologists now generally designate this people as Ubaidians, a name derived from Ubaid, an ancient tell, or mound, not far from the city of Ur... It was the Ubaidians who established the village settlements that gradually developed into Sumer's great urban centers: Ur, Eridu, Adab, Isin, Larsa, Kullab-Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Kish. The Ubaidians were responsible for Sumer's earliest cultural advances..."

  The area of Sumer - "situated in the southern half of modern Iraq, in the alluvial valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, roughly between modern Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, an area of approximately 10,000 square miles. Its climate is hot and dry, its soil is windswept, ...an unpromising land seemingly doomed to poverty and desolation. But the Sumerians were a gifted, energetic, innovative people, technologically inventive and ideologically resourceful, and with the help of irrigation and a relatively pragmatic view of life and its mysteries, they turned this deprived land into a veritable Garden of Eden..."

  "A river went out from Eden to water the garden. From there it divided and became the source of four rivers. ... The name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows to the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates."

  Several interesting points here... First of all, this civilization - if you consider just the Sumerians - is at least 1,500 years older than the known age of the bible. Secondly, the area of the Sumerian civilization matches the area that the mythical "Garden of Eden" was supposedly located in... Most interesting...

  So, obviously, the Sumerian civilization and mythology, was a dynamic forerunner of the Israelite mythology, and the area of Sumerian cultivation may have so impressed the proto-Israelites that they probably based their "sacred garden" mythology upon it... But that's not the only connection between the mythology of Inanna and the bible...

  "The Sumerian tales, legends, and songs are part of a vast literature inscribed on clay tablets and fragments... Their contents, which date back to 2,000 B.C., are now in the process of being deciphered, translated, and interpreted by a small international group of dedicated scholars... Inscribed on these tablets and fragments, numbering some five to six thousand in all, are hundreds of compositions - myths, epic tales, hymns, psalms, love songs, laments, essays, disputations, proverbs, fables - that constitute a treasure house of comparative source material for the historian of literature and religion,..."

  The date of 2,000 B.C. is the general time period that the bulk of the cuneiform tablets were generated... But they record tales and mythology that are much, much older...

  In the first story of the book, The Huluppu Tree, there is a description of the 'beginning' of existence, and some phrases sound very familiar...

  "In the first days when everything needed was brought into being,

  In the first days when everything needed was properly nourished,

  When bread was baked in the shrines of the land,

  And bread was tasted in the homes of the land,

  When heaven had moved away from earth,

  And Earth had separated from heaven,

  ("Then God said, 'Let there be an expanse between the waters, separating water from water'. So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above the expanse. ... God called the expanse "sky"...")

  And the name of man was fixed;..."

  The story goes on to describe a terrible storm, which uproots a very special, sacred tree... Tossed upon the waves, it comes to rest on the banks of the Euphrates river...

  "Enki, the God of Wisdom, set sail for the underwold.

  Small windstones were tossed up against him;

  Large hailstones were hurled up against him;

  ...

  The waters of the sea devoured the bow of his boat like wolves; "

  (What an exquisite description of storm waves washing over the bow of a boat...)

  "The waters of the sea struck the stern of his boat like lions.

  At that time, a tree, a single tree, a huluppu-tree

  Was planted by the banks of the Euphrates.

  The tree was nurtured by the waters of the Euphrates.

  The whirling South Wind arose, pulling at its roots

  And ripping at its branches

  Until the waters of the Euphrates carried it away."

  (Now, here's the entry of the Goddess Inanna, who at first appears to be a mere human in this story...)

  "A woman who walked in fear of the word of the Sky God, An,

  Who walked in fear of the word of the Air God, Enlil,

  Plucked the tree from the river and spoke:

  "I shall bring this tree to Uruk.

  I shall plant this tree in my holy garden."

  (Again, note the reference to a "holy garden" - predating the bible by many hundreds - if merely counting the ages of the cuneiform tablets - of years. Or close to 2,000 years, if counting the greater age of the various groups that eventually made up the Sumerians...)

  "Inanna cared for the tree with her hand.

  She settled the earth around the tree with her foot.

  ...

  The years passed; five years, then ten years.

  The tree grew thick, but its bark did not split.

  Then a serpent who could not be charmed

  Made its nest in the roots of the huluppu-tree."

  (Hmmm. That sounds vaguely familiar.... Interestingly, in the bible's version, the serpent doesn't actually take up residence in the tree; it commits enough mischief by persuading the woman to eat from it...)

  "The Anzu-bird set his young in the branches of the tree.

  And the dark maid Lillith built her home in the trunk."

  (Inanna then goes to the sun god, seeking his assistance in ridding her sacred tree of the three pests inhabiting it... The Sun God, Utu turns her request for assistance down... Then she seeks out her brother, Gilgamesh... He agrees to rid the tree of its pests/attackers...)

  "Gilgamesh, the valiant warrior, Gilgamesh, ...

  He lifted his bronze ax, the ax of the road, ...

  He entered Inanna's holy garden.

  Gilgamesh struck the serpent who could not be charmed.

  The Anzu-bird flew with his young to the mountains;

  And Lillith smashed her home and fled to the wild, uninhabited places.

  Gilgamesh then loosened the roots of the huluppu-tree;

  And the sons of the city, who accompanied him, cut off the branches.

  From the trunk of the tree he carved a throne for his holy sister.

  From the trunk of the tree Gilgamesh carved a bed for Inanna.

  From the roots of the tree she fashioned a pukku for her brother.

  From the crown of the tree Inanna fashioned a mikku for Gilgamesh, the hero of Uruk."

  (No exact description of the pukku and the mikku are given in the book, but the "Annotations of the Art" section mentions the following...): "The rod and ring extended to Ur-Nammu by the god[dess] have been interpreted as a measuring rod and line, to be used in laying out the plan of Nanna's temple, for the building of the Moon God's shrine as portrayed on another register of this relief. These implements may also be emblems of kingship, like the pukku and the mikku fashioned by Inanna for Gilgamesh...."

  And here is the artwork mentioned...

  That is all I'm going to post for now...

  Zid
• 

  ziddina

  Again, this is from the book: "Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth - Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer"... Published by Harper & Row, copyright 1983, by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer...

  (and again, my comments are in red...)

  Here is some background commentary on the Sumerian culture... This commentary is written exclusively by Samuel Noah Kramer...

  [from above...] "Sumer - or rather, the land that came to be known as Sumer in about 3,000 BC - was first settled during the fifth millennium B.C., by a people speaking an unknown language that has left its traces in the names of places and occupations. Archaeologists now generally designate this people as Ubaidians, a name derived from Ubaid, an ancient tell, or mound, not far from the city of Ur... It was the Ubaidians who established the village settlements that gradually developed into Sumer's great urban centers: Ur, Eridu, Adab, Isin, Larsa, Kullab-Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Kish. The Ubaidians were responsible for Sumer's earliest cultural advances..."

  [continued...] "they were its first farmers, cattle-raisers, fishermen, weavers, leather workers, woodworkers, smiths, potters, ad masons. But the Ubaidians did not long remain the sole and dominant group in the land. As their settlements prospered and flourished, they were infiltrated and invaded by Semitic nomads from the Syrian and Arabian desert lands, and it was these Semites who became the politically dominant group....

  The Sumerians, on the other hand, did not arrive in the land until the second half of the fourth millennium B.C. The location of their original home is unknown, but since the Sumerian language is an agglutinative tongue like that of the Turkic peoples, it seems likely that it may have been somewhere in south-central Asia. There is also some evidence that on their way to southern Mesopotamia they may have settled for a time in western Iran...

  Sumerian political history is dominated by the institution of kingship. Originally, political power lay in the hands of the free citizens and a city governor known as the ensi, who was no more than a peer among peers. In cases of decisions vital to the community, these free citizens met together in a bicameral assembly consisting of an upper house of "elders" and a lower house of younger fighting men. As the struggle between the various Sumerian city-states grew more violent and bitter, and as the pressures from the barbaric peoples to the east and west intensified, military leadership became an urgent need, and the king - or as he is known in Sumerian, the lugal, "big man" - came to the fore. At first the king was probably selected and appointed by the assembly at critical moments for specific military tasks. But gradually kingship with all its privileges and prerogatives became a hereditary institution. The king established a regular army with the chariot as the main offensive weapon, and a heavily armed infantry that attacked in phalanx formation...

  The first ruler of Sumer whose deeds are recorded, if only in the briefest kind of statement, is a King of Kish by the name of Etana, who probably reigned at the very beginning of the third millennium B.C..... (That's almost 1,500 years before the bible...) In the Sumerian "Kinglist" - a document written centuries later - he is described as the "man who brought stability to all the lands," and it may thus be inferred that he held sway not only over Sumer but also over Sumer's neighbors...."

  (Sumerian history consists of a series of dominance by various Sumerian city-states, from Kish to Uruk, to Mesannepadda, also known as Ur, to Lagash... In descending order...)

  "In the centuries that followed, Sumer suffered two humiliating defeats. The first was at the hands of a Semitic ruler by the name of Sargon, who conquered not only Sumer but most of western Asia. He established his capital in Agade (biblical Akkad), a city not far from Kish, and Sumer gradually became known by the hyphenated name Sumer-Akkad. Moreover, during the reign of the Akkad dynasty, the Semitic tongue now generally designated as Akkadian began to rival Sumerian as the living language of the land..."

  [After Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, attacked the most sacred Sumerian city, and an invasion by the Gutians...] "Towards the very end of this disastrous, humiliating period in Sumerian history, the city of Lagash once again came to the fore as a political force, especially under the rule of an extraordinary and pious ensi named Gudea...The source and extent of his political power are as yet unknown, but his inscriptions indicate that he had trade contacts in virtually all the known world of the time. He obtained gold from Anatolia and Egypt, silver from the Taurus, cedars from the Amanus, copper from the Zagros ranges, diorite from Ethopia, and timber from the as yet unidentified land of Dilmun..."

  (What a striking resemblance between this actual historical figure's accomplishments, and the biblical "King Solomon", whose supposed 'temple' has not yet produced any hard physical evidence, nothing has yet been proven traceable to this 'temple'...)

  "Sumerian society was essentially urban in character, though it rested on an agricultural rather than an industrial base. In the third millennium B.C. Sumer consisted of a dozen or so city-states, each comprising a large and usually walled city surrounded by villages and hamlets. According to Sumerian religious belief, the city belonged to its ruling deity, so the outstanding feature of each city was the main temple. This largest and tallest building was situated on a high terrace, which gradually developed into a massive stage tower, or ziggurat, Sumer's most memorable contribution to religious architecture....

  Although, in theory, the whole city belonged to the main god; in practice, the temple corporation owned only some of the land, which it rented out to sharecroppers. The remainder of the land was the private property of individual citizens: farmers and cattle-breeders, boatmen and fishermen, merchants and scribes, doctors and architects, masons and carpenters, smiths, jewelers, and potters. At the very top of the social hierarchy were the nobles: the palace courtiers and temple administrators, whose families owned large estates tended by clients and slaves. But even some of the poorer citizens managed to own farms and gardens, houses and cattle...."

  The economic and social life of Sumer was characterized by the all-pervading concepts of law and justice...In theory, it was the king who was responsible for the administration of law and justice; in practice, the city governor or his representative, the mashkim, attended to the administrative and legal details. Court cases were usually heard by tribunals of three or four judges. Suits could be brought either by private parties or by the government. Evidence was taken in the form of statements from witnesses and experts, or was obtained from written documents. Oath-taking played a considerable role in court procedure.

  Slavery was a recognized institution of Sumerian society. The temples, palaces, and rich estates owned slaves and exploited them for their own benefit. Many slaves were prisoners of war; these were not necessarily foreigners, but could be Sumerians, from a defeated neighboring city. Slaves were also recruited in other ways: freemen might be reduced to slavery as punishment for certain offenses; parents could sell their children as slaves in time of need; or a man might turn over his entire family to creditors in payment of a debt, but for no longer than three years.

  The slave was the property of his master. He could be branded and flogged, and was severely punished if he attempted to escape. He did have certain legal rights, however; he could engage in business, borrow money, and buy his freedom..."

  (Looking back on the Israelites' version of slavery, a slave could also redeem himself to freedom, but I don't recall whether there is any mention of whether an Israelite slave had as many options to obtain their freedom as did the Sumerian slaves....)

  "If a slave, male or female, married a free person, the children were free. The sale price of slaves varied with the market and the quality of the individual for sale. The average price for a grown man was ten shekels, which at times was less than the price of an ass...."

  "The basic unit of Sumerian society was the family. Marriage was arranged by the parents. The betrothal was legally recognized as soon as the groom presented a gift to the bride's father, although it was often made binding with a contract inscribed on a tablet. While marriage was thus reduced to a practical arrangement, surreptitious premarital lovemaking was by no means unknown..."

  (And also, apparently, didn't lead to a forced marriage or a DEATH sentence, as it did amongst the Israelites...!!! )

  "The woman in Sumer had certain important legal rights: she could hold property, engage in business, and qualify as a witness..."

  (Again, the obvious superiority of the Sumerian woman's rights to the Israelite women's LACK of rights comes to mind.... Especially notice that, unless there were no children from the first marriage, Sumerian men COULD NOT have multiple wives!!!...)

  "But the husband could divorce her on relatively light grounds; and if she had borne him no children, he could take a second wife. Children were under the absolute authority of their parents, who could disinherit them or even sell them into slavery. But usually children were loved and cherished; and at the parents' death, they inherited all property. Adopted children were not uncommon, and these too were treated with care and consideration - they were a kind of insurance for old age..."

  (And that's all I'm going to post, for today...)

  Zid
• 

  Robdar

  Fascinating
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  ziddina

  [Following is the interpretation of "The Huluppu-Tree", by co-author Diane Wolkstein... I will attempt to place the interpretations with the pertinent posting, in future...]

  "The Huluppu-Tree" is one of the world's first recorded tales of genesis. Such a claim, however, ought not to lead us to consider first to mean "primitive" or uninformed. The art and thinking of the Sumerians and Akkadians had an enormous breadth, sophistication, and variety in its representation of the universe...

  In Sumerian there is no rhyme. However, the intricate patterns of similar and alternating sounds of vowels and consonants and the similar and alternating verb and noun endings give the language a musical resonance. Unfortunately, the richness of the sound play in Sumerian is not available to the non-Sumerian reader; nevertheless, we can begin to unlock this mysterious tale by examining it from another aspect of poetics..."

  [In the actual Sumerian text, there tends to be what Samuel Noah Kramer calls "cluttering repetitions"; the Sumerians would often repeat a type of "chorus" stanza with each new element introduced into the story... These repetitions were trimmed, whenever they were non-essential to the actual telling of the story...]

  [It is interesting to note that the number "13" had religious significance for the Sumerians...]

  "Lines 11 and 12 take up the previous repetitive verb-balancing parallelism of lines 8 and 9... However, the third line of the parallelism, with its new subject...throws the spotlight onto the meaning of the thirteenth line:

  'When... Ereshkigal, was given the underworld for her domain...'

  [Ereshkigal is the Goddess of Death and the Underworld... more on that later...]

  "As in so many world mythologies, 13 is the number of death. It is the unlucky, fateful number...." [So, the choice of "Friday the 13th" as the date for destroying the "Knights Templar" may have been based on this ancient belief in the 'death-aspect' of the number 13...]

  "The huluppu-tree sprouts by the EuphratesRiver, but soon it is struck by the South Wind and forced into the waters. If it had not been for Inanna, the tree in its untended state of nature might have perished. Inanna rescues the tree from the waters and brings it to a place of cultivation.

  Only after Inanna has cared for the tree for a period of time in the enclosure of her garden do her wishes connected with it emerge. ...

  [I am again struck by both the similarities and the differences between this story of a Goddess with a Garden, within which she plants a Sacred Tree, and the biblical version which is much, much younger... The Israelite version has totally stripped the Goddess of her garden and her ownership of the sacred tree... The 'female' in the Israelite version of this 'sacred' garden is a mere afterthought, almost a cardboard villain upon which to blame the 'downfall' of mankind...]

  "life must be properly nourished and cared for before it can take root and begin to be differentiated. From the growing tree Inanna wishes to have a shining throne and a bed....

  [Inanna is viewed as physically manifesting herself as the planet we now know as Venus, for Inanna is "the Morning and Evening Star"...]

  "But now Inanna, who was born of divine parents, has descended to earth and waits as a "young woman" for her throne and bed. Inanna waits, but her tree does not come into the fruition she wishes. Instead it becomes the habitat of Inanna's unacknowledged, unexpressed fears and desires..."

  [At this point, co-author Diane Wolkstein applies a good deal of what appears to be "Freudian-based" psychological analysis to the story... I'm going to downplay that, because we can't be sure that the Sumerians would have taken anything like a "Freudian" approach to their divinities...]

  "The snake, because it sloughs off its own skin, has long been connected with rebirth. In the Akkadian The Epic of Gilgamesh, contemporary to the Cycle of Inanna, the snake steals the "flower of rebirth" from the unmindful Gilgamesh. Both because of its regenerative aspect and its phallic likeness, the appearance of the snake suggests rebirth and sexuality...

  The Anzu-bird was known to the Sumerians from the story of "Ninurta-Turtle", in which the Anzu-bird unsuccessfully attempts to steal the me, the attributes of civilization and knowledge, from Enki, the God of Wisdom. The mature Anzu-bird, depicted in Sumerian art with the great wings of an eagle and the face of a lion, craves power and knowledge..."

  [And here is their representation of the "Anzu-bird"...]

  "Lilith [Lillith...] does not appear in any other Sumerian texts. To understand her nature, we need to consider various later texts. In Hebrew legend, she was the first bride of Adam; but insisting on her own equality, she refused to copulate with him, for she did not want to be underneath him. She fled from Adam and remained forever outside human relationship or regulation, possessed by an avid, insatiable sexuality. She was cursed by the daily death of a hundred of her demon children, for which she takes contunal revenge by stealing, injuring, or killing human infants. [How strikingly similar to the much later European 'witch' mythology, in which 'witches' were supposed to steal babies for their infernal rites...] In Zoharic texts, she has dominion over all instinctual, natural beings, over "every living creature that creepeth". Lillith forms with the Anzu-bird and the snake a triad of sexual, lawless creatures who live outside the bounds of the Sumerian community and seek power only for themselves....

  Inanna brought the huluppu-tree from its free-floating state in the wilderness into the enclosure of her garden. But without the will of the hero-king Gilgamesh, the tree cannot bear "the fruit" Inanna wishes for. ..."

  And, since I just spent an hour fighting with Photof*ckit, I'm going to stop here...
• 

  ziddina

  Here's the photo which was deleted from post #1, regarding the pukku and the mikku:

  Sorry 'bout the deletion; I duplicate-uploaded one photo when I added some more to Photobucket...
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  Sapphy

  Thanks ziddina, I find this really interesting. Ancient history and folklore is facsinating. Do you think there's any read across with Yggdrasil of the Norse mythology? Yggrasil had serpents nesting at its roots I think.
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  ziddina

  Funny you should mention that, Sapphy... Let me see if I can find the reference quickly... Ah, here 'tis!

  Referencing an illustration of Sumerian art, page 179 - 180...

  "Snake with interlacing coil... The majority of the pictorial surface is covered with the intertwined coils of a serpent, forming a lattice pattern... The close relationship between snakes and tree roots has been pointed out by Thorkild Jacobsen, especially in connection with the chthonic god Ningishzida, "Lord of the Good Tree", whose symbol is the serpent. The underground source of the tree's life, its roots, become the writhing serpent emblem of the anthropomorphic god. On this seal, the entwined serpent perhaps represents the subterranean sphere in which the tree's winding roots exist and to which the snake returns to hibernate, just as the snake made its home in the roots of the huluppu-tree..."

  Unfortunately I haven't pulled all the illustrations from this book onto my Photobucket account, so I can't show you the imprint of the clay seal, at this point... But I will be posting much more of this book, over the next few months..

  There's so much more in this book, but I have to return it in a few days, cause I'm going on a brief 'vacation' that I"m not looking forward to...

  Will check the book back out when I get back and continue my postings... Zid