Mythology

her vizier, Ninshubur, that if she does not return in three days he is to perform mourning rites for her, and to go in turn to the three high gods, Enlil of Nippur, Nanna the moon-god of Ur, and Enki, the Babylonian god of wisdom, in Eridu, and entreat them to intervene on her behalf that she may not be put to death in the nether world. Then Inanna puts on her queenly apparel and her jewels, and approaches the gate of the nether world. There she is challenged by Neti, the gate-keeper of the seven gates. By the orders of Ereshkigal and in accordance with the laws of the nether world, Inanna, as she passes through the seven gates, is stripped of an item of her apparel at each gate; she is brought before Ereshkigal and the Anunnaki, the seven judges of the nether world. They turn ‘the eyes of death’ upon her and she is turned into a corpse and hung upon a stake. After three days, as she does not return, Ninshubur does as he was directed by Inanna. Enlil and Nanna refuse to intervene, but Enki performs certain magical operations by which Inanna is restored to life. Out of dirt from his finger-nail he creates two strange creatures, the kurgarru and the kalaturru, the meaning of whose names is unknown, and sends them to the nether world with the food of life and the water of life. They are told to sprinkle the food of life and the water of life sixty times upon the corpse of Inanna. They do so and the goddess is restored to life. It is a law of the nether world that no one may return from thence without providing a substitute. Hence the myth goes on to describe the ascent of Inanna to the land of the living accompanied by demons who are to carry back to the nether world the substitute whom she provides. First Ninshubur, then Shara the god of Umma, and then Latarak the god of Badtibira are in turn claimed by the demons and rescued by Inanna. Here the text as given in The Ancient Near Eastern Texts breaks off, but Kramer adds in a footnote to his introductory summary of the myth a surprising addition recently discovered. According to this fragment of the myth, Inanna and her escort of demons come to her own city of Erech and there find her husband Dumuzi. He does not humble himself before her as the other three had done, and she therefore hands him over to the demons to be carried off to the nether world. Dumuzi entreats Utu, the sun-god, to deliver him, and here the fragment breaks off. Hence we do not know whether, in the original Sumerian form of the myth, Dumuzi, who is Tammuz, was carried away by the demons into the nether world. This is the first of the three basic myths referred to above in its Sumerian form. It is possible that the Sumerians brought the myth with them when they settled in the delta, and that this is its earliest form. In this form Inanna does not descend into the nether world to bring back her husband/brother Dumuzi, or Tammuz, from death. On the contrary and against all later conceptions of the myth, it is manna who allows the demons to carry off Dumuzi to the nether world as her substitute, while the reason for her own descent is left unexplained. Nevertheless, the Tammuz-liturgies [2] which belong to the Sumerian period already show the later form of the myth. They describe the chaos and desolation which fall upon the land when Tammuz goes down into the nether world; they describe Ishtar’s lamentation and her descent into the nether world to rescue Tammuz from its powers; and they conclude with a description of the triumphant return of Tammuz to the land of the living. It is also clear that the liturgies form part of a seasonal ritual, and hence that the myth may rightly be classed as a ritual myth. A possible reason for the change in the original form of the myth may be found in the fact that the Sumerians, incoming into the delta, were passing from a pastoral economy to an agricultural mode of life. In the liturgies Tammuz and Ishtar are frequently represented under the figure of the male and female fir-tree, and the fir-tree is not found in the Tigris-Euphrates delta, but belongs to the mountainous region from which the

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