Mythology

Sumerians came. Moreover, the fact that the towering ‘ziqqurats’ were a feature of Sumerian temple architecture has been held to point in the same direction. Hence the original form of the myth may have arisen under conditions of life which were very different from the agricultural mode of life which the Sumerians were obliged to adopt when they settled in the delta. There is evidence to show that Semites and Sumerians were both occupying the delta for a considerable time before the Amorite invasion and the final conquest and absorption of the Sumerians by the Semites. We know that the Semites took over from the Sumerians their cuneiform script and much of their religion and mythology, and this may well be accepted as a further explanation of the changed character of the Tammuz-Ishtar myth as we find it in the Assyro-Babylonian period. We shall see later what changes the myth underwent as it passed into other countries. The Myth of Creation The second basic myth which we find in a Sumerian form is the wide-spread myth of Creation. It may be remarked here that we do not find the conception of creation ex nihilo in any of the ancient myths of Creation. For all of these, creation is the act of bringing order out of an original state of chaos. When we come to deal with the Assyro-Babylonian material, we shall see that the cosmogonic myth existed there in one main form, the well-known Enuma Elish, or Epic of Creation, as it is now generally styled. But there is nothing corresponding to this in the Sumerian material. Professor Kramer has shown that Sumerian cosmogony has to be pieced together from various myths of origin, and the following account is based on his researches. He is, however, careful to remind us that there are great gaps in our knowledge of Sumerian, and that many of the tablets upon which the myths have been preserved are broken and incomplete. Hence, in the present state of our knowledge of Sumerian it is impossible to give a completely coherent account of Sumerian mythology. For the sake of convenience the Sumerian myths of Creation may be arranged under three heads: the origin of the universe, the organization of the universe, and the creation of man. The Origin of the Universe. In a tablet which contains a list of the Sumerian gods, the goddess Nammu, whose name is written with the ideogram for ’sea’, is described as ‘the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth’. From other myths it appears that heaven and earth were originally a mountain whose base was the earth and whose summit was heaven. Heaven was personified as the god An, and earth as the goddess Ki, and from their union was begotten the air-god Enlil, who then separated heaven from earth and brought the universe into being in the form of heaven and earth separated by air. Sumerian mythology gave no explanation of the origin of the primeval sea. The Organization of the Universe. This aspect of the creation motif is dealt with in a number of myths which describe how the heavenly bodies and all the various elements of Sumerian civilization came into being. The first of these myths is concerned with the birth of the moon-god, Nanna, or Sin. The details are far from clear, and further knowledge may modify them; but the outline of the myth seems to be that Enlil, the high god of the Sumerian pantheon, whose shrine was at Nippur, was enamoured of the goddess Ninlil and raped her as she was sailing on the stream Nunbirdu. For this high-handed act Enlil was banished to the underworld, but Ninlil, great with child, refused to be left behind, and insisted on following Enlil to the nether world. As this would have involved the birth of Ninlil’s child Nanna, the moon-god, in the dark nether world

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