Mythology

interesting differences. When Ishtar knocks at the gate of the underworld she threatens to batter down the gate if she is not admitted, and to set free the dead who are in the underworld. A vivid passage of the poem describes this scene: O gatekeeper, open your gate, Open your gate that I may enter! If you open not the gate so that I cannot enter, I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt, I will smash the doorpost, I will move the doors, I will raise up the dead, eating the living, So that the dead will outnumber the living. [9] Ishtar, in this version of the myth, is a much more hostile and threatening figure than she is in the Sumerian version. We also find in Ishtar’s threat to let loose the dead upon the living an illustration of the Babylonian fear of ghosts which was such a marked feature of their religion and appears in so many of their incantations. As Ishtar passes through the seven gates she is stripped of some part of her apparel at each gate, as in the Sumerian version. The Babylonian version omits the grim description of her being turned into a corpse by the baleful ‘eyes of death’ however, she does not return, and then follows Papsukkal’s appeal to the great gods quoted above. In answer to this appeal Ea, who is Enki in the Sumerian version, creates Asushunamir the eunuch, and sends him down to induce Ereshkigal to give him the life-water bag. By his charm he succeeds in doing this, and Ereshkigal reluctantly orders her vizier Namtar to sprinkle Ishtar with the water of life. Ishtar is released and returns, receiving back those articles of adornment and apparel which had been taken from her as she passes through the seven gates on her return journey. But a reference is made to the ransom which she must pay. Ereshkigal says to Namtar, ‘If she does not give you her ransom price, bring her back.’ What this is to be is not specified, but the mention of Tammuz at the end of the myth seems to, imply his return from the underworld, although no indication has been given as to how he came there. We have already seen that there is a Sumerian myth of Enlil’s banishment to the underworld and of Inanna’s accompanying him there, and reference has been made to the identification of Tammuz with Enlil in the liturgies. Hence it would seem that in the course of the development of the myth the descent of Tammuz into the underworld came to assume increasing importance, and to be related to the death and rebirth of vegetation. When, in the course of time, the myth was carried into other countries, it was the death of Tammuz and the mourning for him that came to be emphasized at the expense of other features of the myth. Thus we have a reference in Ezekiel [10] to the women of Israel weeping for Tammuz, and the myth of Venus and Adonis represents the form in which the myth had passed into Greek mythology. Milton’s reference to the river Adonis running ‘purple to the sea, supposed with blood of Thammuz yearly wounded’, is a reminder of the Syrian form of the myth, and we shall see that the death of Baal in the Ugaritic mythology may represent an earlier stage of the development of the myth in its passage to Syria. The Creation Myth We have seen that in the Sumerian version of the second basic myth, the myth of Creation, the creative activities are shared among various gods, Enlil and Enki being the principal figures

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