Mythology

have immolated the wives and court attendants on the occasion of the death of a king; the text appears to imply that Gilgamesh has died, and ends with a paean in his praise. Here we may leave the subject of Sumerian mythology, and pass on to the Akkadian, that is, the Assyro-Babylonian mythology, much of which is, as we have already pointed out, based on the Sumerian material. It must be borne in mind that the Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians, while they adopted the Sumerian cuneiform script, adapted it to express a Semitic language (Akkadian) totally unlike Sumerian. Hence many of ‘the gods of the Sumerian pantheon adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians appear under Semitic names in the Akkadian mythology. Inanna becomes Ishtar, Utu becomes Shamash, the moon-god Nanna becomes Sin, although many of the names of the temples and ritual terms retain their Sumerian forms. Many of the prayers and incantations continued to be recited by the priests in Sumerian, which remained the language of religious ritual and liturgy long after it had ceased to be a spoken language, much as Latin continued, and still continues, to be the liturgical language of the Church. The Akkadian forms of Sumerian myths thus reflect both the altered political conditions of Semitic domination, and the different mentality of the Semitic conquerors. Babylonian Myths We have, for convenience, classed the myths described in this section as Babylonian, although many of the texts which contain them were written by Assyrian scribes and come from the library of the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. Professor Sidney. Smith has said:’ ‘It is certain that the Assyrian scribes were engaged in transforming the literature they borrowed from Babylonia from the style of the First Dynasty of Babylon to the form in which we find it in Ashurbanipal’s library.’ All the gods of Assyria were also worshipped in Babylonia, and the Assyrian religious festivals were celebrated at the same times and in the same way as those of Babylonia. There are a few myths or legends peculiar to Assyria, such as the legend of Sargon of Agade, which has a very curious history. But in the main the myths which we shall describe are of Babylonian provenance, and represent the Semitic transformation of earlier Sumerian material. We shall begin by giving the Babylonian form of the three basic or type myths already described in the previous section: The Descent of Ishtar into the Nether World As in the Sumerian version, so also in the Babylonian form of the myth, no reason is given for Ishtar’s descent into the nether world; but at the end of the poem, after Ishtar has been released, Tammuz is introduced as Ishtar’s brother and lover, without any explanation of how he comes to be in the nether world. The lines that follow seem to imply the return of Tammuz to the land of the living with rejoicings. It is only from the Tammuz liturgies that we learn of the imprisonment of Tammuz in the underworld, and of the desolation caused by his absence from the land of the living. In the Babylonian version of the descent of Ishtar to the land of no return, we have a description of the failure of all sexual fertility caused by her absence: ‘the bull springs not upon the cow; the ass impregnates not the jenny; in the street the man impregnates not the maiden.’ e It is with these words that Papsukkal, the vizier of the great gods, announces the non-return of Ishtar and its consequences. The description of the descent of the goddess follows the Sumerian version in its main outlines; but there are some

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