Sumerian myths. Myths of ancient Sumer and the bible

More than once those biblical legends, which for many centuries were taken for fiction, were confirmed by finds on the territory of the Sumerian state as real. The mere existence of the Sumerian version proves that the Bible is not the primary source in this knowledge. That she, at least, copied ancient legends. And as a maximum, she embodied the legends of another, extinct or destroyed people.

The flood, according to the story of the Sumerian narrator, occurred after the gods created people. Unfortunately, the legend has come down to us in only one copy. And then, the tablet that scientists discovered in Nippur is badly damaged, and part of the record is forever lost to researchers. The Flood Tablet is considered a document and is of great value to the history of mankind. It is missing the upper part of the tablet, which contained 37 lines from the ancient Sumerian flood epic. It was in this part that, apparently, it was said about the reasons why the gods decided to destroy people. The visible text begins with the desire of some supreme god to save humanity from complete extinction. He is driven by the belief that religiosity and reverence for those who created them will return to people.

In this part, it is appropriate to recall the myth about the creation of biorobots by the Anunnaki, and that sometimes the results of the experiments did not satisfy the creators, and they sent a global disaster to the earth. At least later, as a maximum, a nuclear explosion, which, perhaps, completely destroyed the Sumerians.

This tablet also says that people need to be saved, and then they will rebuild the temples. You also need to save the four-legged creatures that the gods created. Further, several lines are missing again, perhaps there is a full description of the act of creation of the living world on earth. Recall that the Sumerians almost did not leave specific examples of the creation of all living things, the sadder is the loss of this text on the tablet.

The next part of the myth already tells about the foundation of the five cities by the gods, about how the kings were created, and what they were charged with doing. Five cities were formed in sacred places, these cities were Ereda, Badtibiru, Larak, Sippar and Shuruppak. That is, according to this historical source, before the flood, the Sumerians lived in five cities. Then again about 37 lines of text are missing. Sumerologists believe that there could be information about the sins of people, for which the gods sent a flood on them. Moreover, the decision of the gods was not unanimous. Divine Inanna wept for the created people. And the unknown god - as the researchers suggest, Enki - also wants to save humanity.

The next part of the tablet tells about the last ruler of Shuruppak, the God-fearing Ziusudra. The Bible calls him Noah. In a dream, Ziusudr receives an order from the gods to build an ark and bring there "each creature in pairs."

And again, there is a huge gap further on the plate. Almost in the most important part of it! Apparently, it was about what the ship should be like, how it should be built, what size it should be. Just what is later more accurately reflected in the biblical legend of Noah.

The Flood myth ends with a passage about the Flood itself:

All the storms raged with unprecedented force at the same time.
And at the same moment the flood flooded the main sanctuaries.
Seven days and seven nights the flood flooded the earth,
And the winds carried a huge ship on stormy waters,
Then came Utu, the one who gives light to the heavens and the earth.
Then Ziusudra opened a window on his huge ship...
(Translated by F. L. Mendelssohn)

It was on the basis of this primary source that the Babylonian flood myth was created, and then the biblical one. This legend is reflected in the myths of almost all nations. For their good deed, King Ziusudra and his wife were rewarded with an eternal stay on the island of Bliss.

An and Enlil caressed Ziusudra,
Gave him life like a god
Eternal breath, like a god, was brought for him from above.
Then Ziusudra, the king,
Savior of the name of all plants and the seed of the human race,
In the land of transition, in the land of Dilmun, where the sun rises, they placed.
(Translated by F. L. Mendelssohn)

The people of Ancient Sumer lived in conditions of anxiety and constant worries. Nature did not protect them from the raids of neighboring peoples, and the unstable and unpredictable floods of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers inspired a sense of uncertainty about the future.

The mythology born on this earth is closely connected with the conditions of life. Local gods cared more about the economic and administrative problems of life, were fussy and capricious, and the posthumous fate was seen by the inhabitants of Sumer as dull and unpromising.

Sumerian myths were not united, in different communities the version of a particular myth could differ. However, some common features can be distinguished that speak of a common origin of representations.

The ideas about the structure of the Universe were based on a pair of concepts "heaven - earth". The earth in the view of the Sumerians was a flat disk in the middle of the oceans. The celestial sphere, or "lile" (wind), on which the clouds float, rests on the firmament, on which the sun, moon and stars are placed. Once all the elements existed in unity, but as a result of the activity of the gods, they were forever separated.

Sumerian mythology - gods and their qualities

The gods of the Sumerian pantheon were similar to people and existed in a hierarchical system similar to the Sumerian society. A relatively small number of deities participated in the myths: the god of air, the god of water Enki, the god of the south wind Ninurta, the goddess of fertility Inanna, are perhaps the most famous of them.

The cares of the Sumerian gods, the arrangement of life, marriage, their desires and contradictions created the world in the form known to the Sumerians. Thus, the earth came from the marriage of Enlil, the lord of air space, and the goddess Ninlil, who remarried.

Basically, all natural phenomena were created by the god Enlil. However, another god, Enki, put everything in order. He plowed the land, rid it of numerous poisonous reptiles, filled the rivers with water and fish, after which he distributed duties among the deities.

Also, he taught people everything necessary and gave them the law. He divided the plots of the landowners by boundaries, so that each would diligently look after his plot.

In order for people not to look like animals, they were given laws: certain “forces” or “institutions” began to rule over them, called “me” by the Sumerians. These “me” included: power, peace, victory, crown, the power of the gods, etc. According to these ideas, any thing corresponds to a word, or a concept that is with the gods. Possession of this word, or "me", gives full power.

Once, by cunning, she lured a lot of such magical “me” from the intoxicated Enki and handed them over to the inhabitants of Uruk, in which she was the ruler. Sobering up, Enki bitterly regretted the loss, and people gained many precious skills: crafts, arts, social and political institutions, tools and technologies appeared.

Ideas about paradise, the fertile country of Dilmun, originated early in Sumer. However, only the gods could reach it, for people this place was closed. In this bright and immaculate country, neither disease nor death existed.

Some stories from mythology

Humans were created from clay by deities to work for the gods. Some attempts to create people were not very successful: once Enki drank too much wine and quite ugly creatures began to come out from under his hands. Later, he coped with the task, but it is precisely these unsuccessful experiments that explain the existence of deformities and deviations among people.

Seasonal changes were also explained by the activities of the gods. The myth tells of the journey of the goddess Inanna to the underworld, where she was captured by the mistress Ereshkigal. The underground goddess agrees to return Inanna only on the condition that she finds a replacement for life in the realm of the dead. Angry at her husband, the god of fertility Dumuzi, who took the throne in her absence, Inanna sends him to the underworld. These cyclic journeys to the underworld are the reason for the barren seasons of the year.

A number of mythological plots of Sumer give rise to associations with biblical myths. So in the myth of the flood, the gods decide to exterminate people for their vices and disobedience. Only the obedient king Ziusudra, who is identified with the biblical Noah, was saved by the gods from death. He built a ship on which he survived the global flood, and after that he was transferred to Dilmun, like a god.

There are many other recognizable stories. - one of those sources in which traces of the origin of many important ideas and ideas of mankind can be found.

The contents of the section are myths, legends and sagas, epics and epics, canons and apocrypha of religions from all over the world.

Myths of Sumer and Akkad

Ancient Greek geographers called Mesopotamia (Mesopotamia) the flat area between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The self-name of this area is Shinar. The center of development of the most ancient civilization was in Babylonia. Northern Babylonia was called Akkad, and southern Babylonia was called Sumer. Not later than the 4th millennium BC in the extreme south of Mesopotamia, the first Sumerian settlements arose, gradually they occupied the entire territory of Mesopotamia. Where the Sumerians came from is still unknown, but according to a legend common among the Sumerians themselves, from the islands of the Persian Gulf. The Sumerians spoke a language whose relationship to other languages ​​has not been established. In the northern part of Mesopotamia, starting from the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. lived Semites, pastoral tribes of ancient Asia Minor and the Syrian steppe, the language of the Semitic tribes was called Akkadian.

In the southern part of Mesopotamia, the Semites spoke Babylonian, and to the north, the Assyrian dialect of the Assyrian language. For several centuries, the Semites lived next to the Sumerians, but then they began to move south and by the end of the 3rd millennium BC. occupied all of southern Mesopotamia, as a result of which the Akkadian language gradually replaced Sumerian, but it continued to exist as the language of science and religious worship until the 1st century BC. AD The Mesopotamian civilization is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in the world. It was in Sumer at the end of the 4th millennium BC. human society has left the primitive stage and entered the era of antiquity, which means the formation of a new type of culture and the birth of a new type of consciousness.

An important role in the formation and consolidation of the new culture of the ancient society was played by writing, with the advent of which new forms of information storage and transmission became possible. Mesopotamian writing in its oldest, pictographic form appeared at the turn of the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. It is believed that in early pictographic writing there were over one and a half thousand signs-drawings. Each sign meant one or more words. The improvement of the writing system went along the line of unifying badges, reducing their number, as a result, cuneiform impressions appeared. At the same time, the phonetization of the letter takes place, i.e. icons began to be used not only in their original, verbal meaning, but also in isolation from it. The most ancient written messages were a kind of puzzles, while the developed cuneiform system, capable of transmitting all shades of speech, developed only by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. Most of what is known about the culture of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians has been obtained from the study of 25,000 tablets and fragments of the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Ancient Mesopotamian literature includes both monuments of folklore origin and author's works. The most outstanding monument is the Akkadian epic about Gilgamesh, which tells about the search for immortality, about the meaning of human life. Of great interest are the Old Babylonian Atrahasis Poem, which tells about the creation of man and the Flood, and the cult cosmogonic epic Enuma Elish (When above). Mythology of Mesopotamia - the mythology of the ancient states of Mesopotamia: Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, Elam.
Sumero-Akkadian mythology is the mythology of the oldest known civilization located on the territory of Mesopotamia, and developed from the 4th to the 2nd millennium BC.

Hurrian mythology - the mythology of the peoples who inhabited the Northern Mesopotamia in the III-II millennium BC. e.
Assyrian mythology - the mythology of Assyria, located in the Northern Mesopotamia in the XIV-VII centuries. BC e.; it relied on Sumero-Akkadian mythology, and after the capture of Assyria by the Babylonian kingdom, it had a strong influence on Babylonian mythology. Babylonian mythology - the mythology of Babylonia, a state in the south of Mesopotamia in the 20th-6th centuries BC. e.; influenced by Assyrian mythology. The history of the formation and development of the mythological representations of Sumer and Akkad is known from the materials of the fine arts approximately from the middle of the 6th millennium BC, and from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC according to written sources.

Sumerian mythology

The Sumerians are tribes of unknown origin, in con. 4th millennium BC e. mastered the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and formed the first city-states in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian period of the history of Mesopotamia covers about one and a half thousand years, it ends in con. 3 - early 2nd millennium BC e. so-called. III dynasty of the city of Ur and the dynasties of Isin and Larsa, of which the latter was already only partially Sumerian. By the time the first Sumerian city-states were formed, the idea of ​​an anthropomorphic deity had apparently formed. The patron deities of the community were, first of all, the personification of the creative and productive forces of nature, with which the ideas about the power of the military leader of the tribe-community, combined (at first irregularly) with the functions of the high priest, are connected. From the first written sources (the earliest pictographic texts of the so-called Uruk III - Jemdet-Nasr period date back to the end of the 4th - the beginning of the 3rd millennium), the names (or symbols) of the gods Inanna, Enlil, etc. are known, and from the time of the so-called. n. the period of Abu-Salabiha (settlements near Nippur) and headlights (Shuruppak) 27-26 centuries. - theophoric names and the most ancient list of gods (the so-called "list A"). The earliest actually mythological literary texts - hymns to the gods, lists of proverbs, exposition of some myths (for example, about Enlil) also date back to the period of Fara and come from the excavations of Fara and Abu-Salabih. From the time of the reign of the Lagash ruler Gudei (c. 22nd century BC), building inscriptions have come down that provide important material regarding cult and mythology (a description of the renovation of the main temple of the city of Lagash to Eninnu - the “temple of fifty” for Ningirsu, the patron god of the city ). But the main mass of Sumerian texts of mythological content (literary, educational, actually mythological, etc., one way or another connected with myth) refers to con. 3 - early 2nd millennium, to the so-called. the Old Babylonian period - a time when the Sumerian language was already dying out, but the Babylonian tradition still retained the system of teaching in it. Thus, by the time writing appeared in Mesopotamia (the end of the 4th millennium BC), a certain system of mythological ideas was recorded here. But each city-state retained its own deities and heroes, cycles of myths and its own priestly tradition. Until con. 3rd millennium BC e. there was no single systematized pantheon, although there were several common Sumerian deities: Enlil, “lord of the air”, “king of gods and people”, god of the city of Nippur, the center of the ancient Sumerian tribal union; Enki, the lord of underground fresh waters and the oceans (later also the deity of wisdom), the main god of the city of Eredu, the ancient cultural center of Sumer; An, the god of keba, and Inanna, the goddess of war and carnal love, the deity of the city of Uruk, who rose to the con. 4 - early 3rd millennium BC e.; Nain, the moon god worshiped in Ur; the warrior god Ningirsu, revered in Lagash (this god was later identified with the Lagash Ninurta), and others. , Enki, Nanna and the sun god Utu. The ancient Sumerian deities, including the astral gods, retained the function of a fertility deity, which was thought of as the patron god of a separate community. One of the most typical images is the image of the mother goddess (in iconography, images of a woman with a child in her arms are sometimes associated with her), who was revered under various names: Damgalnuna, Ninhursag, Ninmah (Mach), Nintu. Mom, Mami. Akkadian versions of the image of the mother goddess - Beletili ("mistress of the gods"), the same Mami (having the epithet "helping with childbirth" in Akkadian texts) and Aruru - the creator of people in Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian myths, and in the epic about Gilgamesh - "wild" man (symbol of the first man) Enkidu. It is possible that the patron goddesses of cities are also associated with the image of the mother goddess: for example, the Sumerian goddesses Bay and Gatumdug also bear the epithets “mother”, “mother of all cities”. In the myths about the gods of fertility, there is a close connection between the myth and the cult. The cult songs from Ur (end of the 3rd millennium BC) speak of the love of the priestess "lukur" (one of the significant priestly categories) for King Shu-Suen and emphasize the sacred and official nature of their union. Hymns to the deified kings of the III Dynasty of Ur and the I Dynasty of Isin also show that between the king (at the same time the high priest "en") and the high priestess, a sacred marriage ceremony was performed annually, in which the king represented the incarnation of the shepherd god Dumuzi, and the priestess - the goddess Inanna. The content of the works (constituting a single cycle "Inanna-Dumuzi") includes the motives of the courtship and wedding of the heroes-gods, the descent of the goddess into the underworld ("country without return") and replacing her with a hero, the death of the hero and crying for him and the return of the hero to earth. All works of the cycle turn out to be the threshold of the drama-action, which formed the basis of the ritual and figuratively embodied the metaphor "life - death - life". The numerous variants of the myth, as well as the images of the departing (dying) and returning deities (which in this case is Dumuzi), are connected, as in the case of the mother goddess, with the disunity of the Sumerian communities and with the very metaphor "life - death - life" , all the time changing its appearance, but constant and unchanged in its renewal. More specific is the idea of ​​replacement, which runs like a leitmotif through all the myths associated with the descent into the underworld. In the myth of Enlil and Ninlil, the role of the dying (leaving) and resurrecting (returning) deity is the patron of the Nippur community, the lord of the air Enlil, who seized Ninlil by force, expelled by the gods to the underworld for this, but managed to leave it, leaving instead of himself, his wife and son "deputies". In form, the demand “for the head - the head” looks like a legal trick, an attempt to circumvent the law, unshakable for anyone who entered the “country of no return”. But it also sounds the idea of ​​a certain balance, the desire for harmony between the world of the living and the dead. In the Akkadian text about the descent of Ishtar (corresponding to the Sumerian Inanna), as well as in the Akkadian epic about Erra, the god of the plague, this idea is formulated more clearly: Ishtar before the gates of the "country without return" threatens if she is not let in, "let her out the dead eating the living,” and then “the dead will multiply more than the living,” and the threat works. Myths related to the cult of fertility provide information about the ideas of the Sumerians about the underworld. There is no clear idea about the location of the underworld (Sumer. Kur, Kigal, Eden, Irigal, Arali, the secondary name is kur-nugi, “country without return”; Akkadian parallels to these terms - ercet, tseru) there is no clear idea. They not only descend there, but also “fall through”; the border of the underworld is the underground river, through which the carrier ferries. Those who enter the underworld pass through the seven gates of the underworld, where they are met by the chief gatekeeper, Neti. The fate of the dead underground is hard. Their bread is bitter (sometimes it is sewage), salty water (slops can also serve as a drink). The underworld is dark, full of dust, its inhabitants, "like birds, are dressed in clothes of wings." There is no idea of ​​a "field of souls", just as there is no information about the court of the dead, where they would be judged by behavior in life and by the rules of morality. A tolerable life (clean drinking water, peace) is awarded to the souls for whom the funeral rite was performed and sacrifices were made, as well as those who fell in battle and those with many children. The judges of the underworld, the Anunnaki, sitting before Ereshkigal, the mistress of the underworld, pass only death sentences. The names of the dead are entered in the table by a female scribe of the underground kingdom of Geshtinanna (among the Akkadians - Beletzeri). Among the ancestors - the inhabitants of the underworld - are many legendary heroes and historical figures, for example, Gilgamesh, the god Sumukan, the founder of the III dynasty of Ur Ur-Nammu. The unburied souls of the dead return to earth and bring trouble, the buried are crossed over the “river that separates from people” and is the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The river is crossed by a boat with the carrier of the underworld Ur-Shanabi or the demon Humut-Tabal. Actually cosmogonic Sumerian myths are unknown. The text "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Underworld" says that certain events took place at the time "when the heavens separated from the earth, when an took the sky for himself, and Enlil took the earth, when Ereshkigal was given to Kur." The myth of the hoe and ax says that Enlil separated the earth from heaven, the myth of Lahar and. Ashnan, the goddesses of cattle and grain, also describes the merged state of earth and heaven (“mountain of heaven and earth”), which, apparently, was in charge of an. The myth "Enki and Ninhursag" tells of the island of Tilmun as a pristine paradise. Several myths have come down about the creation of people, but only one of them is completely independent - about Enki and Ninmah. Enki and Ninmah sculpt a man from the clay of the Abzu, the underground world ocean, and involve the goddess Nammu, “the mother who gave life to all gods,” to the process of creation. The purpose of the creation of man is to work for the gods: cultivate the land, graze cattle, collect fruits, feed the gods with their victims. When a person is made, the gods determine his fate and arrange a feast on this occasion. At the feast, drunken Enki and Ninmah begin to sculpt people again, but they end up with freaks: a woman unable to give birth, a creature devoid of sex, etc. In the myth of the goddesses of cattle and grain, the need to create a person is explained by the fact that the gods who appeared before him The Anunnaki don't know how to run a household. The notion slips repeatedly that earlier people grew underground, like grass. In the myth of the hoe, Enlil makes a hole in the ground with a hoe and people come out from there. The same motive sounds in the introduction to the hymn to the city of Ered. Many myths are devoted to the creation and birth of the gods. Cultural heroes are widely represented in Sumerian mythology. The creators-demiurges are mainly Enlil and Enki. According to various texts, the goddess Ninkasi is the initiator of brewing, the goddess Uttu is the weaving craft, Enlil is the creator of the wheel, grain; gardening is an invention of the gardener Shukalitudda. A certain archaic king Enmeduranki is declared to be the inventor of various forms of predicting the future, including predictions with the help of an outpouring of oil. The inventor of the harp is a certain Ningal-Paprigal, the epic heroes Enmerkar and Gilgamesh are the creators of urban planning, and Enmerkar is also writing. The eschatological line is reflected in the myths about the flood and the wrath of Inanna. In Sumerian mythology, there are very few stories about the struggle of the gods with monsters, the destruction of elemental forces, etc. (only two such legends are known - about the struggle of the god Ninurta with the evil demon Asag and about the struggle of the goddess Inanna with the monster Ebih). Such battles are in most cases the lot of a heroic personality, a deified king, while most of the deeds of the gods are associated with their role as deities of fertility (the most archaic moment) and bearers of culture (the latest moment). The functional ambivalence of the image corresponds to the external characteristics of the characters: these omnipotent, omnipotent gods, the creators of all life on earth, are evil, rude, cruel, their decisions are often explained by whims, drunkenness, promiscuity, everyday unattractive features can be emphasized in their appearance (dirt under the nails, dyed red, Enki has Ereshkigal's disheveled hair, etc.). The degree of activity and passivity of each deity is also varied. So, the most alive are Inanna, Enki, Ninhursag, Dumuzi, some minor deities. The most passive god is the "father of the gods" An. The images of Enki, Inaina and, to some extent, Enlil are comparable to the images of the demiurge gods, “bearers of culture”, whose characteristics emphasize the elements of comedy, the gods of primitive cults living on earth, among people, whose cult supplants the cult of the “higher being”. But at the same time, no traces of "theomachy" - the struggle of old and new generations of gods - were found in Sumerian mythology. One canonical text of the Old Babylonian period begins with a list of 50 pairs of gods that preceded Anu: their names are formed according to the scheme: "the lord (mistress) of so-and-so." Among them is named one of the oldest, judging by some sources, the gods Enmesharra ("master of all me"). From a source even later (a Neo-Assyrian incantation of the 1st millennium BC), we learn that Enmesharra is "the one who gave Anu and Enlil the scepter and dominion." In Sumerian mythology, this deity is chthonic, but there is no evidence that Enmesharra was forcibly cast into the underworld. Of the heroic tales, only the tales of the Uruk cycle have come down to us. The heroes of the legends are three kings of Uruk who ruled successively: Enmerkar, son of Meskingasher, the legendary founder of the I dynasty of Uruk (27-26 centuries BC; according to legend, the dynasty originated from the sun god Utu, whose son Meskingasher was considered); Lugalbanda, the fourth ruler of the dynasty, the father (and possibly the ancestral god) of Gilgamesh, the most popular hero of Sumerian and Akkadian literature. A single external line for the works of the Uruk cycle is the theme of the connections of Uruk with the outside world and the motive of the wandering (journey) of the characters. The theme of the hero's journey to a foreign land and the test of his moral and physical strength, combined with the motifs of magical gifts and a magical helper, not only shows the degree of mythologization of the work, compiled as a heroic-historical monument, but also allows you to reveal the stage-early motifs associated with initiation rites. The connection of these motifs in the works, the sequence of a purely mythological level of presentation, brings the Sumerian monuments closer to a fairy tale. In the early lists of gods from Farah, the heroes Lugalband and Gilgamesh are attributed to the gods; in later texts they appear as gods of the underworld. Meanwhile, in the epos of the Uruk cycle, Gilgamesh, Lugalbanda, Enmerkar, although they have mytho-epic and fairy-tale features, act as real kings - the rulers of Uruk. Their names appear in the so-called. "royal list", compiled during the III dynasty of Ur (apparently, c. the mythical number of years of reign: Meskingasher, the founder of the Uruk dynasty, "the son of the sun god", 325 years old, Enmerkar 420 years old, Gilgamesh, who is called the son of the demon lilu, 128 years old). The epic and non-epic tradition of Mesopotamia thus has a single general direction - the idea of ​​the historicity of the main mytho-epic heroes. It can be assumed that Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh were posthumously deified as heroes. Things were different from the beginning of the Old Akkadian period. The first ruler who declared himself the “patron god of Akkad” during his lifetime was the Akkadian king of the 23rd century. BC e. Naram-Suen; in the period of the III dynasty of Ur, the cult veneration of the ruler reached its climax. The development of the epic tradition from myths about cultural heroes, characteristic of many mythological systems, did not, as a rule, take place on Sumerian soil. A characteristic actualization of ancient forms (in particular, the traditional motif of travel) also looks like the motif of a god’s journey to another, higher, deity for a blessing, often found in Sumerian mythological texts (myths about Enki’s journey to Enlil after the construction of his city, about the journey of the moon god Naina to Nippur to Enlil, his divine father, for a blessing). The period of the III dynasty of Ur, the time from which most of the written mythological sources have come down, is the period of the development of the ideology of royal power in the most complete form in Sumerian history. Since myth remained the dominant and most "organized" area of ​​social consciousness, the leading form of thinking, it was through myth that the corresponding ideas were affirmed. Therefore, it is no coincidence that most of the texts belong to one group - the Nippur canon, compiled by the priests of the III dynasty of Ur, and the main centers most often mentioned in myths: Eredu, Uruk, Ur, gravitating towards Nippur as a traditional place of the Sumerian cult. A “pseudomyth”, a myth-concept (and not a traditional composition) is also a myth that explains the appearance of the Semitic tribes of the Amorites in Mesopotamia and gives the etiology of their assimilation in society - the myth of the god Martu (the very name of god is a deification of the Sumerian name of the West Semitic nomads). The myth underlying the text did not develop an ancient tradition, but was taken from historical reality. But traces of a general historical concept - the idea of ​​the evolution of mankind from savagery to civilization (which is reflected - already on Akkadian material - in the history of the "wild man" Enkidu in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh) show through the "actual" concept of myth. After the fall at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. e. under the onslaught of the Amorites and Elamites of the III dynasty of Ur, almost all the ruling dynasties of individual city-states of Mesopotamia turned out to be Amorites. However, in the culture of Mesopotamia, contact with the Amorite tribes left almost no trace.

Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) mythology

Since ancient times, the Eastern Semites - Akkadians, who occupied the northern part of the lower Mesopotamia, were neighbors of the Sumerians and were under strong Sumerian influence. In the 2nd half of the 3rd millennium BC. e. Akkadians are also established in the south of Mesopotamia, which was facilitated by the unification of Mesopotamia by the ruler of the city of Akkad Sargon the Ancient into the "kingdom of Sumer and Akkad" (later, with the rise of Babylon, this territory became known as Babylonia). History of Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC e. - this is the history of the Semitic peoples. However, the merger of the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples occurred gradually, the displacement of the Sumerian language by Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) did not mean the complete destruction of the Sumerian culture and its replacement with a new, Semitic one. Not a single early purely Semitic cult has yet been found on the territory of Mesopotamia. All the Akkadian gods known to us are of Sumerian origin or have long been identified with Sumerian ones. So, the Akkadian sun god Shamash was identified with the Sumerian Utu, the goddess Ishtar - with Inanna and a number of other Sumerian goddesses, the storm god Adad - with Ishkur, etc. God Enlil receives the Semitic epithet Bel (Baal), "lord". With the rise of Babylon, the main god of this city Marduk begins to play an increasingly important role, but this name is also Sumerian in origin. The Akkadian mythological texts of the Old Babylonian period are much less known than the Sumerian ones; none of the text is complete. All the main sources on Akkadian mythology date back to the 2nd-1st millennium BC. e., that is, by the time after the Old Babylonian period. If very fragmentary information has been preserved about Sumerian cosmogony and theogony, then the Babylonian cosmogonic teaching is represented by the large cosmogonic epic poem "Enuma Elish" (according to the first words of the poem - "When above"; the earliest version dates from the beginning of the 10th century BC) . The poem allocates the main role in the creation of the world to Marduk, who gradually occupies the main place in the pantheon of the 2nd millennium, and by the end of the Old Babylonian period, he receives universal recognition outside Babylon (for an exposition of the cosmogonic myth, see the articles Abzu and Marduk). In comparison with the Sumerian ideas about the universe, what is new in the cosmogonic part of the poem is the idea of ​​successive generations of gods, each of which surpasses the previous one, of theomachy - the battle of old and new gods and the unification of many divine images of the creators into one. The idea of ​​the poem is to justify the exaltation of Marduk, the purpose of its creation is to prove and show that Marduk is the direct and rightful heir of the ancient mighty forces, incl. hours and Sumerian deities. The "original" Sumerian gods are then the young heirs of the older forces that they crush. He receives power not only on the basis of legitimate succession, but also on the basis of the right of the strongest, therefore the theme of the struggle and the violent overthrow of the ancient forces is the leitmotif of the legend. Features of Enki - Eya, like other gods, are transferred to Marduk, but Eya becomes the father of the "lord of the gods" and his adviser. In the Ashur version of the poem (end of the 2nd millennium BC), Marduk is replaced by Ashur, the chief god of the city of Ashur and the central deity of the Assyrian pantheon. This became a manifestation of a general tendency towards monotheism, expressed in the desire to single out the main god and rooted not only in the ideological, but also in the socio-political situation of the 1st millennium BC. e. A number of cosmological motifs of the Enuma Elish have come down to us in Greek transcriptions by a Babylonian priest of the 4th-3rd centuries. BC e. Berossus (through Polyhistor and Eusebius), as well as a Greek writer of the 6th century. n. e. Damascus. Damascus has a number of generations of gods: Taut and Apason and their son Mumiye (Tiamat, Apsu, Mummu), as well as Lahe and Lahos, Kissar and Assoros (Lahmu and Lahamu, Anshar and Kishar), their children Anos, Illinos, Aos (Anu , Enlil, Eya). Aos and Dauke (i.e. the goddess Damkina) create the demiurge god Bel (Marduk). In Berossus, the mistress corresponding to Tiamat is a certain Omorka (“sea”), which rules over darkness and waters and whose description resembles that of the evil Babylonian demons. God Bel cuts it, creates heaven and earth, organizes the world order and orders to cut off the head of one of the gods in order to create people and animals from his blood and earth. Myths about the creation of the world and the human race in Babylonian literature and mythography are associated with tales of human disasters, death of people, and even the destruction of the universe. As in the Sumerian monuments, in the Babylonian legends it is emphasized that the cause of disasters is the malice of the gods, their desire to reduce the number of the ever-growing and bothering the gods with their noise of the human race. Calamities are perceived not as a legitimate retribution for human sins, but as an evil whim of a deity. The myth of the flood, which, according to all sources, was based on the Sumerian legend of Ziusudra, came down in the form of the myth of Atrahasis and the story of the flood inserted into the epic of Gilgamesh (and differing little from the first), and was also preserved in the Greek transmission of Beros. The myth of the plague god Erra, who fraudulently takes away power from Marduk, also tells about the punishment of people. This text sheds light on the Babylonian theological concept of some kind of physical and spiritual balance of the world, dependent on the presence of a rightful owner in its place (cf. Sumero-Akkadian motif of balance between the world of the living and the dead). Traditional for Mesopotamia (since the Sumerian period) is the idea of ​​the connection of a deity with his statue: leaving the country and the statue, the god thereby changes his place of residence. This is done by Marduk, and the country is damaged, and the universe is threatened with death. It is characteristic that in all epics about the destruction of mankind, the main disaster - the flood, is caused not by a flood from the sea, but by a rain storm. The significant role of the gods of storms and hurricanes in the cosmogony of Mesopotamia, especially the northern one, is also connected with this. In addition to the special gods of the wind and thunderstorms, storms (the main Akkadian god is Adad), the winds were the sphere of activity of various gods and demons. So, according to tradition, he was probably the supreme Sumerian god Enlil (the literal meaning of the name is “breath of the wind”, or “lord-wind”), although he is basically the god of air in the broad sense of the word. But still, Enlil owned destructive storms, with which he destroyed enemies and hated cities. Enlil's sons, Ninurta and Ningirsu, are also associated with the storm. As deities, in any case, as personified higher powers, the winds of the four directions were perceived. The Babylonian legend about the creation of the world, the plot of which was built around the personality of a powerful deity, the epic development of episodes telling about the battle of the god-hero with the monster - the personification of the elements, gave rise to the theme of the god-hero in the Babylonian epic-mythological literature (and not the mortal hero, as in Sumerian literature). According to Akkadian concepts, the tables of fate determined the movement of the world and world events. Possession of them ensured world domination (cf. "Enuma Elish", where they were initially owned by Tiamat, then by Kingu, and finally by Marduk). The Scribe of the Tables of Fates - the god of scribal art and the son of Marduk Nabu - was also sometimes perceived as their owner. Tablets were also written in the underworld (the scribe was the goddess Beletzeri); apparently, it was a fixation of death sentences, as well as the names of the dead. If the number of god-heroes in Babylonian mythological literature prevails compared to Sumerian literature, then about mortal heroes, in addition to the epic about Atrahasis, only a legend (obviously of Sumerian origin) about Etana, a hero who tried to fly to heaven on an eagle, and a relatively late story are known about Adapa, a wise man who dared to “break his wings” to the wind and provoke the wrath of the sky god An, but missed the opportunity to get immortality, and the famous epic about Gilgamesh is not a simple repetition of the Sumerian legends about the hero, but a work that reflected the complex worldview evolution that, together with the Babylonian society was done by the heroes of Sumerian works. The leitmotif of the epic works of Babylonian literature is the failure of man to achieve the fate of the gods, despite all his aspirations, the futility of human efforts in an attempt to obtain immortality. The monarchical-state, and not communal (as in Sumerian mythology) nature of the official Babylonian religion, as well as the suppression of the public life of the population, leads to the fact that the features of archaic religious and magical practice are gradually suppressed. Over time, "personal" gods begin to play an increasingly important role. The concept of a personal god of each person, who facilitates his access to the great gods and introduces him to them, arises (or, in any case, spreads) from the time of the III dynasty of Ur and in the old Babylonian period. On the reliefs and seals of this time, there are frequent scenes depicting how the patron deity leads a person to the supreme god to determine his fate and receive blessings. In the period of the III dynasty of Ur, when the king was considered as the protector-guardian of his country, he took on some of the functions of the god-protector (especially the deified king). It was believed that with the loss of his protector god, a person became defenseless against the evil self-will of the great gods, and could easily be attacked by evil demons. In addition to a personal god, who was primarily supposed to bring good luck to his patron, and a personal goddess who personified his life “share”, each person also had his own shedu (cf. Sumer, alad) - an anthropomorphized or zoomorphized life force. In addition to these defenders, the inhabitant of Babylonia in the 2nd-1st millennium BC. e. his own personal guardian appears - lamassu, the bearer of his personality, possibly associated with the cult of the placenta. The "name" of a person or his "glory" (noise) was also considered as a material substance, without which his existence is unthinkable and which was passed on to his heirs. On the contrary, the “soul” (napishtu) is something impersonal, it was identified either with breath or with blood. Personal guardian gods resisted evil and were, as it were, antipodes of the evil forces surrounding a person. Among them - the lion-headed Lamashtu, rising from the underworld and leading all kinds of diseases, the evil spirits of diseases themselves, ghosts, embittered shadows of the dead who do not receive victims, various kinds of service spirits of the underworld (utukki, asakki, etimme, galle, galle lemnuti - “evil devils”, etc.), the god-destiny Namtar, who comes to a person at the hour of his death, the night spirits-incubus lilu visiting women, the succubus lilit (lilith) taking possession of men, etc. The most complex system of demonological representations that developed in Babylonian mythology (and is not attested in Sumerian monuments) was also reflected in the visual arts. The general structure of the pantheon, the addition of which dates back to the III dynasty of Ur, basically remains unchanged throughout the entire era of antiquity. The whole world is officially headed by the triad of Anu, Enlil and Eya, surrounded by a council of seven or twelve "great gods" who determine the "shares" (shimatu) of everything in the world. All gods are thought to be divided into two generic groups - the Igigi and the Anunnaki, the gods of the earth and the underworld, as a rule, are among the latter, although there are also Anunnaki gods among the heavenly gods. In the underworld, however, it is no longer Ereshkigal who rules as much as her husband Nergal, who subjugated his spouse, which corresponds to the general decrease in the role of female deities in Babylonian mythology, relegated, as a rule, almost exclusively to the position of impersonal spouses of their divine husbands (essentially, a special only the goddess of healing Gula and Ishtar retain their significance, although, judging by the epic of Gilgamesh, her position is also under threat). But steps towards monotheism, manifested in the strengthening of the cult of Marduk, which monopolized to the end. 2nd millennium, almost all areas of divine activity and power continue to occur. Enlil and Marduk merge into a single image of the "lord" - Bela (Baal) (in Assyria - Enlil and Ashur). In the 1st millennium BC. e. Marduk in a number of centers is gradually being replaced by his son, the god of scribal art Nabu, who tends to become a single Babylonian deity. The properties of one god are endowed with other deities, and the qualities of one god are determined by the qualities of other gods. This is another way to create the image of a single omnipotent and omnipotent deity in a purely abstract way. Monuments (mostly of the 1st millennium) make it possible to reconstruct the general system of cosmogonic views of the Babylonian theologians, although there is no complete certainty that such a unification was carried out by the Babylonians themselves. The microcosm appears to be a reflection of the macrocosm - "bottom" (earth) - as if a reflection of the "top" (heaven). The whole universe, as it were, floats in the world ocean, the earth is likened to a large inverted round boat, and the sky is like a solid semi-arch (dome) covering the world. The entire celestial space is divided into several parts: the "upper sky of Anu", the "middle sky", belonging to the Igigi, in the center of which was the lapis lazuli cella of Marduk, and the "lower sky", already visible to people, on which the stars are located. All heavens are made of different types of stone, for example, the “lower sky” is made of blue jasper; above these three heavens there are four more heavens. The sky, like a building, rests on a foundation, attached to the heavenly ocean with pegs and, like an earthly palace, protected from water by a rampart. The highest part of the heavenly vault is called the "middle of heaven." The outer side of the dome (the "inside of heaven") radiates light; this is the space where the moon hides - Sin during his three-day absence and where the sun - Shamash spends the night. In the east is the "mountain of sunrise", in the west - the "mountain of sunset", which are locked. Every morning, Shamash opens the “mountain of sunrise”, sets off on a journey through the sky, and in the evening through the “mountain of sunset” hides in the “inside of heaven”. The stars in the firmament are "images" or "writings", and each of them has a fixed place, so that not one "strays from its path." Earthly geography corresponds to heavenly geography. The prototypes of all things: countries, rivers, cities, temples - exist in the sky in the form of stars, earthly objects are only reflections of heavenly ones, but both substances each have their own dimensions. Thus, the heavenly temple is about twice as large as the earthly one. The plan of Nineveh was originally drawn in heaven and existed from ancient times. In one constellation is the celestial Tigris, in the other - the celestial Euphrates. Each city corresponds to a certain constellation: Sippar - the constellation of Cancer, Babylon, Nippur - others whose names are not identified with modern ones. Both the sun and the month are divided into countries: on the right side of the month - Akkad, on the left - Elam, the upper part of the month - Amurru (Amorites), the lower part - the country of Subartu. Under the vault of heaven lies (like an inverted boat) "ki" - the earth, which is also divided into several tiers. People live in the upper part, in the middle part - the possessions of the god Ey (the ocean of fresh water or underground waters), in the lower part - the possessions of the gods of the earth, the Anunnaki, and the underworld. According to other views, seven earths correspond to the seven heavens, but nothing is known about their exact division and location. To strengthen the earth, they tied it to the sky with ropes and secured it with pegs. These ropes are the Milky Way. The upper land is known to belong to the god Enlil. His Ekur temple ("house of the mountain") and one of its central parts - Duranki ("connection of heaven and earth") symbolize the structure of the world. Thus, a certain evolution is outlined in the religious and mythological views of the peoples of Mesopotamia. If the Sumerian religious-mythological system can be defined as based primarily on communal cults, then the Babylonian system shows a clear desire for monolatry and for more individual communication with the deity. From very archaic ideas, a transition is planned to a developed religious and mythological system, and through it to the field of religious and ethical views, in whatever rudimentary form they may be expressed.

Mythology. Encyclopedia, - M.: Belfax, 2002
S. Fingaret "Myths and legends of the Ancient East", -M.: Norint, 2002
S. Kramer "Mythology of Sumer and Akkad", -M.: Enlightenment, 1977
Reader on the history of the Ancient East, parts 1-2, -M., 1980

Added ok. 2006-2007

From the first written sources (the earliest pictographic texts of the so-called Uruk III - Jemdet-Nasr period date back to the end of the 4th - the beginning of the 3rd millennium), the names (or symbols) of the gods Inanna, Enlil, etc. are known, and from the time of the so-called. n. the period of Abu-Salabiha (settlements near Nippur) and headlights (Shuruppak) 27-26 centuries. - theophoric names and the most ancient list of gods (the so-called "list A").

The earliest actually mythological literary texts - hymns to the gods, lists of proverbs, exposition of some myths (for example, about Enlil) also date back to the period of Fara and come from the excavations of Fara and Abu-Salabih. From the time of the reign of the Lagash ruler Gudei (c. 22nd century BC), building inscriptions have come down that provide important material regarding cult and mythology (a description of the renovation of the main temple of the city of Lagash to Eninnu - the “temple of fifty” for Ningirsu, the patron god of the city ). But the main mass of Sumerian texts of mythological content (literary, educational, actually mythological, etc., one way or another connected with myth) refers to con. 3 - early 2nd millennium, to the so-called. the Old Babylonian period - a time when the Sumerian language was already dying out, but the Babylonian tradition still retained the system of teaching in it.

Thus, by the time writing appeared in Mesopotamia (the end of the 4th millennium BC), a certain system of mythological ideas was recorded here. But each city-state retained its own deities and heroes, cycles of myths and its own priestly tradition. Until con. 3rd millennium BC e. there was no single systematized pantheon, although there were several common Sumerian deities: Enlil, “lord of the air”, “king of gods and people”, god of the city of Nippur, the center of the ancient Sumerian tribal union; Enki, the lord of underground fresh waters and the oceans (later also the deity of wisdom), the main god of the city of Eredu, the ancient cultural center of Sumer; An, the god of keba, and Inanna, the goddess of war and carnal love, the deity of the city of Uruk, who rose to the con. 4 - early 3rd millennium BC e.; Nain, the moon god worshiped in Ur; the warrior god Ningirsu, who was revered in Lagash (this god was later identified with the Lagash Ninurta), etc.

The oldest list of gods from Farah (c. 26th century BC) identifies six supreme gods of the early Sumerian pantheon: Enlil, An, Inanna, Enki, Nanna, and the sun god Utu. The ancient Sumerian deities, including the astral gods, retained the function of a fertility deity, which was thought of as the patron god of a separate community. One of the most typical images is the image of the mother goddess (in iconography, images of a woman with a child in her arms are sometimes associated with her), who was revered under various names: Damgalnuna, Ninhursag, Ninmah (Mach), Nintu. Mom, Mami. Akkadian versions of the image of the mother goddess - Beletili ("mistress of the gods"), the same Mami (having the epithet "helping with childbirth" in Akkadian texts) and Aruru - the creator of people in Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian myths, and in the epic about Gilgamesh - "wild" man (symbol of the first man) Enkidu. It is possible that the patron goddesses of cities are also associated with the image of the mother goddess: for example, the Sumerian goddesses Bay and Gatumdug also bear the epithets “mother”, “mother of all cities”.

In the myths about the gods of fertility, there is a close connection between the myth and the cult. The cult songs from Ur (end of the 3rd millennium BC) speak of the love of the priestess "lukur" (one of the significant priestly categories) for King Shu-Suen and emphasize the sacred and official nature of their union. Hymns to the deified kings of the III Dynasty of Ur and the I Dynasty of Isin also show that between the king (at the same time the high priest "en") and the high priestess, a sacred marriage ceremony was performed annually, in which the king represented the incarnation of the shepherd god Dumuzi, and the priestess - the goddess Inanna.

The content of the works (constituting a single cycle "Inanna-Dumuzi") includes the motives of the courtship and wedding of the heroes-gods, the descent of the goddess into the underworld ("country without return") and replacing her with a hero, the death of the hero and crying for him and the return of the hero to earth. All works of the cycle turn out to be the threshold of the drama-action, which formed the basis of the ritual and figuratively embodied the metaphor "life - death - life". The numerous variants of the myth, as well as the images of the departing (dying) and returning deities (which in this case is Dumuzi), are connected, as in the case of the mother goddess, with the disunity of the Sumerian communities and with the very metaphor "life - death - life" , all the time changing its appearance, but constant and unchanged in its renewal.

More specific is the idea of ​​replacement, which runs like a leitmotif through all the myths associated with the descent into the underworld. In the myth of Enlil and Ninlil, the role of the dying (leaving) and resurrecting (returning) deity is the patron of the Nippur community, the lord of the air Enlil, who seized Ninlil by force, expelled by the gods to the underworld for this, but managed to leave it, leaving instead of himself, his wife and son "deputies". In form, the demand “for the head - the head” looks like a legal trick, an attempt to circumvent the law, unshakable for anyone who entered the “country of no return”. But it also sounds the idea of ​​a certain balance, the desire for harmony between the world of the living and the dead.

In the Akkadian text about the descent of Ishtar (corresponding to the Sumerian Inanna), as well as in the Akkadian epic about Erra, the god of the plague, this idea is formulated more clearly: Ishtar before the gates of the "country without return" threatens if she is not let in, "let her out the dead eating the living,” and then “the dead will multiply more than the living,” and the threat works. Myths related to the cult of fertility provide information about the ideas of the Sumerians about the underworld. There is no clear idea about the location of the underworld (Sumer. Kur, Kigal, Eden, Irigal, Arali, the secondary name is kur-nugi, “country without return”; Akkadian parallels to these terms - ercet, tseru) there is no clear idea. They not only descend there, but also “fall through”; the border of the underworld is the underground river, through which the carrier ferries. Those who enter the underworld pass through the seven gates of the underworld, where they are met by the chief gatekeeper, Neti. The fate of the dead underground is hard. Their bread is bitter (sometimes it is sewage), salty water (slops can also serve as a drink). The underworld is dark, full of dust, its inhabitants, "like birds, are dressed in clothes of wings." There is no idea of ​​a "field of souls", just as there is no information about the court of the dead, where they would be judged by behavior in life and by the rules of morality. A tolerable life (clean drinking water, peace) is awarded to the souls for whom the funeral rite was performed and sacrifices were made, as well as those who fell in battle and those with many children. The judges of the underworld, the Anunnaki, sitting before Ereshkigal, the mistress of the underworld, pass only death sentences. The names of the dead are entered in the table by a female scribe of the underground kingdom of Geshtinanna (among the Akkadians - Beletzeri). Among the ancestors - the inhabitants of the underworld - are many legendary heroes and historical figures, for example, Gilgamesh, the god Sumukan, the founder of the III dynasty of Ur Ur-Nammu. The unburied souls of the dead return to earth and bring trouble, the buried are crossed over the “river that separates from people” and is the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The river is crossed by a boat with the carrier of the underworld Ur-Shanabi or the demon Humut-Tabal.

Actually cosmogonic Sumerian myths are unknown. The text "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Underworld" says that certain events took place at the time "when the heavens separated from the earth, when an took the sky for himself, and Enlil took the earth, when Ereshkigal was given to Kur." The myth of the hoe and ax says that Enlil separated the earth from heaven, the myth of Lahar and. Ashnan, the goddesses of cattle and grain, also describes the merged state of earth and heaven (“mountain of heaven and earth”), which, apparently, was in charge of an. The myth of Enki and Ninhursag tells of the island of Tilmun as a primeval paradise.

Several myths have come down about the creation of people, but only one of them is completely independent - about Enki and Ninmah. Enki and Ninmah sculpt a man from the clay of the Abzu, the underground world ocean, and involve the goddess Nammu, “the mother who gave life to all gods,” to the process of creation. The purpose of the creation of man is to work for the gods: cultivate the land, graze cattle, collect fruits, feed the gods with their victims. When a person is made, the gods determine his fate and arrange a feast on this occasion. At the feast, drunken Enki and Ninmah begin to sculpt people again, but they end up with freaks: a woman unable to give birth, a creature deprived of sex, etc.

In the myth of the goddesses of cattle and grain, the need to create man is explained by the fact that the Anunnaki gods who appeared before him do not know how to manage any economy. The notion slips repeatedly that earlier people grew underground, like grass. In the myth of the hoe, Enlil makes a hole in the ground with a hoe and people come out from there. The same motive sounds in the introduction to the hymn to the city of Ered. Many myths are devoted to the creation and birth of the gods.

Cultural heroes are widely represented in Sumerian mythology. The creators-demiurges are mainly Enlil and Enki. According to various texts, the goddess Ninkasi is the initiator of brewing, the goddess Uttu is the weaving craft, Enlil is the creator of the wheel, grain; gardening is an invention of the gardener Shukalitudda. A certain archaic king Enmeduranki is declared to be the inventor of various forms of predicting the future, including predictions with the help of an outpouring of oil. The inventor of the harp is a certain Ningal-Paprigal, the epic heroes Enmerkar and Gilgamesh are the creators of urban planning, and Enmerkar is also writing. The eschatological line is reflected in the myths about the flood and the wrath of Inanna. In Sumerian mythology, very few stories have been preserved about the struggle of the gods with monsters, the destruction of elemental forces, etc. (only two such legends are known - about the struggle of the god Ninurta with the evil demon Asag and about the struggle of the goddess Inanna with the monster Ebih). Such battles are in most cases the lot of a heroic personality, a deified king, while most of the deeds of the gods are associated with their role as deities of fertility (the most archaic moment) and bearers of culture (the latest moment). The functional ambivalence of the image corresponds to the external characteristics of the characters: these omnipotent, omnipotent gods, the creators of all life on earth, are evil, rude, cruel, their decisions are often explained by whims, drunkenness, promiscuity, everyday unattractive features can be emphasized in their appearance (dirt under the nails, dyed red, Enki has Ereshkigal's disheveled hair, etc.).

The degree of activity and passivity of each deity is also varied. So, the most alive are Inanna, Enki, Ninhursag, Dumuzi, some minor deities. The most passive god is the "father of the gods" An. The images of Enki, Inaina and, to some extent, Enlil are comparable to the images of the demiurge gods, “bearers of culture”, whose characteristics emphasize the elements of comedy, the gods of primitive cults living on earth, among people, whose cult supplants the cult of the “higher being”. But at the same time, no traces of "theomachy" - the struggle of old and new generations of gods - were found in Sumerian mythology. One canonical text of the Old Babylonian period begins with a list of 50 pairs of gods that preceded Anu: their names are formed according to the scheme: "the lord (mistress) of so-and-so." Among them is named one of the oldest, judging by some sources, the gods Enmesharra ("master of all me"). From a source even later (a Neo-Assyrian incantation of the 1st millennium BC), we learn that Enmesharra is "the one who gave Anu and Enlil the scepter and dominion." In Sumerian mythology, this deity is chthonic, but there is no evidence that Enmesharra was forcibly cast into the underworld.

Of the heroic tales, only the tales of the Uruk cycle have come down to us. The heroes of the legends are three kings of Uruk who ruled successively: Enmerkar, son of Meskingasher, the legendary founder of the I dynasty of Uruk (27-26 centuries BC; according to legend, the dynasty originated from the sun god Utu, whose son Meskingasher was considered); Lugalbanda, the fourth ruler of the dynasty, the father (and possibly the ancestral god) of Gilgamesh, the most popular hero of Sumerian and Akkadian literature. A single external line for the works of the Uruk cycle is the theme of the connections of Uruk with the outside world and the motive of the wandering (journey) of the characters.

The theme of the hero's journey to a foreign land and the test of his moral and physical strength, combined with the motifs of magical gifts and a magical helper, not only shows the degree of mythologization of the work, compiled as a heroic-historical monument, but also allows you to reveal the stage-early motifs associated with initiation rites. The connection of these motifs in the works, the sequence of a purely mythological level of presentation, brings the Sumerian monuments closer to a fairy tale.

In the early lists of gods from Farah, the heroes Lugalband and Gilgamesh are attributed to the gods; in later texts they appear as gods of the underworld. Meanwhile, in the epos of the Uruk cycle, Gilgamesh, Lugalbanda, Enmerkar, although they have mytho-epic and fairy-tale features, act as real kings - the rulers of Uruk. Their names appear in the so-called. "royal list", compiled during the III dynasty of Ur (apparently, c. the mythical number of years of reign: Meskingasher, the founder of the Uruk dynasty, "the son of the sun god", 325 years old, Enmerkar 420 years old, Gilgamesh, who is called the son of the demon lilu, 128 years old). The epic and non-epic tradition of Mesopotamia thus has a single general direction - the idea of ​​the historicity of the main mytho-epic heroes.

It can be assumed that Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh were posthumously deified as heroes. Things were different from the beginning of the Old Akkadian period. The first ruler who declared himself the “patron god of Akkad” during his lifetime was the Akkadian king of the 23rd century. BC e. Naram-Suen; in the period of the III dynasty of Ur, the cult veneration of the ruler reached its climax. The development of the epic tradition from myths about cultural heroes, characteristic of many mythological systems, did not, as a rule, take place on Sumerian soil.

A characteristic actualization of ancient forms (in particular, the traditional motif of travel) also looks like the motif of a god’s journey to another, higher, deity for a blessing, often found in Sumerian mythological texts (myths about Enki’s journey to Enlil after the construction of his city, about the journey of the moon god Naina to Nippur to Enlil, his divine father, for a blessing). The period of the III dynasty of Ur, the time from which most of the written mythological sources have come down, is the period of the development of the ideology of royal power in the most complete form in Sumerian history.

Since myth remained the dominant and most "organized" area of ​​social consciousness, the leading form of thinking, it was through myth that the corresponding ideas were affirmed. Therefore, it is no coincidence that most of the texts belong to one group - the Nippur canon, compiled by the priests of the III dynasty of Ur, and the main centers most often mentioned in myths: Eredu, Uruk, Ur, gravitating towards Nippur as a traditional place of the Sumerian cult. A “pseudomyth”, a myth-concept (and not a traditional composition) is also a myth that explains the appearance of the Semitic tribes of the Amorites in Mesopotamia and gives the etiology of their assimilation in society - the myth of the god Martu (the very name of god is a deification of the Sumerian name of the West Semitic nomads).

The myth underlying the text did not develop an ancient tradition, but was taken from historical reality. But traces of a general historical concept - the idea of ​​the evolution of mankind from savagery to civilization (which is reflected - already on Akkadian material - in the history of the "wild man" Enkidu in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh) show through the "actual" concept of myth. After the fall at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. e. under the onslaught of the Amorites and Elamites of the III dynasty of Ur, almost all the ruling dynasties of individual city-states of Mesopotamia turned out to be Amorites. However, in the culture of Mesopotamia, contact with the Amorite tribes left almost no trace.

Gods Itu and Inanna. Bas-relief. Around the 23rd century BC.

About general ideas about the mythology of the Sumerians. Universe. Gods. Creation of man.

The Sumerians were tribes that mastered the territory of the Tigris and Euphrates valley at the end of the 4th millennium. When the first city-states were formed in Mesopotamia, ideas about gods and deities were also formed. For the tribes, the deities were patrons who personified the creative and productive forces of nature.

The very first written sources (these were pictographic texts of the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium) name the gods Enlil and Inanna.

Over time, each city-state had its own special deities, cycles of myths, and also formed its own priestly traditions.

Nevertheless, there were several common Sumerian deities.

Enlil. Lord of the air, as well as the king of the gods and all people. He was the god of the city of Nippur, which was the center of the ancient union of the Sumerian tribes.

Enki. Lord of the oceans and underground fresh waters, later became known as the divine essence of wisdom. He was the main god of the city of Eredu, which was the oldest cultural center of Sumer.

An. God of the sky.

Inanna. Goddess of war and love. Together with An, they were the deities of the city of Uruk.

Naina. The god of the moon, he was revered in Ur.

Ningirsu. A warrior god honored in Lagash.

The oldest list of gods, which dates back to the 26th millennium BC. identifies 6 supreme gods: Enlil, Anu, Enki, Inanna, Nanna, Utu (the god of the Sun).

The most typical image of the deity was presented as the image of a mother-goddess who holds a child in her arms. This meant that the patroness was fertile. She was revered under various names, such as Ninmah, Nintu, Ninhursag, Damgalnuna, Mami, Mama.

The worldview of the Sumerian tribes about the origin of the universe can be found in the text "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the underworld." God Anu is the lord of the sky, and Enlil disposes of the earth. Ereshkigal owns Kura. The primordial paradise is described in the myth of Enki and Ninhursag, where the island of Tilmun acts as this very paradise. How man was created is most fully described in the myth of Enki and Ninmah, who mold man from clay.

Man was created in order to serve the gods and fulfill their will, his duties included grazing cattle, cultivating the land, gathering, and observing the cults of sacrifice.

When a person is ready, the gods reward him with fate and feast in honor of the new creation. At this very feast, Enki and Ninmah, a little tipsy, are again sculpting people, but now they get freaks, for example, a man without a sex or a woman who cannot bear a child.

In one of the myths about the goddesses of cattle and grain, an explanation is even given for the creation of man. The thing is that the Anunnaki gods are not adapted to run a household, so they needed people.

Sumerian mythology is riddled with myths about the creation and birth of gods, but myths about heroes are also common.