Understanding Sumerian Mythology and the Creation of Human
Understanding the origin of all mythologies
Sumerian mythology is arguably the most complex, most problematic, and difficult-to-know set of myths in the world. There are still many unsolved problems and unanswered questions. The fact that the myths are really complex will cause a reader who is not an expert on the subject to give up reading. The main reason for this is “the difficulty of following the events chronologically”. Also, another big problem is; The reason is that we have been confined to “very few and uncertain sources” regarding the creation of the universe, worlds, gods, concepts, people, and other things.
Now, what I want to explain in this article is to present the phase up to the creation of man (Sumerian myths basically end with the creation of humans) in a chronological line.
I have no intention of explaining the mythology completely. This is already very difficult. I aim to provide basic events and chronology information. Sumerian mythology is full of dozens of myths and narratives. gods are created, gods have adventures, culture, and civilization are created, etc. But what is important is not these, but the basic outline. I will describe the emergence of the earliest gods who created the universe and the world and all subsequent things. So please forgive me for skipping many mythological stories.
The Biggest Problem in Understanding Sumerian Mythology
First of all, I would like to start with the issue of resources and the problems with resources. As you know, we learn about Sumerian myths from cuneiform tablets written in Sumerian and Akkadian. And don’t think that our way of learning is like “Oh, we opened it, look, it’s explained here from beginning to end, how nice…”. All these myths are in the form of separate texts written one by one, in a scattered manner, and later associated with each other. Therefore, the emergence of mythology coincides 100 years after the reading of Sumerian. And in fact, a complete mythology has still not emerged.
Another problem we have is that there are very few literary sources. Only about 10 percent of cuneiform tablets are literary. The rest are tablets that are of little use to us, such as trade records, law, and civil servant lists. Also, the language, namely Sumerian, is a huge problem. Sumerian is a language that is still not fully understood, even though nearly 200 years have passed since it started to be read. That’s why in some literary tablets it is not possible to understand what the lines say.
Sumerian Gods
Nammu
The primeval sea. At the beginning of everything, there was the primeval sea. There is no definitive information about the origin creation or emergence of the primeval sea in the Sumerian texts obtained so far. This is probably the same thing as the “primeval waters” formed by Oceanus and Thetis in Hellenic mythology. It is also referred to as Tiamat in Semitic mythology. Nammu was most likely conceived of as a “primeval space” that was “uncreated” and “existed from eternity.” Also, it is not known what caused it to appear as a single here and as a double in Hellen.
Hursag
The cosmic mountain. The primeval sea Nammu formed the Hursag, the cosmic mountain, formed from the unity of the sky and the earth. Our source here is the following passage: “Behind the mountain of heaven and earth the annunnaki were impregnated.” This concept of the cosmic mountain can be reconciled with the chaos in Hellen. In other words, according to the Sumerian priests, the “thing that existed before everything”, which we call the universe in the 21st century, was the primeval sea Nammu. Probably, as in the Hellenic, Semitic, and Indo-Persian myths, it was not even considered whether this primeval sea was created here. The Sumerians saw Nammu as “the space in which everything happens”, as the concept that “includes time and all spaces”, and they thought of the cosmic mountain as the “secondary universe”, “the place of the gods and the beings that follows the gods”.
An
I want to try to explain An here in the passage I just wrote. As we see, An appears here as a personality that existed while there was still chaos, “when heaven and earth had not yet been separated”. both anthropomorphically. that is, in human form. Of course, this is interesting to us because it is a situation that we cannot reconcile with other mythologies. Samuel Noah Kramer made it easy this way:
- Once upon a time, there was a primeval sea. Nammu.
- The sky and the earth, formed by the primeval sea, merged. The cosmic mountain was formed. Hursag.
- When heaven and earth had not yet been separated, the first divine personality was born.
- heaven and earth were separated, An gave birth to his children (annunnaki), and the universe was organized.
We don’t know who created An. We won’t know until a tablet that directly or indirectly mentions it is found and read. However, we understand that An is the first and greatest god in Sumerian mythology.
Ki
mother Earth. She was created by An, the sole ruler of the Cosmic Mountain, and became his wife. According to Samuel Noah Kramer, “the world where An and KI are together” is the exact equivalent of the universe in which life is experienced and where life exists in the Sumerian dream. The primordial sea is the first and is nothingness, emptiness. The cosmic mountain is chaos, where the first creative force emerges (An). However, this world, that is, Anki, (literally sky-earth) is a fully alive and living universe.
Enlil
The “highest god after An”, born from the mating of An and Ki. god of weather, lord of the air. (en = master, lil = air.)
Ninlil
wife of Enlil. She is the goddess created by Enlil to be his wife.
Enlil, the god of air, separates the sky and the earth. His father takes the sky. Enlil, on the other hand, controls the earth himself instead of giving it to his mother ki. The collapse of matriarchal structures and the rise of a male-dominated society in approximately 3200 BC had an impact on women’s relegation to the background, albeit slightly, at some points in Sumerian mythology. In this example, the mother, who should have taken the place, should have been the master of the place, was content with the title of holy queen. For example, Ki’s titles and names such as Ninmah (great queen), Ninhursag (queen of the cosmic mountain), and Nintul (fertile queen) are also related to this situation.
Enki
Enki has a very special place in Sumerian mythology. He is the god of water and earth. He is also considered the master of civilization. Enki is actually Enlil in the city of Eridu. According to many myths, Enlil’s sacred city was Nippur. Therefore, Nippur was considered the sacred center of the Sumerian society. However, starting from the 3000s BC, a power struggle began between the cities in the Sumerian geography, that is, in southern Mesopotamia, which would continue continuously. This struggle was also seen in the cultural values of the society.
The city of Eridu and the social-religious memory of this city created a god named Enki with the same personality, in opposition to the god Enlil, the lord of the earth and the sky, who emerged from Nippur. The literal meaning of Enki is “lord of the earth”. (en=lord, ki=place.) Enki is actually a manifestation of Ea, the local god of Eridu, likened to Enlil. Ea transformed into Enki and became a rival to Enlil.
Nanna
After Enlil separated the sky from the earth, he realized that the place he lived in was dark and lightless, and he created Nanna, the moon god, to illuminate the world.
Ningal
Nanna’s wife. Nanna created Ningal to be his wife.
Utu
Son of Nanna and Ningal, sun god. It was born to help the mission given to Nanna to enlighten the world.
Creation Of Human
In Sumerian mythology, the purpose of human creation is to serve the gods, as in the other mythologies it influenced (Semitic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian…). The world we mentioned above is a world where gods live entirely and solely and handle their own affairs. But the gods are bored and tired. One day, at a party, they advise Enki, the god of wisdom, to create servants for them. Enki also presents 6 types of “human beings” made of clay to the gods, along with his mother, that is, Ninmah(Ki). However, these are mindless, uncultured beings that can’t even speak.
Thereupon, Enki decides to create a human on his own. but it fails. What he creates is again an unintelligent human being… Now, let’s come to the big problem about this myth: The myth tablet called The Creation of Man is badly damaged and broken from here on. Therefore, in the continuation of the myth, we only learn that Ninmah was very angry with Enki and that even though it was not liked, humans were forced to work as mindless individuals in the service of the gods.
In the continuation of the myth, we learn that the two fertility gods named Lahar and Ashnan took pity on this servant and suffering human being and gave him breath and endowed him with intelligence and thought “for the sake of all the good things created.” Here, perhaps, we can find Prometheus, who introduced culture to humans in the Hellenes, in the personalities of Lahar and Ashnan.
We have come to the end of the article in which I explained the religion of the Sumerians, the ancestors of civilization. Thank you for reading. More stories from Mythology Journal:
