The Sumerian people once inhabited the region near the Persian Gulf, known as Iraq. Greeks called this country Mesopotamia, which means the land between the rivers, as the Euphrates and Tigris, rising in Anatolia, flowed through Syria and Iraq before discharging into the Persian Gulf. 'Simurrum' is the name given to the northern region by the Semitic peoples later, like the word Sumerian, which was later used for the southern region. According to the Sumerians, their land was called Kien-gi, or 'land of the lordly En,' after the priest-king of Sumer (En). Sometime after 4000 BC, the Sumerians moved to this coastal area, but it's unclear from where they came. There is no connection between their language and any other language spoken in the region. After sailing upriver from the Persian Gulf, they migrated inland from the coastal area. On the other hand, Sumerians came from the northeast of Mesopotamia and traveled down the river to the south. 'Simurrum' could indicate that the Sumerians once lived in the northern region. The Sumerians must have encountered people who had already settled in the Persian Gulf area for a long time when they entered since a few cities had names that did not match Sumerians but were most likely derived from an unknown language. Examples include Uruk, Ešnunna, and Shuruppak. Similarly, Buranuna, the name of the Euphrates River, makes no sense in Sumerian, whereas Idigna, the name of the Tigris River, might be explained as 'the blue river. Farmers had established small settlements along these two great rivers during the fifth millennium BC. To irrigate agricultural crops, they diverted water from rivers through canals. There was little rainfall in this area, and the sun burned mercilessly during the summer months, so everyone lived entirely off floodwater from the rivers. The rivers could be dangerous, though, as the land was flat, and there was always the danger that the river would overflow its banks and change its course, inundating new areas and destroying crops and water supplies. The great rivers carried silt through the plain, forming swamps along the Persian coast. Here, the inhabitants grew cane for making little reed houses for the gods. God Enki was responsible for this domain. He brought civilization to the Sumerians and lived underground in a freshwater residence, the Abzu, located below the earth's surface but above the ocean's saltwater expanse.

This anthology translates and discusses texts authored by women of ancient Mesopotamia.

The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them. Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world. "There are few scholars in the world qualified to write such a book, and certainly Kramer is one of them. . . . One of the most valuable features of this book is the quantity of texts and fragments which are published for the first time in a form available to the general reader. For the layman the book provides a readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture. For the specialist it presents a synthesis with which he may not agree but from which he will nonetheless derive stimulation."—American Journal of Archaeology "An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity."—Library Journal

This book includes tales of gods and goddesses, both major and minor, as well as kings and heroes, both historical and mythical. One such king is the hero of what many scholars believe to be the first written epic: Gilgamesh.

A fresh retelling of the ancient texts about Ishtar, the world's first goddess. Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. "A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Around 2,300 BC Enheduanna was high priestess to the moon god Nanna at his temple in Ur, a position she held for almost forty years. This volume translates Enheduanna's three devotional poems to the goddess Inanna accompanied by an extensive commentary and discussion which places these highly personal and unique expressions within the context of Sumerian culture and religion. The author highlights the importance of the poems and the princess for our understanding of the place of women in Near Eastern society and religion.

Mesopotamian religion was one of the earliest religious systems to develop with—and in turn influence—a high civilization. Followed by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, Mesopotamian religion and mythology reflected the complexities of these societies and has been preserved in remnants of their cultural, economic, and political institutions. This absorbing volume provides a glimpse of the cradle of civilization by examining Mesopotamian religious and mythological beliefs as well as some of the many gods and goddesses at the core of their stories and also looks at epics—such as that of Gilgamesh—and other aspects of Mesopotamian life.

The current investigation has been divided into three main chapters. In the first two chapters, the primary focus is the relationship between Ninurta and kingship. The first chapter gives a diachronic overview of the cult of Ninurta during all historical periods of ancient Mesopotamia. This chapter shows that the conception of Ninurta's identity with the king was present in Mesopotamian religion already in the third millennium BC. Ninurta was the god of Nippur, the religious centre of Sumerian cities, and his most important attribute was his sonship to Enlil. While the mortal gods were frequently called the sons of Enlil, the status of the king converged with that of Ninurta at his coronation, through the determination of the royal fate, carried out by the divine council of gods in Nippur. The fate of Ninurta parallels the fate of the king after the investiture. Religious syncretism is studied in the second chapter. The configuration of Nippur cults left a legacy for the religious life of Babylonia and Assyria. The Nippur trinity of the father Enlil, the mother Ninlil, and the son Ninurta had direct descendants in the Babylonian and Assyrian pantheon, realized in Babylonia as Marduk, Zarpanitu, and Nabu, and as Assur, Mullissu, and Ninurta in Assyria. While the names changed, the configuration of the cult survived, even when, from the eighth century BC onwards, Ninurta's name was to a large extent replaced by that of Nabu. In the third chapter various manifestations or hypostases of Ninurta are discussed. Besides the monster slayer, Ninurta was envisaged as farmer, star and arrow, healer, and tree. All these manifestations confirm the strong ties between the cult of Ninurta and kingship. By slaying Asakku, Ninurta eliminated evil from the world, and accordingly he was considered the god of healing. The healing, helping, and saving of a believer who was in misery was thus a natural result of Ninurta's victorious battles. The theologoumenon of Ninurta's mission and return was used as the mythological basis for quite a few royal rituals, and this fact explains the extreme longevity of the Sumerian literary compositions Angim and Lugale, from the third until the first millennium BC. Ninurta also protected legitimate ownership of land and granted protection for refugees in a special temple of the land. The "faithful farmer" is an epithet for both Ninurta and the king. Kingship myths similar to the battles of Ninurta are attested in an area far extending the bounds of the ancient Near East. The conflict myth on which the Ninurta mythology was based is probably of prehistoric origin, and various forms of the kingship myths continued to carry the ideas of usurpation, conflict, and dominion until late Antiquity.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.

This volume is an interdisciplinary investigation and contextualization of the various concepts of divine union in the private and public sphere of the Greek and Near Eastern worlds.