The mythology of ancient Sumer presents a complex and intriguing quandary of poorly preserved stories/poems, hymns, and architectural structures from which modern day scholars now try to re-envision the Sumerian cosmological beliefs system (I say re-envision because that is really what we’re doing here; trying to imagine a different perspective, as opposed to recreating one). To that end, the seemingly simply task of cataloguing the long lists of Sumerian gods & goddesses and their powers, domains, designations, and even their parentages has proven far less an exacting science than even the least discriminating critical eye would deem acceptable.
Something as simple as cataloguing a cosmological timeline, from the creation of An (heaven) and Ki (earth) to the birth of Inanna or Enki is questionable. Why is it that Ki is thought to have been widely referred to as Ninhursag, Nintu, and a bevy of other names? What do we know of the actual age of the many myths (mostly fragmented and/or incomplete) that we do have? Which stories came first? Why are there two seemingly identical stories of feuding cattle and grain gods? Did the themes of these epic poems follow any sort of socio-economic pattern, at the time of their creation, in Sumer? Answers to these and other questions about Sumerian mythology remain unclear.
My goal is to draw as accurate a picture as possible of the Sumerian pantheon, and in doing so, to address these many pertinent questions. I will go about this, in large part, by analyzing modern interpretations of Sumerian myth. But the study of mythology must not be limited to poems and hymns. Often, in depth analyses of “literature” fail to utilize the full range of evidence available to the archaeologists. This is unfortunate, because the archaeologist is neither a modern historian nor a gossip. Integrating the various forms of evidence is a primary goal of this analysis.
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