In Mesopotamian belief, all the major celestial bodies were envisaged as visible manifestation of deities. The sun, the moon, the stars and comets were a source of never-ending wonder. Utu (the sun) sheds a brilliant light during each day, and returns again each new day to illuminate the life of human beings, as well as bringing about the fertility of vegetation with his beneficial warmth. Utu was believed to emerge from a set of doors at the eastern horizon at dawn each day and make a daily journey across the skies, driven by his charioteer Bunene. Finally he entered ‘the interior of heaven’ once more at dusk, through a corresponding doorway on the western horizon. At night, when the sun’s light was absent, the moon took over the duty of illuminating the skies. Given the absence of artificial light in ancient times, and the limited amount of fires, torches, or candles shining upwards from the earth, the skies would regularly have been brilliantly bright with the moon and stars, dimmed only by cloud cover. The waxing and waning of the moon, and its varying positions in the sky depending on the time of year, were keenly observed (see A sir-namgala to Nanna), and as with all astronomical observations were interpreted as omens of the future. The calendar year was a lunar year, divided into twelve months each of thirty days. This necessitated the occasional intercalation of an extra month at the end of the lunar year to bring the calendar back into rhythm with the solar cycle.
Both the moon and the sun were envisaged as male deities. This is different from the Graeco-Roman belief according to which the sun was a male deity but the moon a female. In Sumerian, the names of the moon-god were Suen or Nanna, and sometimes he was called by both together, Nanna-Suen. Often he is referred to either as ‘youthful Suen’ or ‘Father Nanna’, making it clear that these names were assigned respectively to the minimal and maximal phases of the lunar cycle. Sometimes Nanna is represented as a cowherd who is responsible for the herds of heaven: the stars (see The herds of Nanna). He was generally considered a benign deity who might provide assistance and to whom one might turn in prayer.
Other names included Asimbabbar and the Glory of Heaven. In
Akkadian, Suen was later pronounced Sin. Nanna was the son of the deities Enlil and Ninlil; his wife was the goddess Ningal, and their children were the sun-god Utu and the goddess Inana. The most important shrine of Nanna was the temple E-kis-nugal at Urim, and this meant that Nanna was regarded as an important deity in the very capital city of the empire of the Third Dynasty of Urim (see The lament for Sumer and Urim).
Although he was a very popular deity in the early second millennium BCE, the position of Nanna always remained subordinate to that of the chief gods of the pantheon (see A balbale to Nanna and Nanna-Suen’s journey to Nibru). A symbol of Nanna was a recumbent crescent (which is how the new moon appears in the latitudes of Iraq). Probably because of the similarity of this to the horns of a bull, his associated animal was a bull.
FURTHER READING
Colbow, G., ‘More Insights into Representations of the Moon God: The Third and Second Millennia BC’, in I. L. Finkel and M. J. Geller (eds.), Sumerian Gods and their Representations (Styx: Groningen, 1997, pp. 19—31) explores the iconography of Nanna-Suen.
Klein, J., ‘The Genealogy ofNanna-Suen and its Historical Background’, in T. Abusch et al. (eds.), Historiography in the Cuneiform World (CDL Press: Bethesda, MD, 2001, pp. 279—302) examines literary traditions about the divine family of Nanna-Suen. Michalowski, P., The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur (Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, Ind., 1989) is an in-depth study of The lament for Sumer and Urim.
World History
