Dumuzid

The churns lay on their sides and no milk came out of them. That is how a Sumerian poem chooses to say that a god has died: not a wound, not a battle, just dairy gear tipped over on the floor of an empty pen and the pen itself gone strange and quiet. For a shepherd, an overturned churn is the end of the world, and whoever composed the song knew it.

Dumuzid was that shepherd. His name reads as the faithful son, and the earliest scribes of southern Iraq gave him the flocks, the sheepfold, the butter and the milk, and the most dangerous wife in the pantheon. In the orchard country further south he carried a second name, Ama-ushumgal-ana, the one great source of the date clusters, and there his power was the sap rising in the palm rather than the fat on the lambs. Both versions come to the same thing. He is what increases.

No poem tells how he came to exist. He simply arrives, already grown, with a mother called Duttur whose name he cries out when he knows he is going to die, a sister who can read dreams, and a flock. The Sumerian King List makes him twice a king, which does not clarify matters: once as a shepherd ruling at Bad-tibira before the flood, credited with a reign of thirty-six thousand years, and again, generations later, as a fisherman out of Kuara who held Uruk between Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh. Whether those two are the god, the memory of a real man, or two unrelated names that drifted together is a question the tablets do not settle.

He had to argue his way into the marriage. In one balbale Inanna states her position flatly: she will not be the wife of a shepherd, she will have the farmer, the one who grows colourful flax and dappled grain. Her brother Utu takes the shepherd’s side and makes the case in the plainest terms available, that his butter is good and his milk is good. Dumuzid then makes it himself, and his argument is a shopping list. Let the farmer give him a black garment and he will hand over a black ewe for it, a white garment for a white ewe, best beer for yellow milk, fine beer for soured milk, brewed beer for whipped milk, bread for milk, little beans for small cheeses. In what is the farmer superior to me? Enkimdu, the man of the dykes and canals, declines to fight about it and offers instead to let the sheep graze his stubble and the kids and lambs drink from his Surungal canal. The quarrel dissolves into an exchange of gifts, which is not how these things usually go.

The wedding songs are better than the quarrel. In one of them Inanna sends out for the finest of everything, fat carp from the fisherman, choice birds from the fowler, butter and milk from the shepherd, and Dumuzid arrives with the butter in his hands and the churn balanced on his shoulder, hammering at her door: open the house, my lady, open the house. She washes, anoints herself with sweet oil, straightens the small lapis stones at her neck, takes up her cylinder seal, and steps out to him like a moonbeam. He looks at her and is glad. Then he makes her the promise a Sumerian bridegroom makes, that she will not weave cloth for him, she will not spin yarn, she will not comb out goat’s wool.

It does not last, and the reason has nothing to do with him.

Inanna set her mind on the great below, and her sister Ereshkigal had her stripped at seven gates until she came into the throne room with nothing left, and the seven judges looked at her with the look of death and hung her corpse on a hook. Enki got her out using two creatures he made from the dirt under his fingernails, one carrying a life-giving plant and the other a life-giving water. Nobody leaves that place for free. The Anuna set the price at a substitute, and a crowd of galla demons came back up with her to collect it. They are described with a peculiar, chilling precision: they know no food and no drink, they take no flour offering, they accept no pleasant gift, they never enjoy a wife’s embrace and never have sweet children to kiss, and they chew no garlic and eat no fish and no leeks. Everything that makes a person a person has been subtracted from them.

She walked them through her cities. At Umma, Shara sat in the dust in a filthy garment and threw himself at her feet, and she refused to give him up. At Bad-tibira, Lulal did the same, and she refused again. Then they came to the great apple tree on the plain of Kulaba, and there was Dumuzid in a magnificent garment, seated magnificently on a throne, not in the dust at all. The demons seized him by the thighs. Seven of them poured out the milk from his churns. She looked at him, and it was the look of death, and she said: how much longer? Take him away.

What follows is the longest sustained chase in Sumerian literature. He calls up to Utu, his brother-in-law, reminding him that he carried butter to his mother’s house and milk to Ningal’s house, and asks to have his hands and feet turned into a gazelle’s. Utu accepts his tears and does it, and does it twice more after that, and each time Dumuzid runs and each time they find him: at Ku-biresh, at the house of the old woman Belili who poured him water and sprinkled him flour, and finally at his own sheepfold. Nobody saves him.

He had been warned. In a separate poem he wakes shaking from a dream and sends for his sister Geshtinanna, the scribe proficient in tablets, the singer expert in songs, the wise woman who knows the meanings of dreams, and tells it to her: rushes rising, a single reed shaking its head at him, twin reeds with one pulled away, water poured over his coals, the cover lifted off his churn, his cup torn down from its peg, his stick gone, an owl carrying a lamb out of the sheep house, and at the end of it the churns on their sides and Dumuzid dead and the fold haunted. She reads every image and not one of the readings is kind. The single reed is his mother. The twin reeds are the two of them, and one is being separated. When the demons come, two from Adab and two from Akshak and two more each from Uruk, Ur and Nippur with head-smashing clubs tied at their waists, they offer Geshtinanna a river of water and a field of grain and she will not take either. They offer his friend the same and he takes both. Dumuzid is run down in the ditches of Arali, and the only thing he says about it is that in the city his sister saved his life and his friend caused his death.

The sources give him almost no body. He is the lad and the wild bull, he wears the magnificent garment, and past that the poems say nothing about his face, so the sharpest physical detail on record is a shape he was never born with: gazelle-footed across the flat ground of a Mesopotamian plain, or in some manuscripts snake-handed and snake-footed, going low and fast through the grass.

His powers are the powers of surplus and nothing else. Where he is, the fold fills and the churn fills and the palm bears, and at Uruk his marriage to Inanna was kept as something close to a harvest festival, the security of a community that has just laid in its provisions read back as the security of a young couple. His weakness is the same fact stated backwards. Surplus is seasonal, and a god made out of it can be spent. He cannot outrun the galla, Utu’s mercy buys him distance but never safety, and the arrangement Inanna finally reaches is not a rescue at all: half the year for him and half for Geshtinanna, his sister standing in the dark so that he can stand in the light.

The Akkadian speakers took him over as Tammuz and gave his name to a month in midsummer, and when that month came round the women of Mesopotamia sat and mourned him in public. The practice travelled. Ezekiel, at the north gate of the temple in Jerusalem, found women sitting there weeping for Tammuz and wrote it down as an abomination, which means the shepherd who lost the argument with his wife was still being wept for by name more than a thousand years after the last Sumerian scribe set down the reed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dumuzid?

Dumuzid is the Sumerian god of shepherds and the husband of Inanna, queen of heaven. His name means something like “the faithful son”, and he governs the increase of flocks and orchards, the butter, the milk and the dates. He is best known as the god Inanna surrenders to the underworld in her place.

Why did Inanna give Dumuzid to the demons?

Inanna could only leave the underworld if she supplied a substitute, and the galla demons who escorted her back up were there to take one. She spared the gods who met her sitting in the dust in filthy garments as a sign of mourning, but she found Dumuzid under the great apple tree at Kulaba dressed magnificently and seated on a throne, showing no grief at all. She looked at him with the look of death and handed him over.

What is the difference between Dumuzid and Tammuz?

Tammuz is the Akkadian form of the same god’s name, taken over by the Semitic-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia from the Sumerian Dumuzid. A midsummer month was named after Tammuz, and public mourning for him was held when it came round. The prophet Ezekiel records women weeping for Tammuz at the north gate of the temple in Jerusalem.

Does Dumuzid come back to life?

Not permanently. The settlement reached at the end of Inanna’s descent divides the year between Dumuzid and his sister Geshtinanna, so that each of them spends half of it in the underworld while the other is released. His return is annual and conditional rather than a resurrection, and the poems about his death treat it as a real death, with a real corpse and real mourning.

Who is Geshtinanna and what does she do for Dumuzid?

Geshtinanna is Dumuzid’s sister, described as a scribe skilled with tablets, a singer, and a wise woman who knows the meanings of dreams. She interprets the dream that foretells his death, refuses the bribes of a river of water and a field of grain when the demons demand his whereabouts, and finally takes his place in the underworld for half of every year. His friend, offered the same bribes, accepted them and gave him up.

Related Entries

Inanna, Ereshkigal, Enki, Gallu, Anunnaki, Enlil, Shamash, Sin, Nergal, Anu (Mesopotamian), Gilgamesh, Ishtar, Adonis, Osiris, Persephone