Namtar

Also Known As: Sumerian nam-tar, “fate”; Akkadian dNam-ta-ru; feminine counterpart Namtartu
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology, Sumerian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He carries disease in his hand and the authority of the queen of the dead at his back, and his name is simply the word for what happens to everyone.
Role in Mythos: He is the sukkal of Ereshkigal, the vizier and messenger who runs her orders between the underworld and heaven and decrees the fates of those who arrive.
Relation to Humans: He brings sickness, most often headache and heart pain, and in the flood epic he brings the plague that is meant to thin humanity out. He can also be paid off, which no other power in that story can.

The shepherd Ur-Namma, king of Ur, came into the land of the dead with his donkeys buried beside him and his arms full of presents. He had weapons for Nergal and a battle-axe for Gilgamesh, oil and a heavy robe and a queenly gown for Ereshkigal. Then he stopped at a smaller palace and set down what he had brought for its owner: worked jewellery, a golden ring cast in the shape of a barge, cornelian pure enough to lie on the breast of a god. The poem names the recipient without ceremony. To Namtar, who decrees all the fates.

That is very nearly the whole of his cult. He is missing from the offering lists that record what the temples actually burned and poured, no city kept a festival for him, and Dina Katz notes that nobody seems to have named a child after him either. The two men in the surviving literature who make him presents are both dead kings doing it after arrival, because the underworld is the only address at which he can be reached. Gilgamesh does the same in his own death poem, setting out gifts for Ereshkigal, for Namtar, for the gatekeeper Neti, for Ningishzida and Dumuzid, working down the household like a man tipping the staff of a house he will never leave.

His name is the Sumerian for fate, nam-tar, written in the god lists with the small wedge that tells a scribe a person is meant and not an abstraction. Jacob Klein reads him as fate understood the way Mesopotamians usually meant it, which is death. Nothing calls him a deity before the Old Babylonian period, though the plain word is older than that, and the god list An = Anum gives him a family: a mother called Mardula’anki, a wife called Hušbišag who is titled stewardess of the underworld, a daughter called Ḫedimmeku. One incantation from the Udug-hul series ignores all of that and makes him the son of Enlil and Ereshkigal instead. Barbara Böck’s suggestion is that he started as a disease and was promoted into a courtier somewhere in the second millennium. Klein’s is that the record will not tell us which came first.

What the record does say, twice and in flat contradiction, is what he looks like. The Sumerian poem has Gilgamesh on his deathbed unable to stand, unable to sit, unable to eat, unable to drink, and it explains him with an image rather than a monster: held fast by the door-bolt of Namtar, he cannot rise. The same poem calls him Namtar with no hands or feet. Something without limbs takes the strongest man in the world and keeps him where he is put. Seven centuries later an Assyrian prince called Kumma dreamed his way into the underworld, counted fifteen gods there, and gave the first of them a body after all. Namtar, vizier of the underworld, stood behind a man with the man’s hair gathered in his left fist and a dagger in his right. Alexandre Loktionov points out that this is the Egyptian smiting pose, an image barely used in Assyria, and that the whole vision has Egypt in its bones. Next to him stood Namtartu, his female counterpart, with the head of a protective spirit on human hands and feet.

His ordinary working day is the errand. Anu cannot come down and Ereshkigal cannot come up, so the arrangement is that she sends a messenger to collect her portion from the table above. Namtar climbs the long stairway of heaven, crosses the courtyard, and the assembled gods rise, because when he is standing there she is standing there. One of them stays sitting. Ea can be heard hissing at the offender in a broken passage: the gods are kneeling, why do you not kneel, I keep winking at you but you pretend not to realize. The god who would not stand is Nergal, and the insult is the hinge the entire story turns on.

Sent down to identify the visitor at the gate, Namtar has the best moment anyone gives him. He goes and looks at Erra in the shadow of the door, and his face goes as livid as cut tamarisk, his lips darkening like the rim of a clay cup. He reports back that this is the one who stayed seated. Ereshkigal hears him out and then puts him down hard, telling him not to reach for Enlil-power, not to fancy heroic deeds, not to imagine himself on the throne of the royal dais. Then, in the same breath, go and bring the god to me. He does it, gate by gate, calling each doorkeeper by name.

In the Akkadian descent poem he is the instrument at both ends. Ereshkigal tells him to bring her sister out and strike her, disease of the eyes against her eyes, disease of the hips against her hips, disease of the feet, disease of the heart, disease of the head, upon her whole person. Later, with the world above gone barren and the gods leaning on her, she tells him to wreck the palace of righteousness, turn the thresholds over, bring the Anunnaki out and sit them on a golden throne, and sprinkle Ishtar with the water of life. He does that too, and walks her back up through the seven gates handing her clothes back one layer at a time. The older Sumerian version of the story has no Namtar in it anywhere; there Inanna simply dies of a verdict.

The strangest thing he does is lose. In the flood epic humanity has grown loud enough to keep Enlil awake, and the order goes out for disease. Enki’s counsel to Atrahasis is not to pray harder but to stop feeding every other god and concentrate everything on the one at the throat. The people bring a baked loaf into his presence and make the flour offerings reach him, and Namtar, in Lambert and Millard’s rendering, wipes away his punishing hand. The sickness leaves the land. He is the only power in that poem who can be embarrassed into stopping.

His reach is wide and specific. Incantations pair him with Asag as the two worst sources of illness in the world, with headaches and pains in the heart his particular signature, and the healing goddess Ninisina is called on to undo what he has done. He can also be asked for favours, which sits oddly with the rest. A charm against Mimma Lemnu, Any Evil, hands that thing to Namtar to keep locked below, and one addressed to the fire god asks that a petitioner’s enemies be given over to him. Jailer and disease are the same official.

His limits are the limits of a servant. He does not rule; he is told, sharply, that he never will. Twice he walks the court of Anu looking for the god he was sent to arrest, going up to one and then a second and then a third, and recognising none of them. He can be bought with bread. And when Nergal finally comes down for good he does not come as Namtar’s prisoner at all, he comes with a bow on his shoulder, knocking every gatekeeper flat on the way in. Nobody built Namtar a temple.

What the Sumerian poets left out was not carelessness. Ask what holds Gilgamesh to the bed and the answer is not a grip. It is a bolt across a door, and the door is shut.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Namtar in Mesopotamian mythology?

Namtar is a Mesopotamian god whose name is the Sumerian word for fate. He serves as the sukkal, the vizier and messenger, of Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, and he is also treated as a demon of disease, particularly headaches and heart pain. He carries her orders between the underworld and the heaven of Anu.

What does the name Namtar mean?

Namtar means “fate” in Sumerian. In the god lists the word is written with the divine determinative, the sign that marks a name as belonging to a deity rather than being an ordinary noun. Jacob Klein reads the name as fate in the sense Mesopotamians usually intended, meaning death.

Was Namtar worshipped?

Barely. Namtar is generally absent from the offering lists that record real temple practice, he had no known cult centre, and personal names invoking him are not attested in later periods. Offerings to him do appear in literature, but they are made by dead kings after they arrive in the underworld, in the poems on the deaths of Ur-Namma and Gilgamesh.

What does Namtar do in the Descent of Ishtar?

Ereshkigal orders Namtar to afflict Ishtar with disease of the eyes, the hips, the feet, the heart and the head, and then over her whole body. When the gods force a reversal, the same Namtar destroys the palace of righteousness, brings out the Anunnaki, sprinkles Ishtar with the water of life and leads her back out through the seven gates. He does not appear at all in the older Sumerian version of the story.

How was Namtar’s plague stopped in the Atrahasis epic?

Enki advises Atrahasis to have the people stop offering to their own personal gods and direct everything to Namtar alone. They bring a baked loaf into his presence and make the flour offerings reach him, and Namtar withdraws his punishing hand, ending the disease. Flattery works on him where it works on nothing else in the poem.