Nergal

At the height of summer, when the canals shrank to threads of warm mud and the barley stood dead in the field, the people of Kutha knew whose hand lay on the land. The heat that killed was not weather. It was Nergal, walking.

He was the god who dealt death on purpose. Not the quiet subtraction of old age, not the body simply wearing out, but death sent: the fever that empties a house in a week, the arrow that finds the gap in the armor, the summer that burns the harvest to stubble. One Assyriologist called him the god of inflicted death, and the phrase is exact. Somewhere behind every sudden ending, the Mesopotamians felt a decision had been made, and Nergal was the one who made it.

His city was Kutha, north of Babylon, and his house there was the E-meslam, one of the oldest and most feared temples in the land. He began small, most likely a local god of the fields and the burning sun, the kind of deity a farming town keeps close because it must. Over the centuries he grew into something vast. He took in an older twin figure, Meslamtaea, whose name means the one who comes forth from the Meslam, and he climbed until he held the country of the dead itself.

Sculptors and seal-cutters gave him the shape of a soldier. He carries a mace crowned with a snarling lion’s head, and often a curved scimitar, and on the carved boundary stones that Kassite kings set up to fix the edges of their land his sign is that lion-headed weapon, planted upright where everyone could read it. The lion is his animal, the patient killer of the open country. In the night sky he is the red star, the one later astronomers would name Mars, a bloodshot point that soldiers watched for omens before a march.

The best-preserved story about him explains how a god of the upper world came to rule the lower one, and it starts with an insult at a feast. The gods held a banquet that Ereshkigal, queen of the dead, could not climb up to attend, so she sent her vizier Namtar to collect her portion. Every god at the table rose to honor the messenger. Nergal did not. Namtar carried the slight back down into the dark, and Ereshkigal, enraged, demanded that the offender be handed over so she could kill him.

Nergal went down through the seven gates warned and armed. In the fuller version copied at Sultantepe he brings a company of demons and jams the gates open behind him, a soldier securing his line of retreat. What happens at the throne is not a battle. Ereshkigal bathes and dresses, and he stays with her seven nights, and then he climbs the stairs and slips away while she sleeps. She wakes furious and grieving both, and threatens to raise the dead until they outnumber the living unless he is sent back. He comes back. This time he does not leave. He takes her by the hair and drags her from the throne, and instead of killing her he becomes her husband and king of the underworld at her side.

It is a strange love story, if it is one at all. In the older Sumerian reckoning Ereshkigal’s husband had been Gugalanna, and Nergal is nowhere in it. The marriage is the Akkadians squaring their books: their god of death had taken over the land of the dead, so they wed him to the woman who already ruled there.

Under another name he is worse. As Erra, the subject of a long Akkadian poem preserved in the royal library at Nineveh, he is violence handed a voice and a grievance. Restless and hungry for slaughter, egged on by his own herald Ishum, Erra tricks the city-god Marduk into leaving his post, and in the gap he falls on Babylon with plague, riot, and war, cutting down the guilty and the innocent with the same stroke. The poem reads less like the tale of a character than like a statement from war itself. The scholar who produced its standard edition thought Erra was war wearing a mask.

What he governs follows from what he is. He commands pestilence and can pour it into a city like water into a jar. He is a war-god whose favor decides battles and whose turned back breaks armies. He keeps the underworld and its gates, and the ghosts of the unburied are his to hold or to loose. The killing heat of the year belongs to him, and so does fire.

His limits are the limits of his nature. He is a destroyer and not a maker, and the myths never once show him building or feeding anything. The world does not need him except to be spared him. His power runs on being feared and fed, which is why so much of the worship around him was placation, offerings meant to point his eye somewhere else. And for all his fury he can be reached. Ereshkigal turns his errand of murder into a marriage; Ishum, his own herald, is finally the voice that talks him down and closes the Erra poem’s rampage. The thing that deals death can, now and then, be argued into stopping.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nergal?

Nergal is the Mesopotamian god of inflicted death, war, plague, and the scorching heat, and the ruler of the underworld. He was worshipped by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, with his chief cult center at the city of Kutha and its temple the E-meslam. Mesopotamians feared him as the deliberate hand behind epidemics, violent death, and the killing heat of high summer.

How did Nergal become king of the underworld?

In the Akkadian myth of Nergal and Ereshkigal, Nergal insulted the underworld queen Ereshkigal by failing to stand for her messenger at a divine banquet. Summoned below to be killed, he instead spent seven nights with her, and after a second confrontation he became her husband and co-ruler of the land of the dead. In the older Sumerian tradition Ereshkigal’s husband was Gugalanna, and Nergal did not appear in the story at all.

What is the difference between Nergal and Erra?

Erra is a name and aspect of Nergal that expresses his most destructive side, the god as pure violence and chaos. In the Akkadian Epic of Erra he tricks the god Marduk into leaving Babylon and then devastates the city with plague, riot, and war, killing the guilty and the innocent alike. Scholars often read Erra in the poem as an allegory for war itself rather than a conventional character.

What are Nergal’s symbols?

Nergal’s main symbol is the lion-headed mace, which appears as his emblem on Kassite boundary stones called kudurru. He is also linked with the lion and, in the heavens, with the red planet known today as Mars. Artists depicted him as a warrior armed with a mace and a curved scimitar.

Where was Nergal worshipped?

Nergal’s primary cult center was Kutha, a city north of Babylon in central Mesopotamia, now the site of Tell Ibrahim in Iraq. His temple there, the E-meslam, was one of the most important religious structures in the region for much of recorded Mesopotamian history.

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Ereshkigal, Inanna, Ishtar, Enlil, Marduk, Shamash, Ninurta, Gilgamesh, Tiamat, Pazuzu, Anzu, Humbaba