Shamash

On a piece of serpentine no bigger than a thumb, cut in Akkad some four and a half thousand years ago, a god is climbing out of the ground. Two mountain peaks part around his shoulders. Rays stand off his back like blades. In one hand he holds a serrated knife and he is using it, sawing his way up through the rock of the eastern horizon, while two attendant gods haul the gateposts of the sky apart to let him through. That is sunrise, carved by people who saw nothing automatic in it.

His Akkadian name was Šamaš, which is simply the word for the sun, the same root that gives Arabic shams and Hebrew shemesh. Scribes went on writing it with the old Sumerian sign dUTU long after they had stopped speaking Sumerian, so the name on a clay tablet is a small archaeological section in itself: an Akkadian sound sitting inside the sign for Utu, the earlier sun god of the same sky. The two are not quite one figure, and the Sumerian hymns belong to Utu, but the road across heaven is the same road.

The day began underground. Shamash slept in a chamber beneath the world, rose through the eastern gate at dawn, crossed the full width of heaven, and went down again in the west. A second-millennium prayer meant for recitation at sunset follows him home and is almost embarrassingly domestic about it. The gatekeeper salutes him and opens the door to his chambers. Then the god sits down to a dinner cooked by his wife, Aya, goddess of the dawn. A cosmic circuit, and at the end of it, supper.

Between those two doors he saw everything, and that is the whole engine of his character. A god physically present over every field, roof, courtyard and road for the length of the daylight cannot be lied to, so the sun became the god of truth and of judgement. Oaths were sworn by him. Contracts and treaties named him. Merchants on the highway and travellers between cities counted him a protector, partly out of gratitude for the light and partly because a witness who cannot be bought is worth having along. A Sumerian hymn says his radiance spreads out like a net over the world, which is a generous image and also a faintly menacing one.

Artists agreed on a small set of marks. The horned headdress, standard sign of divinity. Rays or blades rising from both shoulders. The saw gripped in one fist on the Akkadian seals, and on the later monuments a rod and a ring. Where he appears not as a figure but as a symbol he is a disc: a four-pointed star with curved lines whipping out between the points, or, on Assyrian stelae and boundary stones, a winged disc riding above the king’s head. The rays are the constant. Everything else in the picture can move.

In Sumerian reckoning he was the son of the moon god Nanna-Suen and the twin brother of Inana. Akkadian tradition sometimes made him a son of Anu, sometimes of Enlil. His household ran on a small staff: Aya, his wife; Bunene, the minister who drove his chariot, called his son in some traditions and worshipped in his own right at Sippar and Uruk in the Old Babylonian period; and the pair Kittu and Misharu, truth and right, whom the sources describe variously as his children and as his attendants. The disagreement is old and nobody has settled it.

His two great cities were Sippar in the north and Larsa in the south, and in both the temple carried the same name, E-babbar, the White House or Shining House. Devotion to him is as old as writing about him. The first known work of literature in the Akkadian language is a hymn to Shamash recovered from Tell Abu Salabikh and dated to roughly 2600 BCE, and it is still only half understood.

The most reproduced image of him in the modern world sits at the top of Hammurabi’s law stele, carved around 1760 BCE above its 282 rulings. Shamash is seated. The king stands before him. Something passes between them, and it is usually described as the laws coming down from heaven. The relief does not show that. What the god holds out is a measuring rod and a coiled measuring rope, a surveyor’s kit, because in Babylonian thinking a just king was first of all a king who measured honestly. Fairness was an arithmetic problem before it was a moral one.

He also took sides. In the Cedar Forest, when Gilgamesh and Enkidu had gone too far to turn back and Humbaba still had his auras of dread about him, Shamash raised thirteen winds against the guardian: south and north, east and west, the whistling wind, the piercing wind, the blizzard, the ice wind, the sandstorm and the rest, until Humbaba’s face was packed with grit and he could not see the men standing in front of him. Gilgamesh took him then. The sun god had a favourite and did what favouritism does.

Kings approached him in a more procedural way. Extispicy, the reading of a sacrificed sheep’s liver, ran for over a thousand years as a branch of royal scholarship, and it was Shamash whom the diviners addressed, asking him to write his answer into the warm organ so that it could be counted and read out. A diviner’s prayer from the second millennium asks him only to guide the inquiry and to let there be truth. Around 350 such queries and reports survive from the Neo-Assyrian court alone, put to him by Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, and their subject matter is not lofty: will this vassal rebel, will the king recover from this illness, can that officer be trusted.

The dead used the same architecture. Spirits were thought to leave the world through a passage in the far west, and some traditions made that the very door Shamash used going home. Others kept the routes apart, and the Nineveh version of the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh describes the sun’s road beneath the earth as its own path, separate from the road to the land of the dead. Either way he passed nightly through the country of the dead and judged there as he judged above, which is why prayers against ghosts, curses and unquiet spirits went upward, to the brightest thing in the sky.

He could also be misplaced. By the ninth century BCE the Sutean raids had broken the cult at Sippar so thoroughly that the statue of Shamash was gone, hidden by priests or simply lost, and for generations the Ebabbar made do with a sun disc set on an altar in the god’s place. A priest named Nabu-shuma-usharshi eventually turned up a small clay relief of the god on the bank of the Euphrates, and from that model king Nabu-apla-iddina had a new image made in gold and lapis lazuli. The limestone tablet cut to commemorate it, dug out of Sippar in 1881 and now in London, shows the god enthroned in his shrine with the rod and ring in his hand and the disc still resting on its altar in front of him, hauled upright on ropes held by two lesser gods. It is a picture of a god being reinstalled, and of the stopgap that had stood in for him.

What he could do followed from what he was. He gave light and warmth, and the barley came up. He saw through deceit because in daylight there is nowhere to put it. He answered questions, guarded roads, lifted curses, and as the defender of justice he carried a warrior’s aspect and a warrior’s weapons, which is a sensible thing to give a judge in a world where a verdict was only as good as the force behind it.

The limits came from the same design. He was a god of the day, and half of every cycle belonged to somebody else. He kept a fixed road and could not step off it. He judged, but he did not overturn the destinies the great gods had already decreed. And his answers reached the world through a sheep’s liver and a man squinting at it, so the truth on offer was never better than the reader.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Shamash in Mesopotamian mythology?

Shamash is the Mesopotamian sun god and the god of justice, truth and judgement. His name is the Akkadian word for the sun, and he corresponds to the earlier Sumerian sun god Utu. Because he crossed the whole sky every day and saw everything that happened in daylight, he became the divine witness to oaths, contracts and treaties.

Is Shamash the same god as Utu?

They are the same sun of the same sky under two names from two languages, but they belong to different periods and traditions. Utu is the Sumerian sun god, son of Nanna-Suen and twin of Inana; Shamash is his Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian form, sometimes given Anu or Enlil as a father instead. Akkadian scribes kept writing the name with the Sumerian sign dUTU long after Sumerian had ceased to be spoken.

What did Shamash give to Hammurabi on the law stele?

The relief at the top of Hammurabi’s stele shows Shamash handing the king a rod and a ring, understood as a measuring rod and a coiled measuring rope. They are surveyor’s tools and symbols of the power to rule justly, not a copy of the laws themselves. In Babylonian thinking, honest measurement and just government were closely linked ideas.

How did Shamash help Gilgamesh?

Shamash intervened during the fight with Humbaba in the Cedar Forest, raising thirteen winds against the guardian, including the whistling wind, the piercing wind, the blizzard and the sandstorm. The winds blinded Humbaba and pinned him in place long enough for Gilgamesh to overcome him. Shamash was more broadly a protector of the heroic kings of Uruk.

Where was Shamash worshipped?

His two chief cult centres were Sippar in northern Babylonia and Larsa in the south, and in both cities his temple was called E-babbar, meaning White House or Shining House. The Ebabbar at Sippar suffered badly during the Sutean raids, losing its cult statue for generations until Nabu-apla-iddina replaced it in the ninth century BCE.

Related Entries

Sin, Inanna, Ishtar, Anu (Mesopotamian), Enlil, Enki, Ereshkigal, Nergal, Marduk, Anunnaki, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Humbaba, Scorpion People, Ra, Helios