Sin

The cows come out of the dark as sound before shape, hooves working wet clay, and then the colour arrives. The dark ones are the blue of translucent lapis. The pale ones are the exact light of a risen moon. A hymn sung at Ur tries to count them and gives up in the counting. Their herdsman walks among them with shining horns set on his head and fresh linen across his shoulders, mountain oil still on his skin, and when he tips the jar above the offering table the milk comes down white and unhurried. That is the moon, doing what the moon exists to do. The Sumerians called him Nanna. The Akkadians called him Su’en, and later, worn smooth by use, Sin.

He was written more ways than almost any other god in Mesopotamia. Nanna in one script, Su’en in another, Dilimbabbar in the literary texts, and from the Old Babylonian period onward a single numeral: 30, the days of a month standing in for the god who ran them. What none of the writings explain is where the names came from. The etymologies remain genuinely unknown, which is a strange thing to say about a deity attested from the very beginning of writing and still being invoked at the end of the cuneiform tradition, thousands of years later. In the oldest god lists he stands immediately after An, Enlil, Inana and Enki. Slightly junior, and enormously important.

The Sumerian account of his birth puts him at the front of a difficult family. In the myth of Enlil and Ninlil he is the first son, and his three brothers are a grim set to be born alongside: Nergal-Meslamtaea and Ninazu, both of the underworld, and Enbililu, who looked after irrigation. He married Ningal, whom the Akkadians called Nikkal, and their children were Inana and Utu, the morning star and the sun. Other sources add Ningublaga, two daughters with the resonant names Amarra-azu and Amarra-he’ea, and Numušda. His vizier was Alammuš. Much later, at Harran in the north, the god Nuska was reckoned his son, probably through contact with Aramaic belief rather than any old Mesopotamian tradition.

Finding his face is harder than finding his name. Anthropomorphic images turn up in the royal art of the Third Dynasty of Ur, where a fragment of Ur-Namma’s stele appears to show him seated on a throne built like a temple, and they thin out badly after that, which is odd given how many Old Babylonian parents were naming their children after him. What survives instead is the symbol. The crescent, carved on cylinder seals from the Early Dynastic period straight through to the Assyrian empire, and the two things the crescent looked like to people who lived among cattle and rivers: a pair of horns, and a boat. From the horns came the bull, his primary emblem, and from the bull came the whole business of the moon as a cowherd. From the boat came a god who travels, and one Sumerian composition took that literally.

In it, Nanna-Suen decides to visit his parents at Nippur, and first he has to build the barge. He sends for reeds from Tummal, pitch from the abzu, rushes from Du-ašaga, cypress for the strakes, cedar for the beams, planking from the forests of Ebla. He loads it with bulls and fattened sheep, goats, small birds netted from ponds, carp, baskets of eggs, bundles of old and new reed. Then he goes upriver, and at every city a goddess comes out to meet the boat with flour and bran spread before it, a bronze vat at her feet, promising ghee and syrup and wine if he will only stop. Ningirida at Enegir. Šerida at Larsa. Inana, his own daughter, at Uruk. Ninunuga at Šuruppak. Ninlil at Tummal. Each time the boat answers the same way and does not stop: I am going to Nibru. He docks at last at the Shining Quay and stands outside his father’s house shouting at the doorkeeper to open up, listing his cargo item by item until Kalkal, laughing, works the bolt. Enlil is delighted. He calls for sweet cakes and the finest beer for his little fellow. Then Suen asks for what he actually came for, and it is not glory: flood in the river so the carp can breed, speckled barley in the fields, reed in the reedbeds, ibex and wild ram in the forests, syrup and wine in the orchards, long life in the palace.

That is the shape of him. Abundance, and the patient keeping of it. The longest surviving hymn on the subject does nothing but enumerate the cattle in his herd. A magical-medical text called A Cow of Sin tells how his beautiful cow Geme-Sin came to her labour and how the moon god eased her pains, and it ends by asking that the woman being spoken over give birth as easily as Geme-Sin did. The moon governed the month, the month governed the cycle, and a god of cattle was already a god of things being born.

His other power was colder. Light in a dark place is also the ability to see, and Sin was a god of divination, invoked in prayers about reading the future and paired with his son the sun in texts about issuing laws, determining destinies and announcing omens. Oaths were sworn in his presence as early as the Stele of the Vultures. One of his epithets, used across the whole Near East, was diviner of fates. Babylonian scholars compiled an entire omen series out of watching him, opening with the words if the moon at its appearance, and every irregularity in his rising was a sentence in a language kings paid to have translated.

Which made his failures terrifying. A tablet of the exorcists’ series Utukkū Lemnūtu explains the lunar eclipse as an ambush: seven evil gods swarming at the base of heaven under Ištar’s direction and with An’s consent, closing on the crescent until the light goes out. The most reliable thing in the sky can be put out, and the ritual response was to make noise until it came back. He suffered a quieter eclipse too, sliding out of fashion between roughly 1500 and 1000 BCE before returning hard in the first millennium, when Assyrians named their children for him and court letters put him second only to Aššur in blessings on the king.

At Ur his sanctuary was the é-kiš-nu-gal and his ziggurat, built by Ur-Namma out of solid brick, still stands in the plain. For centuries the reigning king’s daughter served as his high priestess there, the most famous being Enheduanna, whose authorship of the poems attached to her name is now seriously disputed. In the north, at Harran, he had the é-húl-húl, the House of Rejoicing. It was there that the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, made him the centre of a reign that has puzzled everyone since: a rebuilt temple, a stele recording the long devout life of his mother Adda-guppi, a decade spent away at Tayma while his son held Babylon. Whether he truly tried to raise the moon above the rest of the pantheon is now thought to be an over-reading of the evidence. What is certain is that he restored the god’s temple at Ur, put a high priestess back in office after centuries, and went to the moon for permission to be king.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sin in Mesopotamian mythology?

Sin is the Mesopotamian moon god, called Nanna in Sumerian and Su’en or Sin in Akkadian. He was the patron deity of the city of Ur and one of the most important gods in the pantheon, ranking just below An, Enlil, Inana and Enki in the earliest god lists. He was worshipped from the beginning of writing in Mesopotamia until the end of the cuneiform tradition.

What is the difference between Nanna and Sin?

There is no difference in the god, only in the language. Nanna is the Sumerian name and Su’en or Sin the Akkadian, and the earliest writings of both are roughly contemporary and used interchangeably. A third name, Dilimbabbar, appears only in literary texts. From the Old Babylonian period the god was also written with the numeral 30, for the days of the month.

Why is Sin associated with cattle and bulls?

The horizontal crescent of the waxing moon looks like a pair of horns, so the bull became Sin’s primary symbol and the moon god became a cowherd. One Sumerian composition consists largely of a list of the cattle in his herd, and a hymn describes his dark cows as lapis lazuli and his pale ones as the light of the risen moon. The cattle link also tied him to fertility and childbirth.

How did Mesopotamians explain a lunar eclipse?

A tablet of the exorcistic series Utukkū Lemnūtu describes the eclipse as an attack by seven evil gods who whirl at the base of heaven and close on the crescent moon, acting under Ištar’s direction and with An’s approval. Sin was also watched constantly for omens through the series beginning “If the moon at its appearance,” in which every irregularity of his rising carried meaning for the king.

What was Sin’s connection to Harran and King Nabonidus?

Harran, in the north, held Sin’s temple the é-húl-húl, the House of Rejoicing, attested as a cult centre from the Old Babylonian period onward. The last Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus, rebuilt that temple, set up a stele commemorating his mother Adda-guppi’s devotion to the moon god, and spent about a decade at Tayma in Arabia while his son governed Babylon. Whether he genuinely tried to elevate Sin over the rest of the pantheon is now regarded by many scholars as an over-interpretation of the evidence.

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Shamash, Inanna, Ishtar, Enlil, Enki, Nergal, Ereshkigal, Anu, Anunnaki, Marduk, Gallu, Bull of Heaven, Ninhursag