Tammuz

The fourth month of the Babylonian year fell in the worst of the heat, when the canals ran low, the barley was already cut and threshed, and the fields between the rivers baked to the hardness of brick. That was the month set aside for weeping. From Uruk to Babylon to the Assyrian cities in the north, women sat down in the dust and mourned a young man who had been dead longer than anyone could reckon, and the month itself carried his name. Du’uzu. Tammuz.

He came into Akkadian from Sumerian, the way Ishtar came in from Inanna. Behind him stands Dumuzid, the shepherd god of the older tradition, whose corpus is thick with story: the courtship songs, the quarrel with the farmer, the dream of the reeds falling, the demons closing on the sheepfold. Akkadian speakers took the god and kept the marriage and let most of the narrative go. What they built instead was a season of grief, an annual civic event with professional singers and a fixed date, and a god who is present in the literature mainly as a name that makes people cry.

He turns up, characteristically, inside somebody else’s argument. In the sixth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar climbs to the wall of Uruk and offers herself to the king, promising him a chariot of lapis and gold and kings bowed under him. Gilgamesh answers by reciting the list of her lovers, and he begins at the top: Tammuz, the lover of your earliest youth, for whom you have ordained lamentations year upon year. Then the bright roller bird whose wing she broke, so that it stands in the woods crying “My wing!”; the lion and its seven pits; the stallion given the whip and the goad and muddied water to drink; the herdsman turned into a wolf and hunted by his own dogs; the date gardener Ishullanu, shrunk to a dwarf and left standing in the middle of his own orchard. Tammuz heads that list, and the poem assumes the reader already knows why. The weeping is older than the joke.

The fullest Akkadian text to name him is the poem of Ishtar’s descent. The goddess goes down to the land of no return, the house of Irkalla where the dead eat clay and drink dust and wear their wings like feathered coats, and at each of seven gates the porter strips something from her, crown, earrings, necklace, breast ornaments, the birthstone girdle, the bands on her hands and feet, and at last the cloth around her hips. Ereshkigal, queen below, looses sixty diseases on her. Above ground, everything stops. The bull does not mount the cow, the ass does not go near the she-ass, the man sleeps in his room and the woman sleeps alone. Ea forms a creature to go down and flatter Ereshkigal into a careless promise, and Ishtar is sprinkled with the water of life and led back out, receiving her ornaments again gate by gate.

Then the poem turns and speaks to somebody standing over a body. If she will not give up your dead, it says, then for Tammuz, the lover of her youth, pour out clean water and fine oil, dress him in a festival garment, let him play the flute of lapis lazuli. His sister Belili is nearby with her lap full of jewels, and when she hears her brother’s lament she throws the stones down and scatters them, crying that she is not to be left. Play for me, she says to the mourning women, so that the dead may come up and smell the incense. The great myth of the Akkadian Tammuz ends with a funeral service and a stage direction.

Nobody says what he looked like. There is no lion head, no horned crown, no beard of a particular cut, none of the visual furniture that the scribes lavished on other gods, and the closest thing to a portrait is the ritual kit: the clean water, the oil, the good cloth, the blue flute. He is a god known by his own funeral. That is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly, because most Mesopotamian deities are described from the outside, as something a person might meet, while Tammuz is described from the position of the people burying him.

The cult travelled, and its most famous witness is hostile. In the eighth chapter of Ezekiel, written by an exile from Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE, the prophet is led to the north gate of the temple and shown women sitting there, weeping for Tammuz. What exactly those women thought they were doing has been argued over ever since. The old reading makes them petitioners for the fertility of the land. A more recent one, following the shape of the Sumerian city laments, reads the rite as grief for a god who has abandoned his city, which in Ezekiel’s Jerusalem would make it a lament not for a Babylonian shepherd but for a departed YHWH, performed in the only borrowed form available.

Powers are the wrong frame for him. He does not act, he is acted upon: chosen, married, taken below, mourned, dressed, mourned again next year. Whatever force this cult had ran through the mourners rather than the god, which is why the lament tradition itself, the balag and ershemma laments performed in the Emesal dialect by temple singers, survived for two thousand years while the stories about him thinned to almost nothing. His weakness is built into the same structure. Tammuz is the one who is taken. Whether he ever came back up is genuinely unclear from the Akkadian texts, and it has been the noisiest question about him for over a century.

James Frazer put him at the head of the dying and rising gods in The Golden Bough from 1890, a god annually killed and annually resurrected as the grain, and the pattern became so influential that it was applied to half the world. It has not held up well. Jonathan Z. Smith and Mark S. Smith both concluded the category was largely a scholarly fantasy, and when Tryggve Mettinger reopened the case in 2001 and argued that several such gods really did exist, his chapter on Dumuzi and Tammuz was the most cautious in the book: the texts have him die and be mourned in quantity, while the handful of references to his rising are vague and appear to describe divine images being carried in procession between temples rather than a resurrection anyone believed in.

The rite outlived the argument and very nearly outlived memory. Writing in tenth-century Iraq, Ibn Wahshiyya recorded that the Sabians of Babylonia and of Harran still wept and lamented for Tammuz every year in the month named after him, the women loudest, reading long litanies over him. He also recorded, with some irritation, that neither community could tell him a single reliable thing about who Tammuz had been or why they were crying. The version preserved in al-Nadim’s Fihrist supplies a story of sorts, in which Tammuz’s master killed him and ground his bones in a hand-mill and winnowed them to the wind, which is why the mourning women eat nothing milled that day and live on soaked wheat, chickpeas, dates and raisins; scholars generally read that detail as an import from the Syrian god Mot rather than anything Babylonian. Three thousand years after the first laments were sung in Sumerian, people were still sitting down in the heat of midsummer to weep for him, and none of them could say what for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tammuz?

Tammuz is the Akkadian and Babylonian form of the Sumerian shepherd god Dumuzid, the young consort of the goddess Ishtar. He belongs to the land of the dead, and the fourth month of the Babylonian calendar was named after him and given over to public mourning for his death. He appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh as the first of Ishtar’s ruined lovers and in the poem of her descent to the underworld.

Why did women weep for Tammuz?

The month of Du’uzu, falling in the midsummer heat, was the fixed season for lamenting Tammuz across Mesopotamia, and the mourning was carried mainly by women and by professional temple singers. What the weeping was meant to achieve is disputed. One reading makes it a plea for the fertility of the land, while another treats it as grief for a god who has left his city, following the pattern of the older Sumerian city laments.

What is the difference between Tammuz and Dumuzid?

They are the same god under Akkadian and Sumerian names, but the two bodies of literature are very different, which is why Gods and Monsters treats them as separate entries. The Sumerian Dumuzid has a large narrative corpus, including the courtship poems and the dream of his own death. The Akkadian Tammuz has almost no stories and an enormous ritual footprint: a month, a lament tradition and a cult that outlasted Babylon by well over a thousand years.

Is Tammuz mentioned in the Bible?

Yes, once. Ezekiel 8:14 describes the prophet being brought to the north gate of the temple in Jerusalem, where women sat weeping for Tammuz. The passage is written as an accusation of foreign worship inside the temple precinct, and it is the clearest evidence that the Mesopotamian mourning rite had reached the Levant by the sixth century BCE.

Did Tammuz die and rise again?

He certainly died and was mourned, and that part is attested in quantity. The resurrection is much shakier. James Frazer made Tammuz the model dying and rising god in The Golden Bough, but later scholarship dismantled the category, and even Tryggve Mettinger’s 2001 defence of it found only a few vague references to Tammuz rising, most of which look like descriptions of a divine statue being carried between temples.

Related Entries

Ishtar, Dumuzid, Geshtinanna, Ereshkigal, Inanna, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Bull of Heaven, Enki, Nergal, Shamash, Adonis, Baal, Mot, Osiris, Persephone