Tammuz

“ We have seen251.2 that the evidence is clear that the life of Tammuz is the life of the crops and fruits; and we discern a pure nature-religion unmoralised and without dogma, but evoking a mood and a sentiment that might supply the motive force to more complex and more spiritual creeds. It was not suited to the religious atmosphere of the Assyrian and Babylonian courts; but its influence spread far through Asia Minor. ”

“ Still, if a real live Tammuz was burned on a funeral pyre [20] his ashes might well be represented by a dummy. It has not yet occurred to Mr. Frazer, as it does later, to have the re-arisen god personated by a living human counterpart (Mordecai in a later page) of the dead Tammuz (Haman) . The festival of the Sacæa is now a Tammuz festival, a religious feast, and, indeed, is identical with that of ii. 123, 124, for it occurs in the month Lous. Now Lous, says Mr. Robertson Smith, 'answered to the lunar month Tammuz,' [21] and the month of Tammuz [22] was June-July, or June-September. ”

“ The date of the rise of the myth of Tammuz is uncertain, but as the name of this god is found on tablets of the time of Lugal-anda and Uru-ka-gina (about 3500 B.C.) , it can hardly be of later date than 4000 B.C., and may be much earlier. As he is repeatedly called "the shepherd," and had a domain where he pastured his flock, Professor Sayce sees in Tammuz "Daonus or Daos, the shepherd of Pantibibla," who, according to Berosus, ruled in Babylonia for 10 /sari/, or 36,000 years, and was the sixth king of the mythical period. ”

“ Perhaps we may conceive of the event of his death as having taken place at Eridu before the service of lamentation had developed into a cult honored at the court of Sargon of Akkad, where a temple was built for Tammuz after northern Babylonia had gained the ascendency over southern Babylonia. The literal cause of his death was that he was not capable of making plant-growth a continuous process. The power of the heat of the sun as the summer advanced was superior to the virtue which Tammuz possessed over plant-life. The fierce heat of the summer caused vegetation to take a paler hue ”

“ It is perfectly clear from the texts which have been deciphered that Tammuz is not to be regarded merely as representing the Spirit of Vegetation; his influence is operative, not only in the vernal processes of Nature, as a Spring god, but in all its reproductive energies, without distinction or limitation, he may be considered as an embodiment of the Life principle, and his cult as a Life Cult. ”

“ The close of the legend of Ishtar's journey suggests that the festival of Tammuz was selected as an 'All-Souls' day. The weeping for the lost Tammuz served as an appropriate link for combining with the mourning for the god the lament for the dead. The water jar is never absent in the old Babylonian tombs, and by the side of the jar the bowl of clay or bronze is found, and which probably served the same purpose as a drinking utensil for the dead. How early it became customary to bury the dead together we do not know. ”

“ To say nothing of the continual charges against Jewish kings, from Solomon downwards, of setting up alien worships, and the express assertion of Jeremiah15 that in Judah there were as many Gods as cities, and in Jerusalem as many Baal altars as streets, we have the equally explicit assertion in Ezekiel16 that “women weeping for Tammuz” were to be seen in or at the Temple itself. Now, Tammuz was a Semitic deity, borrowed, it would seem, from the Akkadians,17 an original or variant of Adonis, the very type of the Saviour-God we are now tracing. Tammuz, like Jesus, was “the only-begotten son.” ”

“ The goddess Bau, "the mother of Lagash", was worshipped in conjunction with other deities, including the god Nin-Girsu, an agricultural deity, and therefore a deity of war, who had solar attributes. One of the titles of Nin-Girsu was En-Mersi, which, according to Assyrian evidence, was another name of Tammuz, the spring god who slew the storm and winter demons, and made the land fertile so that man might have food. Nin-Girsu was, it would seem, a developed form of Tammuz, like the Scandinavian Frey, god of harvest, or Heimdal, the celestial warrior. ”

“ In later times it appears that a different cause was assigned for the weeping of the "wailing men and wailing women." They no longer mourned the death of Tammuz, but the departure of Ishtar into the netherworld, and so the legend of her journey to Aralu came to be recited in the temples. Sir James Frazer suggests that the ritualistic counterpart of the Tammuz-Ishtar myth may have included the pouring of water over an effigy of the god, the practice corresponding to the pouring of the water of life over him in order to bring him back to life. ”

“ That the process of evolution was complete at a very early date has been proved by recent researches into the Sumerian-Babylonian civilization. We know now that the cult of the god Tammuz, who, if not the direct original of the Phoenician-Greek Adonis, is at least representative of a common parent deity, may be traced back to 3000 B.C., while it persisted among the Sabeans at Harran into the Middle Ages. ”

“ Clearly the king theory alone, or the Tammuz theory alone, will not yield the facts necessary to the hypothesis. Consequently the two theories must be combined. The king must not only be divine, be a god; he must also be a god of vegetation, a god of the Tammuz type, who has a resurrection. Now we have no evidence, or none is adduced, to prove that the king, whether Babylonian or Persian, was ever deemed to be an incarnation of Tammuz or any such vegetable deity. ”

“ We have not, meanwhile, even any testimony to show [Pg 127] that, in any time, in any place, any human victim was ever slain, let alone a king (and a king annually) , as Tammuz. We have only a guess, founded on the weakest possible basis, that of analogy, 'The analogy,' says Mr. Frazer, 'of Lityerses and of folk-custom, both European and savage, suggests that in Phœnicia the corn-spirit—the dead Adonis—may formerly have been represented by a human victim.' [5] .... This can hardly persuade me that the kings of Babylon were annually sacrificed as Tammuz or as Adonis. ”

“ In my Hibbert Lectures I have dealt so fully with the story of Tammuz in the various forms it assumed, as well as with the myth of Istar's pursuit of him in the world below, that I need not dwell upon it now. All I need do is to insist upon the caution with which we should build upon it theories about the Babylonian's conception of the other world, and the existence he expected to lead after death. ”

“ The references to their connexion with each other in myth and ritual are both fragmentary and obscure, but we gather from them that every year Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world, and that every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him "to the land from which there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust lies on door and bolt." During her absence the passion of love ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their kinds: all life was threatened with extinction. ”

“ As the spring sun god, Tammuz is "a youthful warrior", says Jastrow, "triumphing over the storms of winter". [121] The storms, of course, were symbolized as demons. Tammuz, "the heroic lord", was therefore a demon slayer like Heimdal and Agni. Each of these gods appear to have been developed in isolation from an archaic spring god of fertility and corn whose attributes were symbolized. In Teutonic mythology, for instance, Heimdal was the warrior form of the patriarch Scef, while Frey was the deified agriculturist who came over the deep as a child. ”

“ Much of the uncertainty as to date is doubtless due to the reflective influence of other forms of the cult; the Tammuz celebrations were held from June 20th, to July 20th, when the Dog-star Sirius was in the ascendant, and vegetation failed beneath the heat of the summer sun. ”

“ We have here, it may be, recollections of the days when Lydian soldiers marched against Egypt under the leadership of Hittite princes, and learnt to know the name and the character of Athar-'Ati, the goddess of Carchemish.
The Babylonian Istar was accompanied by her son and bridegroom Tammuz, the youthful Sun-god, the story of whose untimely death made a deep impression on the popular mind. Even in Jerusalem Ezekiel saw the women weeping for the death of Tammuz within the precincts of the temple itself ”

“ But it came finally; not even the most powerful of the winged creation could venture with impunity into the heaven of the gods.
While the celestial seat of Istar was beyond the reach of man, Istar herself sought Tammuz, the bridegroom of her youth, in the underground realm of Hades, in the hope that she might give him to drink of the waters of life which gushed up under the throne of the spirits of the earth, and so bring him back once more to life and light. The poem which told of her descent into Hades was sung at the yearly festival of Tammuz by the women, who wept for his untimely death. ”

“ As Sir J. G. Frazer has before now pointed out, there are parallel and over-lapping forms of this cult, the name of the god, and certain details of the ritual, may differ in different countries, but whether he hails from Babylon, Phrygia, or Phoenicia, whether he be called Tammuz, Attis, or Adonis, the main lines of the story are fixed, and invariable. Always he is young and beautiful, always the beloved of a great goddess ”

“ He seems to be presented to us just as though he were a man.
Our first paragraph may describe him as a resident of one of the ancient cities of southern Babylonia. The city of his residence was Eridu on the banks of the Euphrates. His official title is that of sun-god and his occupation is to care for the growth of plants. The name of his father was Ea, the lord of the city of Eridu, whose duties consisted in governing the waters of the river on whose shore the city rested. Tammuz had a mother, whose name was Davkina, the mistress of the vine. ”

“ The moon-god Sin was the first to utter his prediction: he suffered eclipse in the month of Tammuz, and for three successive days, at nightfall, showed himself in the sky surrounded by strange appearances which heralded the death of a king in Elam, and foretold calamity to that country. Then Assur and Ishtar struck Tiummân with violent convulsions ”

“ What appears to be an early form of the widespread Tammuz myth is the Teutonic legend regarding the mysterious child who came over the sea to inaugurate a new era of civilization and instruct the people how to grow corn and become great warriors. The Northern peoples, as archaeological evidence suggests, derived their knowledge of agriculture, and therefore their agricultural myths, from the Neolithic representatives of the Mediterranean race with whom they came into contact. ”

“ This theory also is untenable, for one might guess at any ancient god. The exact form of the name “Tauz” is uncertain (see Chwolsohn, Die Ssabier, II, 202) ; the statement that in Kurdish m is frequently changed to w is not true, if one would set it up as a grammatical rule to explain such phenomena; the Kurdish-speaking people never pronounce Tammuz, “Tauz;” and, finally, in the Yezidi conception of Melek Ṭâ ́ûs there are no traces of the notion held respecting Tammuz.
26
30 Such a state of affairs finds a historical parallel in other religions. ”

“ The worship of Ištar, she being the goddess of love and war, was considerably more popular than that of her spouse, Tammuz, who, as among the western Semitic nations, was adored rather by the women than the men. Her worship was in all probability of equal antiquity, and branched out, so to say, in several directions, as may be judged by her many names, each of which had a tendency to become a distinct personality. ”

“ Samas, the Sun-god, was the son of Sin, in accordance with the astronomical view of the old Babylonians; he was really only a form of Merodach, though in historical times the two were separated, and received different cults; originally identical with Tammuz, through the myth of Istar, separate attributes were assigned to him, and Tammuz became a deity distinct from Samas, 61-2.
Samas-Rimmon, Shalmaneser's second son, quelled the revolt against his father, and succeeded him as king of Assyria, 32. ”

“ The misery of death was a special theme of song at the rites of mourning for the spring god Tammuz (Adonis) , who each year sank into the world of the dead at the approach of winter. One lament for Tammuz recalls to mind the gardens and flower-pots used in the Phoenician and Greek Adonis cult, the forced growth and rapid fading of the plants. It runs: "Thou shepherd and lord, spouse of Istar, king of the Underworld, king of the dwelling-place of the waters ”

“ Tammuz-Av-Elul, but Ya`akov Avinu a"h overcame and snatched from him Elul and what remained in his hand was Tammuz and Av alone, and this is why he dominated in them during the churban/destruction of the Temple and dealt bad to Yisrael in them, but in the future these two also will be taken from him and Yisrael will dominate in them, and these two months will be festivals to Yisrael. This is what they say. ”

“ Nanâ, also written Nanna, is the Sumerian name of Ištar. NANNU is sometimes written like RI which, when preceded by the god-sign, also equals “Ištar”. ge (see Hymn to Adad, line 4) .
è (see Hymn to Sin, line 3) .
An-na-ka (see Hymn to Adad, line 4) . ka equals nota genitivi (see Br. 551 and Hymn to Bêl, line 1) .
im-me: im (see Hymn to Sin, line 23) . me (Hymn to Bêl, line 16) . Tammuz seems to be the shining one. The epithet “shining” is sometimes applied to gods, goddesses, kings, princes and others. The primary relation of Tammuz was that of lover. ”