hi my name is jack rackham and today i'm going to introduce you to the old gods older than the pharaohs of egypt older than the pantheon of olympus older than writing the gods of mesopotamia ruled when civilization was just beginning to take shape in the fertile crescent between the tigris and euphrates rivers their worship coincides with the birth of the wheel irrigation and written language over 5 000 years ago but you might be surprised to learn that even if you've never before heard their names some of their stories are eerily [Music] familiar [Music] now i
want to begin with an important caveat the mesopotamian pantheon was around for a long time and this religion was practiced by many different cultures across hundreds of miles and thousands of years each culture had its own slightly different take on how they practiced religion so there are no definitive versions of these stories for instance there can be quite a bit of overlap between the duties of different gods and which gods are most important when the sumerians first adopted the religion different cities had different patron deities and so when certain cities like akkad or asur or
babylon built their empires their patron deity became way more important and often adopted the qualities of gods that used to be more important in different cities in short there is no mesopotamian bible to give us a single definitive cannon now with that disclaimer behind us let's turn our attention to the top of the chart abzu and tiamat are the primal gods and they present an interesting cosmology unlike other religions that feature either a creator or perhaps personifications of the earth and the sky the first beings abzu and tiamat were the personifications of fresh water and
salt water tiamat the glistening one is the raging sea the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos abzu her husband was the king of the primeval freshwater sea beneath the world from which all aquifers draw their life-giving water these two waters mixed and tiamat bore the stars in the heavens and they in turn begat anshar and kishar not much information survives about these two but they're the first instance both within this family tree as well as historically of a very popular trope among many polytheistic religions that of the sky father and earth mother their children anu and
ki are another form of this same trope much like with the greek titans and olympians they fulfill the same role as their parents anu was the supreme god but despite this he was rarely worshiped and sort of fell into the background his most important role in society rather than being a god of the sky was being sort of the god of divinity itself he transferred divine authority to kings on earth and gods alike his wife key has a couple of identities having once been called urash and later being supplanted by antu though they're all more
or less the same person she was goddess of the earth and it was believed that the rain was anu's seed and that when the rain came down the earth became pregnant and ki thereby gave birth to all things alongside the plants ki gave birth to the anunnaki who are sort of like the olympians or the acer of norse mythology their name means the ones who decree because they were believed to hold the fates of humans in their hands the two most important of the anunnaki were the brothers enlil and enki enlil in contrast to his
father was worshipped a lot he was seen as the ultimate benevolent father figure and was so holy that even certain other gods couldn't look upon him he was responsible for the creation of civilization and his temple was the anchor between heaven and earth his wife was ninla who was the lady of the wind or lady of the open field when they met enlil seduced ninla by the riverside and they conceived nanar god of the moon enlo was then sent to the underworld for his ritually impure relationship with nin lil but she follows him along the
way she encounters enlil three more times disguised as the gatekeeper of the city he's left the river of the underworld and the underworld's ferryman an element of the mesopotamian religion that would later find itself integrated into greek mythology each time ninla is seduced and impregnated with a new deity a god of canals a god with a curious dual association with both the underworld as well as healing and most importantly the god of death nergal enlil is also important in the mesopotamian flood myth another point of similarity with later religions originally the story went that there
was a great flood and enlil rewarded the sole survivor utnapashtim with immortality but in later tellings he was the cause of the flood himself enlil couldn't sleep because there were too many humans on the earth making noise so he decided to kill every living thing with a flood his brother enki warned udnapusdem of the oncoming flood so he and his family became the only survivors enlil was furious to see humans still walking the earth but his son ninurta and his granddaughter inanna convinced him to promise never to flood the earth again and instead to periodically
cull the human population with wild animals and famines so hooray and then he briefly went to see the humans and they treated him with respect in spite of or maybe because of the apocalypse he just inflicted so he blesses udnapishtim with immortality this was very much an explanation myth more so than a moral fable the other primary anunnaki enki is a god of creation as well as a trickster at times heroic at times villainous and other times just plain lazy he's a central figure in the creation of humanity once upon a time abzu was growing
old and tired but he was disturbed by the ruckus of the younger gods and so he set out to destroy them the gods found out about this and enki stepped forward as their point guard he placed abzu in a deep sleep and carried him deep underground this begged the question who would care for abzu's primordial waters while he slept so enki dove deep down to the freshwater sea beneath the earth to rule abzu's realm in his stead tiamat was not happy with their children usurping abzu so she transformed into a terrifying dragon in order to
destroy the world herself this time enki chooses to do nothing because apparently putting one elder god to rest was as much as he could muster so enlil stepped up to slay the dragon he tore her body apart making the vault of the heavens with her ribs and the milky way with her tail but of course she couldn't truly be killed and so she carried on living in that disfigured form and from her crying eyes sprang forth the rivers tigris and euphrates once again the question arose without tiamat who would keep the cosmos working as intended
and this time enki came back with a clever solution the gods would create servants from clay to tend to the earth that's us but enki was also promiscuous and deceitful in one very sordid tale enki has an affair with ninhersag a fertility goddess but eventually she left him some years later enki is still lonely and missing his lost lover when who should appear but a beautiful young woman who looks just like her enki at once seduces her not knowing that this woman was the daughter he had with ninhersag well she eventually leaves him and time
goes by and enki is again stewing in his loneliness when he meets another beautiful young maiden this is also his daughter and also his granddaughter years go by and there's a third mysterious young woman who looks very much like ninhersog even though going by dna she would be 87.5 percent enki ninersog finds out what's happened and undoes it then sets out to turn the tables on enki his whole body begins to swell and he seems to be dying until nintendog takes mercy and removes the swelling from him creating gods of healing for each part of
the body afflicted aside from that ultimate incestuous line enki had a son named marduk who became the patron god of babylon he used to be a very minor god until the reign of hammurabi in which babylon conquered much of the fertile crescent marduk then took on the roles and myths of enki and enlil according to babylonian tradition it was marduk who slayed abzu and defeated tiamat he's also associated with the planet jupiter and so is sometimes seen as the equivalent to the roman jupiter though the similarities are limited returning to enlil and ninla's side of
the tree their son ninorta is associated with farming and healing whether that's alleviating sickness or driving out demons he's associated with the planet saturn and the roman saturn aka cronus again it's not an exact match but they do share similar themes of farming and the passage of time and eventually ninorta became associated with war as well he enjoyed much popularity during the neo-assyrian empire during a time when the empire was largely henotheistic that means they acknowledged the existence of many gods but only worshiped one in this case usually the god asher who was likely the
assyrian equivalent of enlil but after the fall of the empire ninerta had become too closely associated with the oppressive warlike regime so his statues were torn down and he faded once again into obscurity though sometimes presented as the son of nin-lil there are other stories in which he's the son of ninersag that's because after defeating a mighty army with the help of his talking mace he used his enemies fallen stone soldiers to construct the mountains and the hills dedicating them to his mother whom he renamed ninersag which means lady of the mountain he's also known
for defeating the anzu a giant bird that stole his father enlil's tablet of destinies the object which denoted his divine right to rule ninerta shot the bird with arrows but the tablet had the ability to turn back time so the arrow's shaft turned to kane the flint heads returned to the quarry and the feathers turned to birds i find this particularly interesting as most classical or medieval stories depicting any kind of time travel or almost always moving forward in time and nearly anything about going backwards is much much more recent ultimately he summons a wind
that rips the bird's wings off and then he slits its throat and in some versions he ends up desiring further glory and attempts to take over the world but enki defeats him with a giant turtle that nips at his ankles next we have nanar who's a little unique in being a moon god rather than a moon goddess he's also named sin but not because he was evil it just happens that was the name he took in the ancient semitic polytheistic religion he has a beard of lapis lazuli and rides a winged bull but other than
that we don't know too much about him because his time in the spotlight was when er was the most powerful of the sumerian city-states which was around 2600 to 2400 bce however the famous ziggurat of ur was dedicated to him so he still has that distinguishment okay now before we get to gilgamesh and his mother let's quickly run through the final generation of the anunnaki nabu is the son of marduk and is the god of wisdom writing and prophecies he's associated with the planet mercury and sometimes with the god mercury both being gods of wisdom
and messages though he shares some characteristics with apollo as a giver of prophecies inanna otherwise known as ishtar is a very important goddess and the one about whom we have the most information but to do justice to her would require an entire other video luckily this video is being made in collaboration with mythology with mike who's created an entire video all about her so i'll just cover the basics she was the goddess of love and beauty much like her roman counterpart venus but also goddess of war justice and political power and one day she was
courted by two minor deities one a shepherd and the other a farmer she initially likes the farmer but is persuaded to pick the shepherd because he can give her the better gifts a setup similar to the story of cain and abel in the bible anyway that shepherd is dumazid and they live happily ever after until inanna decides to descend to the underworld and finds herself trapped there like many who've come before her dumazid fails to mourn her properly so when inanna eventually breaks out and returns to the overworld the demons demand a replacement inanna sees
what dumazid's been up to and offers him to be dragged down but eventually she takes pity on him and so she works out a deal where he'll spend half the year in the underworld and half on the surface which explains seasons and yes for those keeping track at home this is a likely inspiration for the myth of persephone in hades next is inanna's twin brother utu utu was trying to help dumazid when the demons came to drag him to the netherworld because he is the god of justice he's also the god of the sun riding
a chariot across the sky during the day and traveling through the underworld at night his position from the sky allows him to see everything on earth and therefore to enforce justice truth and morality among mortals a fun fact about him there is actually a carved portrait of utu in the u.s house chamber just above the gallery doors in 1950 they installed the portraits of famous lawmakers and philosophers and this one of hammurabi was based off of this figure in the hammurabi steely sitting on his throne and wearing a spiraling hat however the man sitting on
the throne isn't hamurabi in all of hammurabi's depictions he's got this round hat that looks like a helmet whereas utu who has a higher station than a king is depicted in a throne wearing his spiraling hat and finally there's ereshkigal and nergal nergal as i mentioned earlier is a son of enlil and ninlow and areshkogal is inanna and utu's older sister though she's not really associated with them that often aside from the story about inanna's descent into the underworld her primary myth is about her marriage one day there is a banquet that ereshkagal can't visit
because she's queen of the underworld and the other gods don't want to throw a party down there because people have a tendency of getting trapped so ereshkigal sends someone on her behalf at the party nergal is rude to ireshkagal's envoy so she summons him to the underworld he's told that if he ever wants to make it out alive he cannot eat drink wash or sit in ereshkigal's kingdom but he also can't sleep with the goddess of the underworld and that turns out to be more challenging for him he tries to leave after having an affair
with her but she drags him back down even after he tries to disguise himself but despite initially being called down to the underworld as punishment the two get married and nergal becomes king of the underworld okay we're finally ready to talk about gilgamesh recently on this channel we've been doing segments on whether various figures from ancient history actually existed in real life or whether they were primarily a product of human imagination so far we've looked at moses and the buddha using the historical method as our guide let's now turn our attention to gilgamesh and ask
the question did gilgamesh exist in previous videos matt talked about the three options that can be used to determine someone's existence physical remains archaeological evidence and textual sources now keep in mind that gilgamesh if he did exist would have lived around 2 800 bce which is around 1500 years earlier than the traditional time frame for the lifetime of moses this basically rules out any hopes of ever finding gilgamesh's physical remains the earliest human remains which can be directly identified as belonging to known historical people are as you might have guessed the mummies of egyptian pharaohs
and most of the oldest mummies for which we have names are those from the 17th and 18th dynasty well over a thousand years after gilgamesh would have lived we can also rule out textual sources as matt mentioned previously humans really only started writing reliable history sometime after 600 bce everything before this was written in the style of myth and legend which always mixed in a heavy dose of fantasy with bits of real history considering that gilgamesh would have lived a whopping 2 000 plus years before humans started to write straightforward history it's not surprising that
all the texts we have about him are quite clearly greatly embellished that leaves archaeological evidence let's start with the sumerian king list which has been found in multiple locations the oldest one dating to around 2000 bce gilgamesh is included on the list but there are two problems with this source one it's still 800 years after gilgamesh and 2 it clearly includes both historical kings and legendary ones for example there is one king who is said to have reigned for 43 200 years a reign that will surely only be beaten by queen elizabeth ii but she
still has a long way to go interestingly however the first king on the sumerian king list for whom we have contemporary archaeological evidence is a man named enma baraguessi and according to the epic of gilgamesh and mabara gessie lived at the same time as gilgamesh this places gilgamesh around the exact point on the sumerian king list where the names go from being legendary to being historical it is therefore possible if not probable that gilgamesh was in fact a real historical king even though the stories we have about him are primarily mythological the earliest stories about
him come from sumerian poems in gilgamesh and kidu and the netherworld he is inanna's brother and helps her to drive away the serpent the anzu bird and demon from a special hulupu tree as thanks she gives him a pair of special objects the names of which aren't completely deciphered but might be a drum and drumsticks but he loses them his servant and kiru travels to the underworld to retrieve them because apparently gilgamesh really misplaced them but as we've seen before and kidu gets trapped gilgamesh asks him about the underworld and what life after death is
like and that's where the poem ends there are other stories involving gilgamesh revolting against the king of kish and he and ankidu defeating an ogre sent by enlil but the most famous is the epic of gilgamesh in it gilgamesh is described as two-thirds divine through his mother ninsun and one-third mortal through his father the former king of uruk gilgamesh starts the story as a tyrant king and as punishment anu creates a wild man named enkidu to slay him and kidu travels to gilgamesh and the two men wrestle but gilgamesh proves too strong for even anu's
creation nonetheless he's so impressed by enkidu that the two become friends rather than the master servant dynamic of earlier versions together they travel to the cedar forest guarded by humbaba the giant with the face of a lion his roar is a flood his mouth is death and his breath is fire it's only with the help of utu's blinding wind that the two are able to slay the beast this daring feat attracts the attention of inanna who wants gilgamesh to be her consort but gilgamesh turns her down on account of how her past lovers have been
treated inanna doesn't take kindly to being spurned by a mortal and sends down the bull of heaven to slay him but gilgamesh and nkidu kill the bull and offer it to utu while they're resting inanna comes down from heaven and stands upon the walls of uruk to lay a curse upon gilgamesh gilgamesh in a move equal parts impressive and foolish pulls off the bull's thigh and throws it over the wall hitting the goddess in the face he threatens to do the same to her if he ever gets his hands on her and immediately the two
begin bickering as inanna orders everyone to mourn the bull and gilgamesh orders everyone to celebrate its death unfortunately the curse comes into effect and gilgamesh has a dream that he or and kidu must die the gods convene and select and kidu and considering gilgamesh was the one hitting people with cow legs i'm left to interpret that the other gods must have thought inanna had it coming gilgamesh is struck with grief over his friend's death and he suddenly feels a pit in his stomach as he's hit with his own mortality for the first time so he
leaves uruk and travels across the sea to find the only man who has achieved immortality but napishtim the survivor of the great flood he tells gilgamesh that to avoid death he must first stop sleeping gilgamesh pushes himself to his physical limits but ultimately he can't resist forever and falls into a deep sleep that lasts for seven straight days utnapashtim tells him if he cannot defeat sleep he cannot become truly immortal but that eternal youth can still be his if he consumes a rare plant again gilgamesh sets out on a quest but after finding the plant
the one secret to eternal youth he leaves it unattended to take a swim in which time a snake comes by and steals it explaining the way in which snakes can shed their skin defeated again gilgamesh returns home to samaria empty-handed and the story ends there apart from fragments that don't neatly fit within the chronology of the rest of the epic for instance the story of gilgamesh helping inanna with her tree is on a different tablet despite the two trying to kill each other and there's another story in which enkidu is alive again only to die
again and that's the family tree of the mesopotamian gods hopefully this acts as a nice crash course to one of the oldest religions in the world and the ways in which little bits of it survive in religious tradition to this day if you want to see some more in-depth historical analysis of world religions i highly recommend matt's series breaking down who wrote the bible but first don't forget to check out mythology with mike's video on the goddess ishtar thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you
