Nikkal

Summary

Nikkal is the bride of Yarikh the moon on the Ugarit tablets, and she is the Sumerian Ningal, "the Great Lady", wife of Nanna the moon at Ur and, in the Sumerian genealogies, mother of Utu the sun and Inanna the evening star. The Sumerians wrote her name ᵈnin-gal; in Mesopotamia it was pronounced Nikkal, and from there it passed to Syria, so that Ugarit wrote it nkl and later Aramaic inscriptions name her.

Her fullest story in Sumer is the Lament for Urim. A storm decreed by the gods comes upon the city; Ningal comes to her husband Nanna weeping for his city and his house, and then speaks in her own voice: I beat my wings like a bird of heaven and flew to my city, and my city was destroyed in its foundations. She says she shed her tears before An and implored Enlil: "Let not my city be destroyed, let not Urim be destroyed, let not its people perish"; a second time, when the council had settled itself and the Anuna had seated themselves to decide, she stretched out her arms and wept; but An did not change his word, Enlil did not soothe her heart with "It is good, so be it", and they decreed that the city be destroyed and its people killed. The lament ends by calling her back: "Mother Ningal, return like a bull to your cattle-pen, like a sheep to your fold." Lament for Urim 76–84, 101–111, 136–168 and 378–386, ETCSL.

At Ugarit a short poem, KTU 1.24, opens with her name: "Let me sing of Nikkal-and-Ib, daughter of Harhab, king of weddings." Yarikh the moon burns at the setting of the sun and embraces her who was born of the Kotharat, the goddesses of conception and birth, then sends to her father: "Give Nikkal", promising a thousand shekels of silver, ten thousand of gold and lapis lazuli, and to turn her steppes into vineyards and the steppe of her love into orchards. Her father offers him other brides, among them Pidray, daughter of Baal, and Yarikh says: "With Nikkal will be my wedding." The bride-price is paid on the scales: her father sets up the beam, her mother the pans, her brothers arrange the ingots and her sisters the weights. It ends with a blessing, "Nikkal-and-Ib of whom I sing; may Yarikh shine on you", and a hymn to the Kotharat listing their names. Wyatt thinks the poem was recited at weddings and that it reflects Hurrian tradition.

The idea Nikkal's stories turn on is that the Great Lady, wife of the moon, stands with the house. At Ur she stands before the council of the gods asking that her house and her city not be destroyed; at Ugarit a new house is founded with her, her family weighs her bride-price with their own hands, and the goddesses of birth surround her. In both she is a mother: she weeps for the children of her city when they perish, and she is sung at weddings for the children who will be born.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Sumerian essay reads NIN.GAL in two parts: nin, "lady", and gal, from Arabic jalla, to be great and majestic, so that Ningal is "the majestic lady". Arabic j appears in Sumerian as g; in Lane jalla is said of a thing that was great in size and of a man who was great in rank and dignity. In Mesopotamia the n then merged into the g, the name became Nikkal, and Ugarit wrote it so. In her texts she is majestic indeed: mother of the sun and the evening star, wife of the moon, with a bride-price of a thousand shekels of silver and ten thousand of gold.

Linguistic Root

Nikkal and jalīla

The Sumerian essay divides the name into nin and gal and reads the second part from Arabic jalla, which it counts its likeliest reading; then jalīl as a middling reading, jalā, "it shone", as an interpretive one, and kull as weak. In its table of correspondences Sumerian g answers Arabic j, q and k, with the example "gal = jall". In Lane jalla is said of a thing that became big and bulky, and of a man who became great in estimation and rank; jalāla is greatness of rank, jalāl supreme greatness. The same reading is given to gal in Nergal and elsewhere.

In the passage from nin-gal to Nikkal the n merged into the following letter, as a closing n always does in Akkadian, so the g was doubled and was then written k. Stol says that the name of Sin's wife, written ᵈNin.gal, was pronounced Nikkal, and that with this pronunciation it was taken into Syria as the name of the moon god's partner. All the letters are kept except the n that merged.

Ib and abb

At the head of the Ugaritic poem her name is double, "Nikkal-and-Ib", and the tablets write the second ib with a glottal stop. Wyatt says two explanations are equally plausible: Akkadian enbu, "fruit", and Akkadian ebbu, "bright". We read it, as a reading proposed on the method, as Arabic abb, with a glottal stop and a doubled b: in Lane, herbage fresh or dry, or the pasture beasts feed on, "which is to beasts what fruit is to men", and some say dried fruit stored for winter. If its source is Akkadian enbu, the n merges into the b as it merged in Nikkal, and the b is doubled, as it is in abb. In the same poem Yarikh promises to turn the bride's steppes into vineyards and the steppe of her love into orchards.

Set aside after the dictionary check: kull in the essay's list, since the g of the name answers j in all its other readings.

Shifts used: Sumerian g is Arabic j; a closing n merges into the next letter in Akkadian.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Kotharat

The Ugaritic poem opens by naming the Kotharat, calls on them three times as the story goes on, and ends with a hymn to them that lists their names. Wyatt takes them to be seven goddesses of pregnancy and birth, corresponding to the Akkadian birth goddesses, and reads Nikkal in this poem as their daughter, so that they are called on at every birth. The same Kotharat enter the house of Danel when he is promised a son in the story of Aqhat; he slaughters an ox for them and feeds them for six days, and they leave on the seventh.

Nikkal in Syria after Ugarit

Schmidt writes that Nikkal's cult in Syria perhaps developed independently of Mesopotamia and lasted well into the common era, and that the Ugaritic poem expresses the hope for the fertility the moon and his wife could give to those who sought them. He adds that the Assyrian kings from Shalmaneser III to Ashurbanipal carried the cult of the moon god of Harran to the farthest west of their empire, and that the second-millennium texts of Ugarit already show the Mesopotamian lunar couple, Sin and Ningal, in western Syria.

Symbolic Reading

The Sumerian essay says Ningal is truly "the Great Lady": mother of the sun and the evening star and wife of the moon, so the mother of the heavenly bodies, and the mother from whose womb the sun and the star came out is the greatest. It compares her with Greek Selene.

The Ugaritic poem gives two images from the land and the household. The bridegroom promises that the steppe will become vineyards and orchards, and the wedding itself is a contract weighed on the scales. Wyatt sees in the steppe turned to orchard an agricultural image of the consummation of the marriage and its fruit.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The wedding of Nikkal and Yarikh is one of the two weddings between gods on the Ugarit tablets, the other being El's in the story of Shahar and Shalim, and both belong to the sacred marriage. In India it is answered by the wedding hymn of the Rigveda in which Sūryā, the Sun's daughter, is given in marriage to the moon; see Soma.

Ningal standing before An and Enlil in the council of the Anuna, pleading twice and not being heard, belongs to the divine council: the council decides, and An's word does not change.

In her genealogies Ningal is the mother of Utu, in some the mother of Inanna, and the wife of Nanna, whom the Akkadians called Sin.