Ningishzida

Summary

Ningishzida is a Sumerian god of the underworld and of growing plants. His home was the town of Gishbanda near Ur, his father was Ninazu and his mother Ningirida, and he was the personal god of Gudea, ruler of Lagash. Seals show him with snakes and the heads of the mušḫuššu dragon rising from his shoulders, and his hymn calls him the one "who brings together giant snakes and dragons".

His fullest story is the Sumerian poem Ningishzida's Journey to the Netherworld. It opens with a call: arise, get on board, we are about to sail. The young man is carried off on a barge while people stretch out their hands to him; his younger sister weeps in the cabin, and his older sister pulls back its cover and says: let me sail away with you, my brother. A demon on board tells him to look at his sister, and he answers her: the demon sails with me, the man who bound my hands sails with me, why should you sail? Then he describes where he is going: the river of the netherworld gives no water to drink, its fields give no grain for flour, its sheep give no wool for cloth. Even if his mother dug as if for a canal, he would not drink the water meant for him; the waters of spring will not be poured for him as for the tamarisks, he will not sit in his shade, and the dates he should bear like a date palm will not show their beauty. He is a field threshed by his demon, with manacles on his hands and a stock on his neck. His sister Ama-shilama offers the lapis beads from her hips as ransom and says: there should be a limit to it. The demon orders that the mooring stake stay in until she is on board, and when she boards a cry rises to heaven and earth. Near the end the poem speaks of "the netherworld's office of throne-bearer", calls on the fowler, the young fisherman, the mother of the dead priest and the high priestess to lament him, and then tells the king to wash his head that rolled in the dust; he washes, sits, eats and drinks choice wine. The poem ends in praise of Ereshkigal. Ningishzida's Journey to the Netherworld, 1–90.

The idea his stories turn on is that the plant life that dies every year has unbroken work below. Ningishzida goes down when the crops die, from midsummer to midwinter as his Oracc entry puts it, and is mourned as Dumuzi is mourned. But he does not vanish there: he becomes the chair-bearer of the netherworld, stands at its entrance with the chief gatekeeper, and in the story of Adapa stands with Dumuzi at the gate of Anu in heaven. The god who is gone from the land keeps the doors between worlds and knows who comes in and who goes out. That is why Ea told Adapa to put on mourning and say he wept for two gods who had vanished from the land, Dumuzi and Gizzida; the two guards laughed and spoke for him.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. It is written ᵈnin-g̃iš-zi-da, and scholars render it "lord of the true", "reliable" or "right tree". We leave nin as the Sumerian title for a lord, as in the name of Ninurta, and the final -a as a grammatical ending. That leaves zid, "true, right", which syllabic spellings write with s: ni-gi-si-da. These are the letters of Arabic sadīd: Lane gives ṣāra sadīdan, it became right, direct, rightly aimed, and asadda, he hit the right thing in his saying and his action. Name and texts say the same: a god to be relied on, who judges below and on earth, and late Babylonian personal names say "Ningishzida is judge". What remains is g̃iš, tree or wood, whose nearest Arabic word is khashab, wood, but its b is not in the Sumerian word.

Linguistic Root

"Lord of the right tree"

We first separate title and ending from the stem. Nin is the Sumerian title for lord and lady and is left aside, as in Ninurta and Ninhursag. The final -da is an ending that is sometimes written and sometimes dropped, so it is not part of the reading. The reading covers zid; for g̃iš it is incomplete.

Sumerian zid means true, firm, right, and the syllabic spellings ni-gi-si-da and nin-ki-zi-da show that the name was pronounced with s: Nikkissida. S and d are the letters of Arabic sadda, a doubled root, as the consonant in the name is doubled in pronunciation. Lane: speech and action sadda when they are right; sadīd, right, directed to the mark; sadād, rightness in word and deed. The sense is the same in both tongues, rightness one can lean on, and the texts bear it out: a Gudea text says Ningishzida held him by the hand throughout; his Oracc entry says he judges below and on earth and had a temple at Ur called "House of Justice".

G̃iš is tree and wood, the sign written before every wooden thing. Its first consonant is a nasal between g and n, which the syllabic spellings give as g or k. The nearest Arabic word in meaning is khashab: Lane, wood used in carpentry, timber, one piece khashaba. Kh answers the back consonant and sh is sh, but the Arabic b has nothing to answer it in the Sumerian word, so this part stays open. Oracc notes that the tree of the name may be the vine: in the Ur III period Ningishzida is linked with the "wine-house" and called "lord of the innkeepers".

Key Mythic Narratives

Gudea's personal god

Gudea saw dreams he did not understand and went to the goddess Nanshe to interpret them. She told him that the daylight that had risen for him on the horizon was his personal god Ningishzida, who would rise for him as daylight rises on the horizon. When Gudea moulded the first brick for Ningirsu's temple, he walked with Ningishzida holding him by the hand throughout. At the end of the first cylinder the poem says that Ningishzida set the house on its platform and Gudea drove in its foundation pegs. At Tello, ancient Girsu, a marble dish with Gudea's dedication to Ningishzida was found in his temple there; it is now in the Louvre.

Snakes and dragons

His hymn calls him "lion of the distant mountains" and the one "who brings together giant snakes and dragons"; he drank his mother's holy milk and grew up in the abzu; he is the priest who holds the vessels of purification, checks tablets and secures justice, the shepherd who wields the sceptre over goats and kids, and "the king who carries out commands in the great underworld". Scholars see mušḫuššu dragon heads rising from his shoulders on Gudea's seal; he is called "great snake", and in astronomy the constellation now called Hydra was his.

With Ur-Namma and Gilgamesh

In The Death of Ur-Namma the king goes down to the netherworld with gifts for its people, and offers Ningishzida, "the valiant warrior", in his palace a chariot with wheels sparkling with gold, donkeys and thoroughbreds, and gives the god who stands beside him a lapis seal. In The Death of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh becomes a judge below, his word as weighty as Ningishzida's and Dumuzi's. Judgment of the Dead

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Mesopotamia Ningishzida stands in one line with Dumuzi: both are young men carried to the netherworld and mourned by sister and mother, and both stand at Anu's gate in the Adapa story. His sister who wants to sail with him resembles Geshtinanna, who went down in her brother's place for half the year, and Geshtinanna is his own wife at Lagash. He is one of the figures of the dying and rising god and of the descent to the underworld. Oracc, Ningišzida.

Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, took Ningishzida's emblem to be a staff with two serpents twined about it, as on a vase Gudea dedicated to him, and wrote that the physicians' serpent-encircled staff keeps the memory of it; beside it he set the Thoth of Nubia holding a staff with a serpent coiled round it. This is his view, not the statement of an ancient text. The single-serpent staff of Asclepius and the two-serpent herald's staff of Hermes meet Ningishzida in the image; the route between them is not known.

After his death Gilgamesh becomes a judge below whose word is like Ningishzida's, as Minos judges among the Greeks and Yama in India; see Judgment of the Dead.