Ninlil

Summary

Ninlil is the wife of Enlil, lord of the gods in Sumer, and mother of the moon, Nanna. Her temple at Nippur was called Ekiur, and her record runs for more than three thousand years, from the earliest written tablets of Uruk to the second century CE, when Greek writers still knew her as Mylitta.

Her great story is the Sumerian poem Enlil and Ninlil. It opens in Nippur: Enlil is one of the city's young men, Ninlil one of its young women, and her mother Nun-bar-še-gunu one of its wise old women. The mother warns her daughter not to bathe in the holy river or walk along the bank of the city's canal, because Enlil's eye is bright: he will see her, want her, and then leave her. She bathes in the river, Enlil sees her on the bank and asks for her, and she answers: I am young, I have not known pregnancy or kissing, and if my mother learns of it she will slap my hand. She does not let him. So he has his minister Nuska ferry him across by boat, seizes her on a small bank and lies with her, and she conceives Suen, who is Nanna the moon.

Then, as Enlil walks in the Ki-ur, the fifty great gods and the seven who decide destinies have him arrested, and he leaves the city because he has become ritually impure. Ninlil follows him. On the road Enlil stops at three men and tells each not to show her where he is: the city gatekeeper, the man of the Id-kura, the man-eating river of the underworld, and the ferryman. Each time Ninlil arrives and asks after her lord, and Enlil himself, in the man's shape, answers: my lord has not spoken to me. She says: the seed of your lord, the bright seed of Suen, is in my womb. He says: my master's seed can go up to the heavens; let my seed go downwards in its place. By the gatekeeper she conceives Nergal, by the river man Ninazu, "the king who stretches measuring lines over the fields", and by the ferryman Enbilulu, "the inspector of canals". The poem ends in praise of Enlil, "for the praise spoken for Ninlil the mother".

The idea the story turns on is that what goes up to the sky is matched by what comes down to the earth. The child in her womb goes up to become the moon, and three are born below in his place: a king of the dead, a lord of the fields who measures them, and a lord of the canals who inspects them. Ninlil carries them all because she did not leave her husband when the assembly of the gods put him out, so she becomes mother of what is above and of what is below. The poem begins with a girl who refused and ends with a mother for whose sake the lord of the gods is praised. In another poem, Enlil and Sud, the girl comes to Enlil's house through a proposal and gifts; he names her Ninlil, makes her "Ezina, the growing grain, the life of Sumer", and puts writing, accounting and surveying in her hands.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. NIN.LÍL is made of nin, the Sumerian title for a lady, and líl, which is Arabic layl, night, with both its l sounds, the y between them answering the long vowel. In Lisān al-ʿArab night is what follows day, beginning at sunset. On the reading of the project's Sumerian and Babylonian essays Ninlil is "lady of the night", as her husband Enlil is "lord of the night". That is what her story makes her: she carries the moon, the light of the night, then follows her husband along the dark road towards the underworld and bears the sons of the world below there.

Linguistic Root

Written forms

The second part of the name survives in every form. The Akkadian name comes from Enlil's name in Emesal: umun, "lord", was shortened there to mun, its n assimilated to the following l to give mu-ul-líl, and the Akkadians added the feminine t to make Mulliltu; in Neo-Assyrian the lt became a doubled s, Mullissu, which the Greeks took as Mylitta. The forms change at the beginning and the end, and líl stays in the middle.

The usual explanation takes líl as "breeze" and makes Ninlil "lady of the breeze". ORACC notes that this rests on a Neo-Assyrian commentary that tied the gods to the winds, gave Ninlil the north wind and explained her name as "lady of the breeze", and that there is no earlier evidence for it. The syllable is still under study, which leaves room for reading it as night. Some Akkadian scholars also heard Mullil as a form of elēlu, "to be pure", so that it meant "the purifier".

The Babylonian essay grades "nin + layl" as very likely and sets it beside Hebrew layla, night. It reads the story of Enlil and Ninlil on the same lines: the air, Enlil, pierces the darkness of the night, Ninlil, and the light of the moon is born of it.

Other readings in the essays

After night the Babylonian essay proposes luʾluʾ, pearl, making Ninlil "lady of the pearl" with the moon her pearl in the sky, and calls it interpretive; but luʾluʾ has two glottal stops that leave no trace in the name. It proposes lall, softness, and calls it weak. The Sumerian essay proposes nanna + layyala, "the one who shines at night", and ninn + īl, "the divine lady"; both read nin in Arabic, while in Sumerian nin is a title with a known meaning, used for ladies and lords alike, as in Ninurta and Ninhursag.

Historical Context

Ninlil appears in the earliest writing of Mesopotamia, the Uruk tablets of the late fourth millennium BCE. Her chief temple was the Ekiur at Nippur, and she had a cult at Tummal nearby. The Ki-ur where Enlil was arrested is her place in Nippur, and from it she speaks to her son in Angim. In Assyria she became the wife of Aššur once the kings equated Aššur with Enlil, under the name Mullissu, and in the first millennium she was identified with Ishtar, above all Ishtar of Arbela. Astronomers saw her in Ursa Major, "the Wagon".

Family and connections

Key Mythic Narratives

Sud becomes Ninlil

In Enlil and Sud Enlil travels the land looking for a wife, sees Sud at Eresh, the city of her mother Nisaba, and speaks to her improperly, so she goes into the house in front of him. He sends his minister Nuska to the mother with gifts and the message: your daughter's name shall become Ninlil. After the negotiation Aruru, Enlil's sister, leads the bride by the hand to Ekur. The two poems make the same name the end of two different roads to one house: the first by force and then exile, the second by message and gift.

The mother in Ninurta's wars

In Lugal-e Ninurta is praised as the "firstborn son whom Ninlil has decorated with numberless charms", and when he is away fighting the monster Asag, Enlil cries out to Ninlil: "My wife, my son is no longer here; what is there to support me?" In Angim, when he comes home with captives and booty, "the great mother Ninlil, from within her Ki-ur", speaks to him in admiration: "O wild bull with fierce horns raised, son of Enlil, you have struck blows in the mountains." Lugal-e, 135–150 and 187–190, Angim, 108–112.

Mylitta in Herodotus

Herodotus says the Persians learned to sacrifice to "heavenly Aphrodite" from the Assyrians and the Arabians, and that the Assyrians call her Mylitta and the Arabians Alilat. He describes a custom at Babylon in which a woman sits in the precinct of Aphrodite until a stranger throws money into her lap, saying "I invite you in the name of Mylitta". This is a Greek's report of a custom he heard about, with no witness in the cuneiform tablets; but the name he heard is Mullissu, the Assyrian name of Ninlil.

Symbolic Reading

The Babylonian essay reads the story as a picture of the sky: Enlil is the air, Ninlil the darkness of night, and the moon's light is born when the air pierces the dark. The text itself supports this arrangement: the first child goes up to the sky and the three after him go down, so that one womb holds the mother of the moon and the mother of the dead, the fields and the canals.

The poem also says something about the city. The one who took the girl without her consent is the lord of the gods, yet the assembly arrests him in the Ki-ur and puts him out of Nippur because he has become impure. The law stands above the one who holds power, and impurity drives even the lord out of the city. The poem of Sud makes marriage a contract between two households, and makes the bride, once she enters Enlil's house, "the growing grain" and mistress of writing and surveying, the things on which Nippur's fields and records depend.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Persephone is taken while picking flowers: Hades comes up out of the earth and carries her to the house of the dead. Ninlil is taken at the river and then walks after her husband towards the world below. In both a girl is taken by a lord at water or meadow and becomes bound to the underworld; but Persephone becomes queen of the dead, while Ninlil bears their king, Nergal, and stays in her husband's house at Nippur.

Herodotus sets Mylitta, the Assyrian name of Ninlil, beside heavenly Aphrodite. It is a Greek's equation of names and does not make the two stories one.

Enlil's trial in the Ki-ur is one of the clearest witnesses of the divine council judging its own head, and her wedding in Enlil and Sud, where the bride becomes the growing grain and the life of Sumer, is a Sumerian witness of the sacred marriage on which the land's harvest depends. Her road after her husband, with its gatekeeper, its man-eating river and its ferryman, is one of the oldest pictures of the way down in the descent to the underworld.