Ninurta

Summary

Ninurta is Enlil's eldest son, god of war and of farming in Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria. His city is Nippur and his temple there Ešumeša; at Lagash he is called Ningirsu; and the poem The Farmer's Instructions calls him at its close "faithful farmer of Enlil".

His best-known story is the Sumerian poem Lugal-e, "O king". Ninurta was sitting at a feast held in his honour when his weapon Šar-ur, a mace that thinks and speaks, told him that Heaven had lain with Earth and she had borne a fearless warrior called Asag; the plants had named it their king, its warriors the stones were raiding the cities, it was judging lawsuits as Ninurta did, and it meant to take his powers. Ninurta went out against it as a storm, fought until he had crushed it and piled it up like broken bricks, and then said: do not call it Asag from today; its name is Stone, and its entrails shall be the underworld. Before this, good water did not reach the fields, the Tigris did not bring its full flood, and the gods carried hoe and basket as forced labour. Ninurta heaped the stones in the mountains, built a wall from them to hold back the waters, gathered the scattered lakes and led them to the Tigris, and watered the fields, so that barley grew and orchards bore fruit. His mother Ninmah came to him, and he named the heap Mountain, hursaĝ, and made her its lady, so that her name became Ninhursaĝa. Then he stood before the stones that had fought him and those that had not, and gave each a task in human life: one stone to drill carnelian, one to be thrown away as worthless, and diorite to be carved into kings' statues in his temple.

In another, Akkadian epic, the bird Anzu steals the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil; the gods refuse one after another to fight him, until Ea calls the great mother and she sends her son, who kills the bird and returns the tablet to his father in Ekur. In the Sumerian poem Angim Ninurta returns to Nippur with his trophies hung on his chariot, among them the Anzud bird; Enlil's minister Nuska comes out to meet him and begs him not to frighten his father in his house, and he lays down his weapons and enters the temple.

The idea these stories turn on is that force is used to put the land in order, not to own it. Ninurta defeats the mountain, then makes its stones a dam that leads water to the fields, sentences his enemies to tasks useful to people, and recovers the Tablet of Destinies only to give it back to its owner. He is the warrior who comes home a farmer. That is why the kings of Assyria loved him: Ashurnasirpal II built his temple before any other at his new capital Kalhu, and its walls showed Ninurta defeating Anzu.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ninurta has two parts: nin, the Sumerian title of lordship, and urta. The Babylonian essay reads the second part as Arabic ḥarth, "tillage", making the name "lord of tillage". Akkadian drops ḥ, and Aramaic turns th into t, so what remains of ḥarth is r and t, the letters of urta. In Lisān al-ʿArab, ḥaratha is to break the ground for sowing, ḥarth is the crop itself, and the ḥārith is the cultivator. That is what the stories make him: the farmer who leads water to the barley, whose name closes the farmer's instructions.

Linguistic Root

Ninurta and ḥarth

Ninurta's name keeps the Sumerian title nin, used for both lord and lady, as in Ninhursaĝa and Ninlil. Scholars do not agree on what urta means in Sumerian. The comparison with ḥarth runs like this: ḥ drops in Akkadian, as the sound-change laws state; r stays; and th becomes t, as it does in Aramaic. Lisān al-ʿArab: ḥaratha is to break the ground for sowing and to sow it; ḥarth is the crop and what is raised; maḥrath is land prepared for sowing; the ḥārith is the cultivator.

The limit of the comparison is that t answers th in Aramaic, whereas Akkadian makes th into š, and the Akkadian verb for tilling is itself erēšu, with š. The reading applies an Aramaic rule to a Sumerian element, and that needs a witness.

Other readings in the two essays

The Babylonian essay also glosses the name "lord of the ploughed land", and the Sumerian essay reads urta as arḍ, "land", making him "lord of the field". Both meet ḥarth in the image, but the ḍ of arḍ does not answer t. Both essays mention arṭā, which Lisān al-ʿArab gives as a tree of the sands, making Ninurta a god of the wild tree; this touches Lugal-e from one side, since in the poem the plants named Asag their king. The Babylonian essay adds nūr, "light", the warrior light, which it calls interpretive, and naṣr, "victory", which it calls weak because ṣ does not answer t.

Historical Context

Ninurta was worshipped in Babylonia from at least the mid-third millennium BCE; at Nippur he was a god of agriculture and Enlil's son. His three poems, Lugal-e, Angim and Anzu, were also copied in Assyria, and the two Sumerian ones received a line-by-line Akkadian translation in the first millennium. The Assyrian kings loved the warrior in him: some late second-millennium kings were named Tukulti-Ninurta, "the trusted one of Ninurta"; Ashurnasirpal II built his temple first at Kalhu, carved on its walls the god defeating Anzu, and called him the perfect warrior, "lord of springs and seas", "light of heaven and underworld who illuminates the interior of the apsû". His son Shalmaneser III finished the ziggurat. Robson notes that the modern site name Nimrud may go back to Ninurta.

Family and connections

Key Mythic Narratives

Arrows that return to their reed

In the late Assyrian version of Anzu, three tablets of about 550 lines, Anzu steals the Tablet of Destinies while Enlil is bathing and flees with it to his mountain. When Ninurta shoots, Anzu uses his knowledge of the tablet to order the arrows back to what they were made of, the reed to its canebrake and the feathers to their bird. Ninurta asks Ea's advice, and Ea tells him to cut off Anzu's wings; when the bird calls its wings back, it finds them pinned to the ground by the arrows. Ninurta kills him and takes the tablet; he seems to hesitate before returning it to Enlil, then brings it back, and the gods praise him with many names, as Marduk is praised at the end of Enūma eliš. In the Old Babylonian version from Susa the mother tells her son, "Release a mist, that he not recognise your appearance", and Anzu shouts at the reed, "Return to your cane-brake".

Ninurta and the Turtle

In a broken Sumerian poem the Tablet of Destinies and the me return from the Anzu chick to the abzu; Enki honours Ninurta and promises him glory, but Ninurta is not content and sets his sights on the whole world. Enki makes a turtle from the clay of the abzu and stations it at the abzu's gate; it seizes Ninurta's heel and digs a pit into which they both fall, and Enki asks him: where is your strength now? The hero who returns the tablet in the other poems is trapped here because he wanted it for himself.

The monsters he killed

In Lugal-e his mace lists those Ninurta has slain in the mountains: the Dragon, Gypsum, the Strong Copper, the Six-headed Wild Ram, the Magilum boat, the Bison, the Palm-tree King, the Anzud bird and the Seven-headed Snake. In Angim he hangs the same trophies on his chariot.

Symbolic Reading

The Babylonian rereading essay makes Ninurta the planet Saturn, the slowest planet, and reads in him patience and time. The other essay explains him as "the warrior farmer" who fights to protect the crops. In Lugal-e the two meet in the order of the story itself: war in the mountains first, then the dam and the waters led to the Tigris, then judgement on the stones, assigning them to the builder, the sculptor and the jeweller.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Earth bore Zeus's last enemy Typhon, as Earth bears Asag in Lugal-e; in both, the son of the high god defeats a monster born from the ground. The Roman essay compares Ninurta with Heracles, a hero of many labours, and among Ninurta's trophies is a seven-headed snake, as Heracles killed the Lernaean Hydra. The Babylonian essay compares him with Mars, who joined war and farming. The closest comparison in the texts is Marduk: Frahm notes that Enūma eliš draws heavily on Lugal-e and Anzu, and that in it Marduk takes over the roles of Enlil the king and of his son Ninurta the warrior, taking the Tablet of Destinies from Kingu as Ninurta took it from Anzu.