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Ninurta was one of the great gods of Sumer and Babylon: a son of Enlil, a farmer’s god who became a warrior, and in many scholars’ view the god behind the biblical hunter Nimrod. He has no starring role on this site, but he keeps appearing in the Mesopotamian texts and god lists I work with. These are the pages where I wrote about him.
Son of Enlil at Nippur
Mount Ekur describes Enlil’s temple complex at Nippur, which housed shrines to Enlil, his wife Ninlil and their sons Nanna and Ninurta. In the Anunnaki gods list Ninurta is the god of agriculture, hunting and war. King Hezekiah reigned from approximately 715 to 686 BCE, remembered for his religious reforms calls him a warrior god with an important role in Babylonian rituals.
In the oldest stories
Ninurta has a fixed place in the divine order of the Mesopotamian epics. At the start of Atrahasis, when the gods divide the universe by lot, Anu is king, Ellil is counsellor, Ninurta is their chamberlain and Ennugi is canal-controller. In Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet I the goddess creates Enkidu in the wild, and Ninurta gives him his strength.
The victory on Mount Sabu
His great battle takes place on a mountain. On Mount Sabu I tell how Ninurta fought the demon Asag and his army of stone warriors there and defeated him, restoring order to the cosmos. It is one of his most celebrated feats.
Ninurta and Nimrod
The origin of Nimrod looks at the theory that Nimrod, the mighty hunter of Genesis 10:8-12, is a Hebrew reworking of Ninurta. Ninurta began as a god of farming and healing and later took on a warrior role. Gudea of Lagash rebuilt his temple, and Ashurnasirpal II built a great temple for him at Calah. The name Nimrod may come from a name formed with Ninurta, like that of the king Tukulti-Ninurta I. The parallels are speculative, but many scholars find them strong.
Comparisons
In Jim Marrs’s table on Sumer: The First Known Civilization, Ninurta is the “Facilitator of the Gods”, matched with Thoth, Hermes and Mercury. Chronos and Weekdays list him among the gods compared with Saturn, as a god of agriculture. The Sumerian King List preserves his name in the king Ur-Ninurta of Isin.
Related pages
- Mount Sabu
- The origin of Nimrod
- Mount Ekur
- Atrahasis
- Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet I
- Anunnaki gods list
- Sumer: The First Known Civilization
- Sumerian King List
For every page I tagged with Ninurta, see the Ninurta tag archive.
