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Tammuz turns up all over this site, often in a single line on a page about someone else. He is the shepherd in the Sumerian King List, the husband of Inanna, the god women mourned at the gate of the Temple, and the name of a summer month. I wanted to see those lines side by side, so I collected them here.
Dumuzi, the shepherd king
In Sumerian he is Dumuzi or Dumuzid. On The Sumerian King List he appears among the kings before the flood, with a reign far beyond any human life:
Dumuzi, the shepherd, 36,000 years he ruled;
The Sumerian King List
The same list later names a second Dumuzi, “the fisherman”, in the line of Uruk. Antediluvian Rulers sets the shepherd king in the city of Bad-tibira and notes that he was deified and later depicted as the husband of the goddess Inanna. On The Origin of Nimrod the king list Demuzid is read as Tammuz, the consort of Ishtar, with Gilgamesh following soon after him.
The husband of Inanna
On Ishtar the shepherd Tammuz is one of her lovers, tied to the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth, and Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte and Aphrodite lists her union with Dumuzi as a symbol of agricultural renewal. Jim Marrs tells the story as a family feud among the Anunnaki on Sumer, the first known civilization:
But when Dumuzi was killed after being taken into custody by Enki’s firstborn son, Marduk, or Ra, for violating the Anunnaki moral code, Inanna attacked Marduk/Ra.
Jim Marrs, Our Occulted History
In that telling Dumuzi is the youngest son of Enki and Inanna is a granddaughter of Enlil, so the marriage joins the two rival houses. For more on the other side of that fight, see Marduk.
Weeping for Tammuz
The best known line about him is in the Bible. In Ezekiel 8:14 the prophet is shown women sitting at the north gate of the Temple, weeping for Tammuz. The Hierarchy of YHWH reads him there as the Mesopotamian shepherd god Dumuzi, mourned every year, and Worship of the Sun takes the same scene as proof that foreign rites had already reached the Temple. The gods in the Bible lists him among the other deities the text condemns, and the chapter itself is summarized on Ezekiel.
The mourning was still alive much later. On Planets the Nabataean Agriculture of Ibn Washiyya describes the ritual in detail: people would weep for Tammuz, who was “killed time after time in horrible ways,” during the month that carried his name.
A month and a summer sun
That month is still on the calendar. Babylonian Calendar lists Du’uzu, named after Tammuz, running from about June 21 to July 20, and The Origin of Nimrod notes that the month passed into the Hebrew calendar. On The Sun the Syrian Adonis is said to represent the winter sun “in the cosmic tragedy of Tammuz”, which links the dying god to the turning of the year.
Other names for the same figure
Several pages see Tammuz behind other gods. Wadd in Islamic tradition compares the Arabian god of love Wadd with Tammuz and his tragic bond with Inanna. Donnelly’s list of Phoenician gods on The Gods of the Phoenicians, also Kings of Atlantis gives the fourth son of Ouranos as “Atlas (Tammuz?)”, with the question mark in the source. In the Rob Skiba video Nimrod, the Tower, the Beast, Antarctica and Flat Earth, Tammuz is one of the names Nimrod is said to have taken after his deification.
A burial on a mountain
Credo Mutwa brings Dumuzid up in a conversation with Michael Tellinger about the mines of southern Africa, on Women were mining:
We read that the Sumerian deity Dumuzid was buried in the deep aperture on the edge of a cliff on top of a mountain, facing east.
Credo Mutwa, Women were mining, at 32:33
Related pages
- Ishtar
- Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte and Aphrodite
- The Sumerian King List
- Antediluvian Rulers
- The Origin of Nimrod
- Worship of the Sun
- Babylonian Calendar
- Wadd in Islamic tradition
- Planets
For every page I tagged with Tammuz, see the Tammuz tag archive.
