Professor Ronald Hutton’s following lecture is good fun and informative. It is also lurid and details the evolution of love-war goddesses from Inanna to Venus. A peculiar combination.
Ancient Goddesses of Sex and War, by Ronald Hutton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeqTn6bxnyU
The Sacred Marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi (Dumuzi’s Wedding, from Nippur), with choice parts read by Professor Ronald Hutton:
“In it, Inanna describes her body’s barge of heaven, crescent-shaped like the new moon. Her untilled plot of land, long left fallow in the desert. Her duck field, thick with birds. Her hillock-land, so verdant. Her lovely farmland, banked round. She calls on Dumuzi to put his plow to her well-watered lowlands.”
Of particular note is the serial misconduct of the goddess Ishtar, none of which is relevant because of her divine rank:
"What’s not to like? Note that she is offering [Gilgamesh] status, power and wealth, starting with the chariot, the Sumerian equivalent of a Porsche Turbo. The great sex is taken more or less for granted. Evidently to her amazement, and perhaps to ours, he refuses.
He itemizes in insulting detail the way in which she has disposed of all her previous husbands, including Dumuzi, as soon as they bored or displeased her. The reaction of glorious Ishtar to this, is to fly into a bitter rage, and run straight to her parents, to ask for vengeance on Gilgamesh. Daddy unhelpfully points out, that everything the hero has said about her, was in fact perfectly correct.
Ishtar cheerfully admits that her conduct has consisted of abominable behaviour and tainted acts. Her point is that that’s irrelevant, because mortals shouldn’t insult a goddess, no matter how obnoxious she happens to be at times. Her next move is effectively to throw a tantrum, in which she demands that her father gives her free use of a cosmic monster, the Bull of Heaven, to destroy Gilgamesh. If he refuses, she threatens to smash the doors of the underworld, and let the dead loose upon the living, so wrecking the entire terrestrial world. Boy is this a hissy-fit!
Her weary father objects that to let loose the Bull of Heaven will itself destroy all the crops and cause famine. Ishtar brightly replies that she has thought of this, and has laid up stocks of food to cover the time till the devastation passes. She is clearly a lass who plans vengeance well ahead. Everybody loses by the result."
Cy presents to us the oldest and perhaps most famous customer complaint letter of all time:
The Life and Times of Ea-Nasir, Bronze Age Babylonia’s Most Notorious Businessman (ca. 1750 BC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR9Q69r8wVE
Of which more can be found out here, with a Warhammer 40’000 connection spin:
Summary
This drawing by Hydraulisk will be of interest to people around here:
It depicts the first Daemon Prince of Tzeentch in his interpretation. Wearing an oxhide copper ingot on his chest, carrying a cuneiform clay tablet and sporting a luscious Mesopotamian beard, we infer that the first Daemon Prince of Tzeentch in Warhammer 40’000 would be Ea-Nasir, a dodgy Sumerian copper trader of Alik-Dilmun, or the copper guild of Dilmun, in the coastal city of Ur. The world’s oldest customer complain tablet was found in the ruins of his home, and the scathing words sometimes shine through the dry, formal lingo:
Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
When you came, you said to me as follows: ‘I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.’ You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: ‘If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!’
What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas.
How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.
Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.
Ea-Nasir the dodgy copper salesman has recently achieved wider fame thanks to Internet tomfoolery, and a fair number of the jokes are delicious. A certain infamous copper ingot scam from 2020 only serves to enhance the impression.
While not a Hashutim Daemon Prince, the ancient Mesopotamian connection in Hydraulisk’s nice drawing may still interest a good number of people around here.
Cheers