Goddess Nammu
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness
was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the
waters.”
-
Genesis 1:2
Goddess Nammu is known as the mother of the G-d Enki/Ea as well as the mother Goddess
who gave birth to the cosmos and all the gods. Like her son Enki/Ea she is also
associated with magic. In later times, her role is taken on by Tiamat.
According to the God list An-Anum,
tablet I line 28 (Litke 1998: 24; Wiggermann 1998-2001c: 137), Namma bears the
title "Mother who gave birth to the heavens and the earth."
Goddess of the Primeval Sea, “ She
who gave birth to heaven and earth." In the Sumerian cosmogony,
firstly there is the primeval sea, called Nammu which was the
endless sea in which the universe floated. They believed that Nammu
was without a beginning in time and that Nammu had created heaven
and earth.
An indication of her continued
relevance may be found in the name of Ur-Nammu, the founder of the Third
Dynasty of Ur between 21st - 20th
century BCE. Ur-Nammu founded the Sumerian 3rd dynasty of Ur, in
southern Mesopotamia.
Notice how this time scale of
Sumerian Empire falls so precisely to the birth time frame of Abraham the
Patriarch of Jewish religion, around late 1996 BCE. A clear attestation to the
fact that the myths around that time which predominated the empire must have
had a profound impact on Abraham as he was in his growing stage. His homeland was
also Ur (Gen11:31) and Ur was one of the many city
states which made up the country of Sumer.
Just as in the Biblical narrative,
humans were fashioned out of clay at Enki’s suggestion as shown in this translation by S.N. Kramer, who also
translated the other verses below:
“Mix the heart of the clay
that is over the abyss,
The good and princely fashioners will thicken
the clay,
You, [Nammu] do you bring the limbs into
existence;
Ninmah [earth-mother or birth goddess] will
work above you,
The goddesses [of birth] . . . will stand by you at your fashioning;
O my mother(Nammu), decree its [the newborn's]
fate,
Ninmah will bind upon it the image (?) of the
gods,
It is man . . . . "
Notice that, just like in the later
Bible, humans are made in the image of the Gods. The shadow of Goddess Nammu still lingers today and is strongly felt even
by linguistics today in bible, for when
G-d hovers over “the deep” in the opening scene of Genesis
(Chapter 1, Verse 2), the word
translated here is Tehom, meaning the deeps, the abyss,
and linguistically it is the Semitic form of Tiamat, the name of
the a Sumero-Babylonian Goddess, a primordial Goddess of the Ocean.
This story of life to have dramatically emerged out of deep ocean is not a new theme. Hindu mythology of Churning Of The Ocean, The Gods and the Demons knew that they could gain the Divine Elixir.
Robert Mascharan !!!
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