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Updated: May 13, 2025
The more specific name by which Ishtar of Erech was known was Nanâ, but Nanâ again is nothing but an epithet, meaning, as the Babylonians themselves interpreted it, the 'lady' par excellence. Have we perhaps in Aruru the real name of the old goddess of Erech?
This distribution may itself have been the result of a combination of independent traditions. In any early combination, however, we may feel certain that Marduk was not introduced. After this incidental mention of Aruru, the narrative passes back undisturbed to Marduk.
Knowing that Ishtar, although the giver of life, does not grant a continuance of it, he who is produced by Aruru will have nothing to do with the great goddess. But his refusal leads to a dire punishment, more disastrous even than the alliance with Ishtar, which would have culminated in his being eventually shorn of his strength.
At all events, the occurrence of Aruru in this second 'creation' story points to her as belonging to the district of which Erech was the center. In this way, each one of the three most ancient sacred towns of Babylonia would have its 'creator, Bel in Nippur, Ea in Eridu, and Aruru in Erech.
They constitute the regular means of communication between man and the gods, so regular that at times the compilers of the epic do not find it necessary to specify the fact, but take it for granted. To Gilgamesh, Eabani's coming is revealed and he asks his mother Aruru to interpret the dream. The third and fourth tablets take us back to the history of Uruk.
Associated with Marduk in the creation of mankind is a goddess Aruru. The goddess Aruru created the seed of men together with him. We encounter this goddess Aruru in the Gilgamesh epic, where she is represented as creating a human being, Eabani; and, curiously enough, she creates him in agreement with the Biblical tradition, out of a lump of clay.
So far as man was concerned, created by some god, Bel, Ea, Aruru, or Ishtar, according to the various traditions that were current, no divine fiat could wipe out what was endowed with life and the power of reproduction.
The idea that a goddess should take part with a god in man's creation is already a familiar feature of Babylonian mythology. Thus the goddess Aruru, in co-operation with Marduk, might be credited with the creation of the human race, as she might also be pictured creating on her own initiative an individual hero such as Enkidu of the Gilgamesh Epic.
I venture to suggest, therefore, that Aruru and Ishtar of Erech are one and the same personage. Ishtar is, of course, as has been pointed out, merely a generic name for the 'great goddess' worshipped under many forms.
The chief deity of Erech, it will be recalled, was always a goddess, a circumstance that supports the association of Aruru with that place. Aruru being a goddess, it was not so easy to have Marduk take up her rôle, as he supplanted Bel. Again, Erech and Babylon were not political rivals to the degree that Nippur and Babylon were.
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