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Updated: September 11, 2025
The old Zagmuku festival in honor of Bau and the Tammuz festival, celebrated in spring and summer, respectively, are also closely associated with agricultural life. The spring as the seedtime is, as we have seen, a natural period for beginning the calculation of the New Year, while a first harvest of the wheat and barley is reaped in Babylonia at the time of the summer solstice.
Eerdmans has recently endeavored to show that the festival of Hosein, celebrated by the Shiitic sect of Mohammedanism in memory of the tragic death of the son of Ali, is in reality a survival of the Babylonian-Phoenician Tammuz festival. The spread of the Tammuz-Adonis myth and cult to the Greeks is but another indication of the popularity of this ancient Semitic festival.
In name and detail the rites varied from place to place: in substance they were the same. The supposed death and resurrection of this oriental deity, a god of many names but of essentially one nature, is now to be examined. We begin with Tammuz or Adonis.
Tammuz was among the disaffected peasants who had been relied upon to aid the enemy. But for a long time now he had had growing doubts about lending his aid to such work. He was neither blind nor foolish, and he could not help seeing that the people of the farms and hamlets dwelt in greater security and comfort than they ever had before that he could remember.
Tammuz, of whose position in this pantheon we have already had occasion to speak, is the god of spring vegetation. Another solar deity, Nin-gishzida, who is associated in the Adapa legend with Tammuz, is the deity who presides over the growth of trees. En-meshara, who also belongs to the court of Nergal and Allatu, appears to represent vegetation in general.
We have a race almost certainly Semitic, fusing the primitive race during the period 3500-3000, and a few centuries later we have a new religious idea dominating the fused race. When we examine this new idea, the Osiris belief, we find its earliest form nothing more nor less than the common tammuz or Adonis story of the Semites.
Moreover, the Norman lords did not wait for invasion; they made the first move themselves. They had no mind to risk their people and their homes if the thing could be avoided. Thanks to Tammuz, they knew in what direction the enemy might be expected, and some of the Welsh chiefs, seeing what was afoot, refused to join in the war at all.
The word that I speak to thee take to heart. The messenger of Anu approached. 'Adapa has broken the wings of the south wind. Deliver him into my hands.... Ea obeys the order, delivers up Adapa, and everything happens as was foretold. Upon mounting to heaven and on his approach to the gate of Anu, Tammuz and Gishzida were stationed at the gate of Anu. They saw Adapa and cried 'Help, Lord!
It is therefore not improbable that, like the god Dumuzi, or Tammuz, he was supposed to descend into the underworld in winter, ascending to the surface of the earth with the earliest green shoots of vegetation in the spring.* * Cf. Thureau-Dangin, Rev. d'Assyr., vol. vi. , p. 24.
The result of Istar's disappearance under the earth is that all love and courtship cease both among men and the lower animals, and Ea himself is appealed to, to bring to an end so unnatural a state of affairs. A messenger is sent to the lower regions to cause the release of Istar and the reascent of Tammuz.
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