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Updated: September 11, 2025
The Ishtar who is rescued by Ea through the mediation of the 'Renewal of Light' is the astral Ishtar, as developed by the astronomers, and, finally, the Ishtar who receives her ornaments back again and comes to the upper world, is once more the goddess of vegetation, rescued from her exile to new glory. Up to this point, Tammuz has not been mentioned in the story.
We know now that the cult of the god Tammuz, who, if not the direct original of the Phoenician-Greek Adonis, is at least representative of a common parent deity, may be traced back to 3000 B.C., while it persisted among the Sabeans at Harran into the Middle Ages.
These texts are of a uniform character; they are all 'Lamentations, or 'Wailings, having for their exciting cause the disappearance of Tammuz from this upper earth, and the disastrous effects produced upon animal and vegetable life by his absence.
Then again, Knobel reminds us of "the most interesting discovery a few years ago by Father Strassmeier of a Babylonian tablet recording a partial lunar eclipse at Babylon in the seventh year of Cambyses, on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Tammuz."
Originally a solar festival, celebrated in the fourth month at the approach of the summer solstice, it became through the association of ideas suggested by the mourning of Ishtar for her lost consort Tammuz a kind of 'All Souls' Day, on which the people remembered their dead.
Of this group of deities, Tammuz and Nin-gishzida are the most important. In the Adapa legend, it will be recalled, they are stationed as guardians in heaven. As solar deities, they properly belong there. Like Nergal, they have been transferred to the nether world; and in the case of all three, the process that led to the change appears to have been the same.
Mr Stephen Langdon inclines to believe that the original Tammuz typified the vivifying waters; he writes: "Since, in Babylonia as in Egypt, the fertility of the soil depended upon irrigation, it is but natural to expect that the youthful god who represents the birth and death of nature, would represent the beneficent waters which flooded the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates in the late winter, and which ebbed away, and nearly disappeared, in the canals and rivers in the period of Summer drought.
Von Schroeder establishes parallel between existing Fertility procession and Rig-Veda poem. Identification of Life Principle with King. Prosperity of land dependent on king as representative of god. Celts. Greeks. Modern instances, the Shilluk Kings. Parallel between Shilluk King, Grail King and Vegetation Deity. Sone de Nansai and the Lament for Tammuz. Identity of situation.
Mr Langdon quotes a passage referring to "Kings who in their day played the role of Tammuz in the mystery of this cult"; he considers that here we have to do with kings who, by a symbolic act, escaped the final penalty of sacrifice as representative of the Dying God.
He found, first of all, an inscription of thirteen letters, "introduced by a large cross or star the Assyrian index of the Deity." Before the last word of the inscription he found carved "a flower which he regarded as consecrated to the particular deity Tammuz, and at both ends of the inscription a serpent monogram and symbol of Baal."
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