Nanna (Sin) The Sumerian moon god, also called Sin by the Akkadians. He is the firstborn son of Enlil, who had raped Sin's mother, the grain goddess Ninlil. In some traditions, Nanna is the father of Inanna (Ishtar). He is revered as the god who measures time, and because he shines at night, is considered the enemy of wrongdoers and dark forces. Renowned for his wisdom, Nanna is consulted by the other gods when they need advice.

Ninhursaga The Sumerian goddess of bounty, whose name means "lady of the stony ground." As the Mesopotamian earth goddess, she takes several forms. As Ninlil, she is the wife of Enlil. As Ninki, she is the wife of Enki and bore his children on Dilmun, the island of paradise, and as Nintur, she is worshipped as a midwife. As a fertility goddess, she has power over birth and nourishes the Sumerian kings with her milk, giving them a measure of divinity.

Ninurta The Sumerian war god and patron of the hunt; another son of Enlil and Ninhursaga. Called "lord of the earth," he is god of the thunderstorms and spring floods, and began as a great bird but was later humanized. In one story, nature rises up against Ninurta, but some parts of the natural world, including some stones, take his side. The stones that side with Ninurta became the precious stones.

Tiamat The Babylonian she-dragon of chaos; represents the saltwater ocean, as opposed to the freshwater of Apsu. In the Creation epic Enuma Elish, Apsu and Tiamat mingle and give birth to Lahmu and Lahamu, whose names mean "silt." From them came all the other gods. Tiamat plays a central role in the Enuma Elish and the myth of Marduk, who kills her and turns half of her body into the sky and the other half into the earth. But her legacy goes past Mesopotamia's myths.

The word for the "deep" in Hebrew is tehom, believed to be a version of "Tiamat," and the conflict between the creator god and chaos, in the form of the sea, plays a role in later Canaanite religious ideas, which also influenced the Israelites. The "myth" of the Hebrew god defeating the chaos monster of the sea appears in several places in the Bible. Exodus 15:118, believed to be one of the oldest pieces of literature in the Bible, is a hymn or Song of Moses, which uses the ancient metaphor of the Divine Warrior and his victory over the sea. Psalm 74:13 is a poem that describes the Hebrew God dividing the sea and breaking the heads of the "dragon in the waters," called Leviathan, before the Creation begins. The depiction of the primordial chaos as a dragon or sea serpent is one of the most universal metaphors in mythology.

Utu (Shamash) The benevolent sun god of justice who gives the law code to Hammurabi. The son of Nanna and the brother of Inanna, he is thought to cross the heavens by day and traverse the underworld by night, in the same fashion as Egypt's sun god Re. Utu constituted part of a divine triad of sun, moon, and the planet Venus with his father, the moon god Nanna, and his sister, Inanna.

How did an angry goddess make the seasons?

Men: have you ever gotten in trouble when you didn't notice that the wife or girlfriend was gone all day? Was she a little peeved at being overlooked? Then you know what kind of trouble the shepherd king Dumuzi was in when he enjoyed his wife's absence a bit too much.

Like most ancient cultures dependent on agriculture, the Mesopotamians were preoccupied with fertility-both in their lives and their myths. Just as the death of Osiris was the central myth in Egypt and was tied into Egyptian views of the seasonal crop cycle, the story of fertility goddess Inanna and her husband Dumuzi was the focal point of Mesopotamia's view of the world. While the Osiris myth featured feuding brothers, Seth and Osiris, the family dispute in Mesopotamia starts out between sisters.

Inanna goes to visit her sister Ereshkigal in the underworld, where she is queen of the dead. The ambitious Inanna was in a constant quest for greater power, and she coveted her sister's throne. She leaves behind her beloved Dumuzi, the shepherd god and her "honey man." In a celestial striptease, at each of seven gates leading into the underworld, the beautiful and bejeweled Inanna must remove an article of jewelry or clothing, and finally, at the seventh gate, her remaining garment. Naked at last, Inanna stands before her sister, who stares at her with the "eyes of death," and she dies instantly. For three days, Inanna's corpse hangs, rotting on a hook.

Back in the land of the living, with Inanna in the underworld, sex takes a holiday. People stop coupling.

No bull mounted a cow, no donkey impregnated a jenny,*

No young man impregnated a girl on the street, The young man sleeps in his private room, The girl slept in the company of her friends.

There are competing versions of how Inanna is released. But once restored to life, she must promise to send someone back in her place-which is another common mythic theme. When Inanna returns to Uruk, her cult city, she finds her husband, Dumuzi, sitting on his throne, looking far from mournful. Enraged that her husband did not weep for her, Inanna gives Dumuzi the same withering gaze of death that she had gotten from her sister, and he is taken to the underworld in her place.

Inanna later realizes that she misses her "honey man," and begins to grieve for him. Her laments for her husband become popular Mesopotamian songs, and are the very songs that Ezekiel hears the women of Israel later singing, in what he considers an abomination. Inanna pleads with her sister, and Dumuzi is finally released for half the year, his place in the underworld taken by his compassionate sister, so he can spend half the year with Inanna.

To the Mesopotamians, the disappearance and reappearance of Dumuzi were connected to the seasonal cycles of fertility and crops-just like the story of Persephone in Greek myth, or Amaterasu in Japanese myths. (The later Akkadian version of this myth features Ishtar and Tammuz with slight variations, but the ultimate outcome is the same, and the story was a popular one, well known throughout the Near East.) Was Inanna's city the first "Sin City"?

"What do women want?" Sigmund Freud famously asked. In one modern pop-anthem, the answer is that girls just want to have fun. And Inanna may have been one of the first "girl power" goddesses to live that creed. Accounts of life in the cult cities of this hard-living, hard-loving goddess also give us a very different picture of ancient city-life. It wasn't all-work-no-play back then. Mesopotamians, we know, were party people.

Best known as the goddess of sexual love, the Sumerian Inanna (and her Babylonian counterpart, Ishtar) was also a goddess of war, and she enjoyed battle as though it were a dance. Aggressively sexual, she knew few boundaries, and in poems she says, "Who will plow my vulva? Who will plow my high field? Who will plow my wet ground?"

Inanna was also, not surprisingly, the patroness of prostitutes and ale houses. According to historian Gwendolyn Leick, her city, Uruk, one of the oldest in Mesopotamia, was an ancient "Fun City," and Inanna was a beguiling figure who "stands for the erotic potential of city life, which is set apart from the strict social control of the tribal community or the village." Inanna prowled the streets and taverns in search of sexual adventure, and, according to Leick, sex in the streets was not an unusual thing in ancient Mesopotamia-in Inanna's Uruk and perhaps in Babylon. The idea of sex as "immoral" was not widely held in ancient civilizations, including the Egyptian and, to some extent, Greek worlds. In many cultures, sex was viewed as part of the natural order, and was routinely made a part of the fertility rites that were celebrated openly. Many of the restrictive codes about sexual conduct began with the institution of Mosaic Law in Israel, which is one reason why Babylon gained such a reputation as a sinful place in the view of both the Israelites of the Old Testament-who were also held captive in Babylon-and New Testament Christians, who called Babylon the "great whore," although they meant the hated Rome in the time of the Emperor Nero.

In his recent, modern-English version of Gilgamesh, translator Stephen Mitchell hints at this atmosphere in the streets of old Mesopotamia: Every day is a festival in Uruk, with people singing and dancing in the streets, musicians playing their lyres and drums, the lovely priestesses standing before the temple of Ishtar, chatting and laughing, flushed with sexual joy, and ready to serve men's pleasure, in honor of the goddess, so that even old men are aroused from their beds.

-GILGAMESH In every city of ancient Sumer, and other Mesopotamian cities, pairs of temples were dedicated to Inanna and her husband Dumuzi. In the annual marriage ceremony on New Year's Day, the king of each city would impersonate Dumuzi, and a priestess-or possibly a cultic prostitute-would portray Inanna in a ritual intended to ensure fertility and prosperity. In some early accounts, this rite was actually a sacrificial one, and the figures representing Dumuzi and Inanna were killed every eight years. Some archaeological finds suggest that the king was killed along with a large group of family members and retainers. But over time that idea undoubtedly proved unpopular with the kings, who were stand-ins for Dumuzi, and the ritual evolved, with the "death" becoming ceremonial. In later times, the sacrifice was performed symbolically, and the king-or his stand-in-was merely struck.

The city of Uruk and Inanna play central roles in the most enduring work of Mesopotamian literature, an epic poem called Gilgamesh.

MYTHIC VOICES.

As king, Gilgamesh was a tyrant to his people.

He demanded, from an old birthright, The privilege of sleeping with their brides Before the husbands were permitted.

-from Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative translated by Herbert Mason Who was mythology's first superhero?

Kids today, as always, grow up in a world saturated with superheroes. Comic books, movies, cartoons, and video games all provide a steady diet of Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk, and a host of heroes-some old, some new. With supernatural powers that allow them to defeat evil and danger, these superheroes are also almost always tempered by some flaw, some bit of humanity that hints at the weakness and faults that lie within every mortal.

The first such character in literary history is probably the hero-or antihero-of Gilgamesh, which is widely considered the oldest epic poem in world literature. Its central character, a semidivine king named Gilgamesh, who possesses unusual powers and an oversized ego to go with them, is arguably the world's first superhero. Model for many successive flawed heroes, Gilgamesh is the man who seemingly has it all, but sets off on a series of quests, seeking to become more noble, or enlightened-or immortal-in the process.

A powerful king of Uruk, Gilgamesh claims that he is two-thirds god and one-third man. A perfect physical specimen, a skilled athlete and sex machine, Gilgamesh forces the young men of his city to work building the walls of the city and routinely rapes all the young maidens in Uruk, a tradition that continued into European feudal history as the droit du seigneur ("the right of the lord"). Worn out by his demands, the people of Uruk pray for help, and the gods fashion a creature named Enkidu-a mythical prototype for Frankenstein, the Golem, and other mythical monsters-to challenge Gilgamesh. Covered in shaggy hair, Enkidu is more beast than man, eating and drinking with the gazelles and cattle.

A young hunter sees Enkidu in the woods and tells his father about this wild man. His father says they must tell King Gilgamesh about him. Instead of going to fight the man-beast, Gilgamesh enlists the aid of Shamhat, a prostitute from the temple of Ishtar, to do the work of taming Enkidu.

Shamhat is no ordinary "streetwalker." In Stephen Mitchell's description in his modern-English translation of Gilgamesh, "She is a priestess of Ishtar, the goddess of love, and as a kind of reverse nun, had dedicated her life to what the Babylonians considered the sacred mystery of sexual union.... She has become an incarnation of the goddess, and with her own body reenacts the cosmic marriage.... She is a vessel for the force that moves the stars."

Shamhat eagerly and provocatively introduces this savage man to the arts of lovemaking. After seven days (!) of fairly nonstop and wild sex, Enkidu is tamed-all that sex has civilized him. As Stephen Mitchell translates the poem, "He knew things now that an animal can't know."

Told that Gilgamesh is sleeping with all the young maidens before they are married, Enkidu is outraged and sets off to challenge the much-reviled king. The two wrestle, but then realize that they are meant to be friends-some authorities suggest that their friendship, like that of Achilles and Patroclus of the Iliad and of the biblical David and Jonathan, may be homosexual. They join forces to fight the giant of the pine forest, a fearful creature named Humbaba. With the help of the gods, Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the forest monster, decapitate him, and put his head on a raft that floats back to the city.

Back home, the freshly bathed and robed Gilgamesh catches the eye of the love goddess Ishtar (Inanna), who wants this hunky hero for a lover. But Gilgamesh is all too aware of the unfortunate fates that have befallen most of Ishtar's other lovers. He turns her down, politely at first, but later calling her an "old fat whore."

It's not nice to call the love goddess names like that. In a "woman scorned" rage, Ishtar demands that her father, Anu, destroy Gilgamesh. So Anu sends Inanna back down to Uruk with the Bull of Heaven. The bull roars, and the earth opens, swallowing hundreds of Uruk's young men. When the divine bull roars a second time, hundreds more fall into the chasm, including Enkidu. But Enkidu grabs the bull by the horns-literally-and tells Gilgamesh to kill it with his sword. Gilgamesh kills the divine Bull of Heaven, and the two friends ride in triumph through the streets of Uruk.

In a series of dream visions, Enkidu foresees his own death, which comes after he falls ill and suffers for twelve days. Distraught over the loss of his friend, and obsessed by his own fear of death, Gilgamesh sets off in search of the secret of immortality. After more adventures, he meets his distant ancestor, Utnapishtim, who, with his wife, had been the only survivor of a great flood, and is now immortal. He reveals to Gilgamesh the secret of a plant that grows underwater and gives eternal life. Gilgamesh finds the magical plant and retrieves it, but sets it down while he bathes. Drawn by its scent, a serpent devours it and is rejuvenated-a mythic explanation for why the serpent sheds its skin.

Gilgamesh realizes that immortality is not to be his, except in posterity through the achievement of the great city walls he has built.

The poem Gilgamesh was unknown until it was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. It was unearthed in the temple library and palace ruins in Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian Empire, which had taken control of most of Mesopotamia. Based in the northern valley of the Tigris River, the Assyrians were powerful warriors who came to dominate the Mesopotamian area in the ninth century BCE. Their military innovations included mail armor, armored charioteers, and the earliest use of siege warfare. They soon conquered most of the modern Middle East, dominated Babylon, and even subdued Egypt (in 669 BCE). This was the temple of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668627 BCE), last great king of the Assyrians, who were ultimately defeated by an alliance of their enemies. Nineveh and another great Assyrian city, Nimrud, were destroyed in 612 BCE.

Approximately three thousand lines long, written on twelve tablets-some of them only found as fragments-the poem may have been composed in southern Mesopotamia before 2000 BCE. Fragments of copies found elsewhere in Syria and Turkey seem to show that this text was popular throughout the ancient Middle East, and was probably used by student scribes who were learning to write, just as typing out the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" was once used to test typewriters and teach keyboard technique to typists. (Why? The sentence contains every letter in the alphabet!) Following the discovery of the tablets, in 1872, George Smith delivered a paper before the London Society of Biblical Archaeology which included a partial translation of the cuneiform texts, along with an analysis of several episodes in the Gilgamesh epic, especially its flood narrative. The material rocked the world of biblical scholarship, suggesting that the story of Noah and the flood, as recorded in Genesis, might have been "borrowed" from this earlier-and worse, "pagan"-source.

Was the Gilgamesha work of "faction"?

The Gilgamesh story has it all. Sex, love, monsters, whores, friendship, battles, more sex, more battles, the search for immortality-and, finally, disillusioning truth. Although it is filled with Mesopotamian mythology, the Gilgamesh epic may also be based on some misty history.

The notion that myths are based in real events ("euhemerism") is an old idea. But the story of Gilgamesh may be one of the earliest examples of that possibility. Here are a few reasons why: The character of Gilgamesh was apparently based on a real king who ruled the city-state of Uruk around 2600 BCE.

The Sumerian King Lists, discovered among the tablets in Nineveh, record him as the fifth ruler in Uruk's First Dynasty.

He was known as the builder of the wall of Uruk; his mother was said to be the goddess Ninsun, and his real father was, according to the King Lists, a high priest.

Then again, harsh facts do intrude on the legend. Although the poem credits Gilgamesh with building Uruk's walls, these walls actually predate his lifetime by at least one thousand years, according to archaeological evidence. That means Gilgamesh may have also been the first politician given credit for something he hadn't actually done. Isn't that novel!

Who came first, Gilgamesh or Noah?

Apart from the significance of Gilgamesh as one of humanity's first works of literature, one aspect of this epic has caused great controversy since its translation into English: its inclusion of a flood story that is remarkably similar to the biblical story of Noah.

During his adventures, Gilgamesh goes to visit his ancestor Utnapishtim, who possesses the secret of immortality, given to him by the gods. In Gilgamesh, the gods are annoyed by the humans and their growing numbers and all the noise they make, so they decide to send a flood to destroy humanity. The water god Enki is forbidden to reveal this plan to humans, but he realizes that if there are no humans, there will be no sacrifices to the gods and no people to do all the work. Enki cleverly reveals the plan of the coming flood to Utnapishtim, and instructs him to build a boat and fill it with the seeds of all living things. After a storm that lasts six days and seven nights, the boat comes to rest on a mountaintop and, like the biblical Noah, Utnapishtim releases birds to see if there is any dry land. When the birds do not return, Utnapishtim knows the floodwaters have receded. While many points between the Sumerian legend and Hebrew Bible diverge, the close parallels in details seem more than coincidental. The description of the boat and the storm, the coming to rest on the mountains, and the release of birds are all highly similar narrative features.

Complicating matters is the fact that the flood story of Utnapishtim is not the only deluge account in Mesopotamian myth. There are actually two other stories of a great destructive flood. One is an old Sumerian tale about Ziusudra, who is told that the gods plan to destroy all mankind. The details of this old story are unclear, as a complete version has never been found. But it is very similar in feeling to both Gilgamesh and another flood tale, about a man called Atrahasis, which is found in the Babylonian Creation myth Enuma Elish.

In this story, Enlil was in charge of the minor gods who were digging the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. When they complained about the work and revolted, the gods decided to create mankind to do the work instead, and Nintur, the goddess of birth, mixed some clay with blood and created man. But when the population of men grew too large, the noise they made kept Enlil awake at night, and he asked the gods to send a plague to thin out mankind. A wise man, Atrahasis-whose name literally means "exceedingly wise"-got wind of this divine plan and consulted Enki, the Sumerian water god, who was a bit of a trickster and a friend of mankind.

Enki told the people to keep quiet and make offerings to the plague god to avert the disaster. But as time went by, Enlil again wanted to destroy noisy mankind, this time with a drought. Again, disaster was averted by Enki's intervention. When the people's noise disturbed him a third time, Enlil ordered an embargo on land bounty, but Enki saved mankind from starvation by filling the canals and rivers he controlled with fish.

Finally Enlil decided to send a great flood, and this time Enki advised Atrahasis to build a boat and take his family and animals on board. All mankind was destroyed, except Atrahasis and his family, who survived and repopulated the earth.

So, did the biblical authors "sample" these ancient Mesopotamian stories, conveniently borrowing them, perhaps while they were in captivity in Babylon? Or were these just common stories that were "floating around" the ancient Near East? This question has troubled scholars and archaeologists since it was first raised in 1872. Of course, biblical purists completely reject that notion, holding that Noah's story, like the rest of the Bible, is the divinely inspired word of God. But the many parallels are too striking to ignore.

Whether the Hebrew story is borrowed or original, the existence of so many flood stories around the world raises a larger question: was there ever one cataclysmic flood in earth's history that would explain these many myths?

Among the most intriguing new insights into the old flood question have come from the research done by Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter C. Pitman 3d, authors of Noah's Flood: the New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (1998), and the man who discovered the Titanic, deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard. The two scientists theorized that sometime around 5600 BCE, there was a major inundation of the Black Sea-then a freshwater lake-by water rushing in from the Mediterranean through the present Bosporus Straits. In 2000, Ballard, using his famous underwater equipment, bolstered their argument with the discovery of remains of wooden houses beneath the Black Sea near the Turkish shore. Their theory, simply stated, is that this cataclysmic event destroyed everything for some sixty thousand square miles, killing tens of thousands of people. This ancient deluge then provided the historical memory for all of the flood narratives that later emerged, including those of Mesopotamia, ancient Israel, and Greece.

It would not necessarily explain flood accounts of many other civilizations. To that, writer Ian Wilson has a six-word answer in his recent book Before the Flood: "The end of the Ice Age." The earth has experienced numerous ice ages in its 4-billion-year-plus history. The last of these occurred about sixteen thousand years ago-well within the time scale that modern humans have been around. Arguing that the sudden and cataclysmic rises in sea levels from melting ice would have struck many human populations clustered along seashores, Wilson argues, "It stands to reason that these events must have been responsible for at least some of the Flood stories that are commonplace in the folk memories of so many people around the world."

Beyond the obvious interest in explaining the biblical story, the Ryan-Pitman thesis-enthusiastically endorsed by Ian Wilson-is that a wide-spread antediluvian civilization once existed in and around the Black Sea. The survivors of the Black Sea inundation then spread out, taking civilization with them. It is an audacious idea, which would essentially require rewriting archaeological-and human history-textbooks. But recent archaeological work done in Turkey, at Catalhoyuk, and more recently in the northeast corner of Syria near Turkey's Taurus Mountains, have provided some support to this revision in long-held ideas of how and where civilization developed.

Was the Tower of Babel in Babylon?

History, myth, and biblical traditions all come crashing together in the largely familiar account of the Tower of Babel, a story which appears in Genesis 11. In this tale, men have come from the east and settled in Shinar-a biblical place understood to be the kingdom of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. The men all speak the same language and decide to build a city and a tower to "make a name for ourselves." But when God comes down and sees this activity, in which men are making bricks to build a tower with its "top in the heavens," He is not happy. Men are making their way heavenward. Threatened and annoyed, God decides to confuse their speech so that the tower-builders cannot understand one another. After the construction of the tower is thrown into chaos, God scatters these people all over the face of the earth. The biblical account has traditionally been viewed as an explanatory myth that accounts for the world's many different languages and the spread of different nations.

But in exploring life and myth in the "cradle of civilization," it should be noted that many more languages were spoken over the centuries in Mesopotamia than elsewhere, due to the successive waves of people who conquered or moved through the area, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, and later, Persians. The conquerors of Mesopotamia all spoke different languages, so Babylon's "multicultural" history, and Israel's place in that history, need to be taken into account when considering the Bible story and its historical background.

The first great Babylonian civilization had flourished between 1800 and 1600 BCE, under Hammurabi and other kings. The Babylonians later fell to the Kassites, who ruled Babylon from the sixteenth to the twelfth century, in what is called the Kassite Period. Speaking a little-known language, they came from the Caucasus region, the mountainous area between the Black and Caspian Seas (an area that today includes Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Chechnya, the restive and very troubled region of Russia).

The Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia, took control of Babylon during the 700s BCE, but the city resisted Assyrian rule, and King Sennacherib of Assyria destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE. The New Babylonian, or Chaldean, Empire began in 626 BCE, when the Babylonian military leader Nabopolassar became king of Babylon. Nabopolassar won control of Babylon from the Assyrians, and under his reign, the Chaldean Empire grew to control much of what is now the Middle East. Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadrezzar II rebuilt the city on a grand scale. During the reign of Nebuchadrezzar, from 605 to 562 BCE, workers built huge walls almost 85 feet (26 meters) thick around the outside of Babylon, and people entered and left the city through eight bronze gates. The grandest of these was the Ishtar Gate, decorated with figures of mythical dragons, lions, and bulls made of colored, glazed brick. The Ishtar Gate opened onto a broad paved avenue connecting the Temple of Marduk inside the walls and the site of the great New Year festival. Nebuchadrezzar's main palace stood between the Ishtar Gate and the Euphrates River, an area that may have included the famed Hanging Gardens. The ancient Greeks described these gardens, which grew on the roof of a high building, as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Temple of Marduk stood in an area to the south and included the famed ziggurat tower.

The function of the ziggurat has inspired several theories, including the idea that these towers may have originated as burial mounds-just as the Egyptian pyramids started with kingly tombs-from which the god-king Marduk could be resurrected. Another idea is that each of these towers served as a symbolic "sacred mountain," typical of many mythologies, as home of the gods. Pointing out that Mesopotamia was flat and had no natural high places-such as the Greek's Mount Olympus-to serve as home of the gods, Daniel Boorstin argues that in many cultures, "where there were no natural mountains, people built artificial mountains.... 'Ziggurat' means both the summit of a mountain and man-made stepped tower."

But Boorstin's interpretation is not shared by everyone, and there are disagreements over the rationale for the ziggurats. Historian Gwendolyn Leick argues that there is nothing in Mesopotamian literature to substantiate that the ziggurat was meant to imitate or evoke a natural mountain. Instead, she writes, "In areas prone to flooding this was a practical device, and the towering sanctuaries must have been reassuring sights as high and therefore safe places, not necessarily to keep the people safe, but to protect the gods, upon whose benevolence all life depended."

By all accounts, the grandest of these ziggurats was the temple complex in the city of Babylon that may have been first built around 1900 BCE, then expanded by Nabopolassar and continued by his son Nebuchadrezzar, a project that took forty-three years. Designed to signify the triumph of Babylon over its enemies, Nebuchadrezzar's ziggurat was clearly awesome, involving the production of at least 17 million bricks. Many historians and archaeologists agree that this was the same tower described in Genesis.

After Nebuchadrezzar conquered Jerusalem, he took Judah's king as a captive to Babylon, and, in 586 BCE, destroyed Jerusalem's Great Temple. Thousands of Jews, among the nation's elite, were taken into captivity in Babylon, one of the most significant events in the history of Israel and the development of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. During this time, many of the books of Hebrew scripture were first written down.

In the bustling capital city, the captive Israelites would have heard many languages-with hints of ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian filling the air of the ancient bazaars. Clearly, the story of the Tower of Babel had great significance to the exiled Israelites, because it provided an interesting play on the name of the city of Babylon. In Babylonian, the city's name means "the gate of the gods," but in Hebrew, the word for Babylon is related to a word meaning "to confuse." The author of the biblical Tower of Babel story was essentially using a bilingual pun, a typical Hebrew literary device, to disparage the people who had captured the Israelites and held them captive.

Finally, the Tower of Babel reflects a classic story line, in which the gods become annoyed when people get a little too full of themselves. The theme that the gods-or God-don't want competition from mankind is a common one in myths, and usually it does not end up well for humanity. Mankind overreaching-whether by building high towers, trying to fly, or stealing fire-has been a mythic concept opposed not only by the God of the Hebrew Bible but by gods in other mythologies. However, it just may be part of human nature to strive for the heavens, whether that means building towers in the desert, erecting skyscrapers in the city, or sending rockets into space.

MYTHIC VOICES.

Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

-Genesis 12:13 (King James Version) Was the Bible's Abraham a man-or another Mesopotamian myth?

Mesopotamia was a land in which myths and men mixed. Gilgamesh was both real and a myth. Marduk was a myth, but one with great impact on biblical-and therefore on Western-history. But one of Mesopotamia's most famous men ever is a mysterious figure whose very existence is an open question.

The biblical patriarch Abram-his name was later changed to Abraham, Hebrew for "father of a multitude"-is one of the most revered men in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What generations of believers may not know about this man, hailed as the "father of all nations," is that he was from ancient Mesopotamia. According to Genesis, Abraham came from the city of Ur in Sumer, and was born in a direct line descended from Adam. According to Genesis, he then received a divine message to go to Canaan, a land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants. He dutifully obeyed God's every command and was richly rewarded with many children and great herds.

But there is no specific proof outside the Bible or Koran that such a person existed. His name and exploits appear nowhere in Mesopotamia's surviving tablets. While some scholars maintain that there was an actual Abraham, it is generally believed that he was a legendary figure. Supporters of the position that Abraham truly existed say that certain aspects of his life and travels fit within the framework of Mesopotamian history. References to many of the specific customs mentioned in the biblical story, including the idea that a man could have a legitimate heir conceived by his wife's servant-as Abraham did-buttress their position.

Of course, to believers, the "historical" Abraham doesn't matter as much as what he represents-a pioneer of faith. That faith is underscored in a crucial biblical event heavy with mythic overtones-the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son. By agreeing to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac at God's request, Abraham passes what is viewed as the supreme test of individual faith.

The aborted sacrifice of Isaac and the substitution of an animal in his place is, in the view of most scholars, the symbolic moment in which the ancient Jewish people rejected human sacrifice. In many of the cults and religions of the ancient Near East, including Mesopotamia, human sacrifice was practiced. In most of these cultures, the victims were ritually killed in a way that was meant to appease the gods, often to assure the fertility of the crops. In Mesopotamia, the whole purpose of human existence was to provide the gods with the necessities of life.

But back to the essential question: Did Abraham of Mesopotamia exist? Or was he the invention of Hebrew writers who created a "foundation myth" to justify Israel's presence in the lands it eventually conquered? Doubts linger. And perhaps-barring some remarkable archaeological discovery-it is an unanswerable question. Given the historical background of Mesopotamian life and society, many of the details of Abraham's story certainly have the historical ring of truth. Chances are that a man named Abraham-or an ancient Semitic version of that name-may well have existed and, like Gilgamesh or King Arthur, he was turned into a national legend over the centuries.

The story of Abraham ultimately stands as one more example of how one man's myth is another man's faith.

MYTHIC VOICES.

Then the Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and worshipped the Baals, and they abandoned the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, they followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them, and bowed down to them and they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord, and worshipped Baal and the Astartes.

-Book of Judges 2:1113 Who were El and Baal?

Any discussion of the myths of Mesopotamia would not be complete without discussing Canaan, the "Promised Land" that Abraham and his descendants had been granted by God. Located as a sort of land bridge connecting the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Canaan was both a battleground and a bustling bazaar that felt the influence of the great empires around it. Set in this crossroads of the ancient Near East, Canaan gave rise to a body of myths that drew heavily on the earlier Mesopotamian legends, and the Canaanite stories violently clashed with the beliefs and ideas of the people of Israel.

The people of what was Canaan-today comprising Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine-were Semites, but over time, Canaan became a true Middle Eastern melting pot. Canaanites, and groups called Edomites and Moabites, settled the area and were later joined by the Philistines, who may have migrated from the Mediterranean islands of Crete and Cyprus. (The contemporary word "Palestine" is derived from the word "Philistine.") Another group that moved to the region was the Phoenicians, who had been based in such Mediterranean coastal cities as Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Extraordinary sailors and dyers of cloth, they also get credit for devising the alphabet adopted by the later Greeks, which influenced Western writing.

With these many groups and influences merging and mingling, Canaan was a land of many gods and cults, but one group of Canaanite gods was most widely worshipped. Its chief deity was known as El-which means "god" in ancient Semitic languages. The supreme god El, often depicted as a man wearing bull's horns, was creator of the universe. Benevolent and all-knowing, El was a somewhat remote god. His consort was Asherah, a goddess who is related to Ishtar (Inanna).

At some point in this region's history, the Canaanite El was merged with the one god of the Hebrews, called Yahweh, who gave Moses the Ten Commandments. The significance of the divine name El is clear from the Hebrew words that include it, such as Beth-El, which means "house of God." This was the name given to the spot where the biblical Jacob dreamed of a stairway to heaven-often interpreted as a ziggurat. Jacob took the stone on which his head was lying when he dreamed, stood it upright, and anointed it with oil. Piles of standing stones were traditionally constructed in Canaanite fertility cults. In a later scene in Genesis, Jacob wrestled with a mysterious stranger-also a typical mythical theme-who proves to be El himself. After this wrestling match Jacob's name was changed to Isra-el, interpreted as "he strives with God." He became the father of twelve sons, each of whom headed one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Again, the influence of "pagan" mythology on biblical faith is no small matter.

While the Canaanite El would be merged into the Jewish ideal of one god, Canaan's other chief deity did not fare so well. Canaanite mythology was especially concerned with fertility, and to the Canaanites, Baal was the most significant abundance god. Baal (which means "lord"), whose name is connected to the Mesopotamian Bel (another name for Marduk), would go down in biblical history as a figure of supreme evil.

In a story that mirrored the victory of Marduk over Tiamat, Baal defeats Yam, another dragonlike sea god. With that victory, Baal-like his Babylonian counterpart Marduk-assumed the role of chief god. When his archenemy, Mot, lord of the underworld, invited Baal to come to the underworld, Baal accepted the invitation, hoping to overcome Mot and take control of the underworld, too. But when Mot forced Baal to eat mud, considered the food of the dead, Baal died. With the death of the god of plenty, all of the crops on earth died as well.

While El and the other gods in heaven mourned the dead Baal, Baal's wife Anat (the Canaanite counterpart to Inanna-Ishtar), descended to the underworld, and killed Mot with a sickle. Anat then burned him and ground him, treating the god of the dead like harvested wheat. With Mot's death, Baal was revived, life returned to earth, and the crops grew once more. But Mot returned to life and fought with Baal until the latter agreed to return to the underworld for a few months of the year, establishing the mythical reason for the season change.

Canaanite religion centered on worship of Baal, who was also responsible for the rain. According to their beliefs, the rains came when Baal had sex, with his semen falling in the form of life-giving rain. Most likely, Canaanite rituals included priests having sex, apparently coupling with women, men, and even animals, if the Hebrew accounts are to be believed. Many of the Mosaic Laws of the Old Testament included laws against incest, bestiality, transvestitism, temple prostitution, and idol worship, all of which may have been typical elements of Canaanite worship. The famous scene in The Ten Commandments in which the Jews melt their jewelry, which is then turned into a golden calf, was a reference to Baal worship-and, by extension, to Marduk, who was also called the "bull of heaven."

Many of the Old Testament accounts of Jewish history continue the theme of two contending beliefs-the one god of Judaism against the many false gods of the Canaanites. The final insult paid to Baal by the Hebrews was a pun that changed his name and connected it to another familiar biblical word, Beelzebub. In an Old Testament story, an evil Jewish king, who is sick, requests help from the god he calls "Baalzebub." This is a wordplay on the Canaanite name meaning "Lord Baal," because in Hebrew, it was mockingly translated as "lord of the dung" or "lord of the flies." By New Testament times, Beelzebub became associated with the name of Satan.

What's a Canaanite demoness doing at a rock concert?

The third intriguing figure from Canaanite myth is a character who entered the American pop-culture pantheon in the 1990s through a series of female-oriented summer concerts called the Lilith Fest. The name Lilith comes from the Canaanite storm demon Lilitu, with perhaps deeper connections to the Mesopotamian goddess Ninlil. She has a most intriguing side story-Lilith was once thought to be Adam's first wife, the predecessor to Eve.

There is no mention of Lilith in Genesis-and the only biblical reference to her at all is a single mention in the Book of Isaiah. But in folklore and in the Talmud-which is a collection of ancient commentaries on the Bible made by Jewish rabbis over many centuries-Lilith has a rich history.

The issue of Adam's first wife arises because there are two Creation stories in Genesis. In the first, which describes the six-day Creation in poetic terms, men and women are created simultaneously, both in God's image. The second version tells the longer, more folkloric story set in the Garden of Eden. In this version, man is formed first and woman only later, out of the man's rib. Troubled by this discrepancy or contradiction in the two biblical accounts, early Jewish commentators suggested that the wife in Genesis 1 was a different woman from Eve. Some of these early biblical scholars proposed that she was Lilith.