THE SUN GOD IN HIS DRAGON BOAT

Author: * Sin Assurbanipal - 2 Posts on this thread out of 11 Posts sitewide.
Date: Jul 30, 2006 - 22:23

The Sun God Utu-Shamash in his Reed Boat. Line drawing of a printout from a Mesopotamian cylinder seal. Akkadian period, 2224-2154 BC. Paris: Biblioteque Nationale. Drawing from Henri Fankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, fig 96B, p. 90, Penguin paper edition, 1985.

His tall conical hat or helmet with four rows of bull horns indicates a high god, and the fiery rays or flames shooting from his shoulders shows he is Utu/Shamash, the sun god of the Sumerians and Babylonians. He steers his boat, made from bundles of reeds waterproofed with bituminous tar, from the stern with a long steering-bar. No paddle or oar is needed, for in a way his boat is self-propelled. This is because the figure on the prow, a low-grade god or demon with just one pair of horns, who poles the boat along with a forked punting pole, is actually part of the prow. Between them is the boat's cargo: a human-headed lion tied to the prow, a large jar, a plough, and other objects. Below, fish swim in the water, indicated by three wavy lines.

On the shore at the left Inanna/Ishtar, the goddess of fertility and vegetation, stands in a field. She holds plants in her hands, and an ear of grain, perhaps barley, sprouts from her body.

Is the sun god sailing through the underworld at night, or through the sky in the daytime? Henri Frankfort thought this seal might show "the sun's progress through the night, beneath the earth which is the domain of the goddess." But Inanna/Ishtar, bringer of life-giving rain to the crops in the fields, was a sky goddess as well as an earth goddess, and worshipped as "Queen of Heaven and Earth." Both sky and earth were surrounded by the primeval salt sea, so the sun god could just as well be travelling across the sky in his boat in the daytime as he could be travelling through the underworld cavern of Kur at night. As the planet Venus, Inanna was both the morning and the evening star, and like the sun god and her father Nanna/Sin, the moon god, she travelled across the sky in a boat like this one, whose shape is like the crescent moon.

Here Inanna is framed by the stern of the sun god's boat, which, like the prow, terminates in the body and head of a divine being: the world serpent or dragon, whose body coils down around the stern and at the bottom begins to blend with the winding pattern of the reeds, until the boat itself becomes a kind of hybrid, a living creature whose stern ends in the winding tail and head of the world serpent, and its prow in the skirted body and head of a god.

Storm god (Ninurta?) on Dragon. Cylinder seal from the first millenium BC. Akkadian? Babylonian? From Ugo Bardot, MYSTERIES OF THE COSMIC THUNDERBOLT, ch 2, online. = Plate 19A in Samuel Noah Kramer's "Sumerian Mythology" ch 3, "Myths of Kur"

For thousands of years, a common theme and image in Mesopotamian art, literature and religion was the war of the gods against the forces of chaos, as embodied in giant serpents, dragons and other monsters. Eventually these forces of disorder were defeated and made to serve the enforcers of law and order, often as vehicles or conveyances: as a ship or steed, a winged lion or chariot puller.

Here is another cylinder seal impression that clearly shows the world dragon or chaos monster as a boat (note again the triple wavy line of water below it), as it carries a thunderbolt-wielding storm god (possibly Ninurta) and two other sky gods, the god being represented by a star or sun and the goddess by a star in a crescent "boat." Perhaps the sun god and Inanna?