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(West Asian mythology)

The Sumerian god of the earth and the air. At the beginning the primeval waters generated a cosmic mountain, which consisted of heaven and earth. From this union of heaven, personified by the god An, and earth, as the goddess Ki, sprang Enlil, the air god, who separated his parents and united with his mother to beget mankind. His chief gift to men was the pickaxe, an implement designed to assist in the construction of cities including his own seat of Nippur. The primeval waters, Nammu, were called ‘the mother’ and may have been synonymous with Abzu, the sweet waters in the earth, or perhaps they represented the marshlands at the mouth of the Euphrates and of the Tigris, where new land was being constantly created by riverine deposits.

A myth concerned with the birth of the moon god tells how Enlil was banished to the nether world for raping the goddess Ninlil, but she decided to follow him in order to give birth in his presence. The banished god somehow managed the escape of their child, Nanna, the moon god, so that he could become the light of the night sky. Yet fragments surviving of a flood myth indicate an even more violent side to Enlil, since as the devastating wind god he was probably the author of the disaster. Only pious King Ziusudra escaped in a boat, which he built on the instruction of the water god Enki. To this ruler of Sippar, ‘the seed of mankind’, was granted ‘the breath of eternal life’.

In Babylonian mythology Enlil kept his name, or was known as Ellil, though he acquired the Akkadian epithet of Bel, ‘the lord’. Disturbed by the racket of mankind, he sent to earth a plague, then a drought, and at last a deluge. But Ea warned Atrahasis, ‘the very wise one’, who saved himself in the ship Preserver of Life, In The Gilgamesh Epic, the other Babylonian treatment of the flood, it was Utanapishtim that Ea warned and the decision to destroy life was taken by the gods, not Enlil alone. Other legends underscore his ambivalent attitude towards men, too. Enlil created the monster Labbu, or Lahmu, ‘the raging one’, to wreak havoc on earth: it descended from the primeval chaos, being the offspring of Abzu and Tiamat. On the positive side, he held the ‘tablets of destiny’, tupsimati, by whose authority he ordered the nature of things. In the second millennium BC on the pillar recording his own code of laws Hammurabi, King of Babylon, invoked wrathful Enlil against the disobedient.

 
 
Dictionary: En·lil  (ĕn'lĭl) pronunciation
n. Mythology.

The chief Mesopotamian tutelary deity, invoked to assure prosperity.

[Sumerian, folk-etymological alteration (influenced by en, lord, and lil, wind) of illil, ellil, of Semitic origin.]


 

[Di]

Sumerian god of the sky and storms, son of An. Patron of Nippur, and the most important god in the pantheon until ousted by Marduk.

 
(ĕnlĭl') , ancient earth god of Sumerian origin, worshiped in Babylonian religion. With the sky god Anu and the water god Ea, he formed the great divine triad. Enlil, also referred to as Bel, could be hostile or beneficent. He was responsible for the order and harmony in the universe, but as a god of storms and winds he brought terrible destruction.


 
Wikipedia: Enlil


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Enlil (EN = Lord+ LIL = Air, "Lord of the Open Field" or possibly "Lord of the Wind") was the name of a chief deity in Sumerian religion, perhaps pronounced and sometimes rendered in translations as Ellil in later Akkadian. He was considered to be the god of wind, air and space, separating earth and heaven. The name is of Sumerian origin and has been believed to mean 'Lord Wind' (though this interpretation is now disputed); a more literal interpretation is 'Lord of the Command'.[citation needed]

Origins

One story names his origins as the exhausted breath of An (god of the heavens) and Ki (goddess of the Earth) after sexual union. Another is that he and his sister Ninhursag/Ninmah/Aruru/Ninti/ were children of another god known as Enki 'Lord Earth' borne by Ninki 'Lady Earth'[1] (in another context these are considered the parents of the god Enki of Eridu).

When Enlil was a young god, he was banished from Dilmun, home of the gods, to Kur, the underworld for raping a young girl named Ninlil. Ninlil followed him to the underworld where she bore his first child, the moon god Sin (Sumerian Nanna - Suen). After fathering three more underworld deities (subtitutes for Sin), Enlil was allowed to return to Dilmun. [2].

Enlil was also known as the inventor of the pickaxe/hoe (favorite tool of the Sumerians) and caused plants to grow. He was in possession of the holy Me, until he gave them to Enki for safe keeping, who summarily lost them to Inanna in a drunken stupor.

Cosmological role

Enlil's relation to An 'Sky', in theory the supreme god of the Sumerian pantheon, was somewhat like that of a Frankish mayor of the palace compared to the king, or that of a Japanese shogun compared to the emperor, or to a prime minister in a modern constitutional monarchy compared to the supposed monarch. While An was in name ruler in the highest heavens, it was Enlil who mostly did the actual ruling over the world.

By his wife Ninlil or Sud, Enlil was father of the moon god Nanna - (Suen) (in Akkadian Sin) and of Ninurta (also called Ningirsu). Enlil is sometimes father of Nergal, of Nisaba the goddess of grain, of Pabilsag who is sometimes equated with Ninurta, and sometimes of Enbilulu. By Ereshkigal Enlil was father of Namtar.

There is evidence that Enlil originally replaced Marduk as the God who killed Tiamat, as reported in the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish.

Cultural histories

Enlil is associated with the ancient city of Nippur, and since Enlu with the determinative for "land" or "district" is a common method of writing the name of the city, it follows, apart from other evidence, that Enlil was originally the patron deity of Nippur.

At a very early period prior to 3000 BC—Nippur had become the centre of a political district of considerable extent. Inscriptions found at Nippur, where extensive excavations were carried on during 18881900 by Messrs Peters and Haynes, under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, show that Enlil was the head of an extensive pantheon. Among the titles accorded to him are "king of lands," "king of heaven and earth" and "father of the gods".

His chief temple at Nippur was known as Ekur, signifying 'House of the mountain', and such was the sanctity acquired by this edifice that Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, down to the latest days, vied with one another in embellishing and restoring Enlil's seat of worship, and the name Ekur became the designation of a temple in general.

Grouped around the main sanctuary, there arose temples and chapels to the gods and goddesses who formed his court, so that Ekur became the name for an entire sacred precinct in the city of Nippur. The name "mountain house" suggests a lofty structure and was perhaps the designation originally of the staged tower at Nippur, built in imitation of a mountain, with the sacred shrine of the god on the top.

When, with the political rise of Babylon as the centre of a great empire, Nippur yielded its prerogatives to the city over which Marduk presided, the attributes and the titles of Enlil were largely transferred to Marduk. But Enlil did not, however, entirely lose his right to have any considerable political importance, while in addition the doctrine of a triad of gods symbolizing the three divisions—heavens, earth and water—assured to Enlil, to whom the earth was assigned as his province, his place in the religious system.

It was no doubt in part Enlil's position as the second figure of the triad that enabled him to survive the political eclipse of Nippur and made his sanctuary a place of pilgrimage to which Assyrian kings down to the days of Assur-bani-pal paid their homage equally with Babylonian rulers.

Scholarly study

The Sumerian ideogram for Enlil or Ellil was formerly incorrectly read as Bel by scholars, but in fact Enlil was not especially given the title Bel 'Lord' more than many other gods. The Babylonian god Marduk is mostly the god persistently called Bel (or Baal) in late Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions and it is Marduk that mostly appears in Greek and Latin texts as Belos or Belus. References in older literature to Enlil as the old Bel and Marduk as the young Bel derive from this error in reading.

References

  1. ^ Espak, Peeter "Ancient Near Eastern Gods, Enki and Ea" (Master's Thesis) [1]

Portions of this entry are from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Bel.

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Copyrights:

World Mythology Dictionary. A Dictionary of World Mythology. Copyright © Arthur Cotterell 1979, 1986, 2003. All rights reserved.  Read more
Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Archaeology Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Enlil" Read more

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Mentioned In:

  • Ninhursaga (West Asian mythology)
  • Ea (in archaeology)
  • Marduk (in archaeology)
  • Anu (ancient religion, Babylon)