Myths of Babylonia and Assyria

Tammuz died with the dying vegetation, and Diarmid expired when the hills apparently were assuming their purple tints.[113] The month of Tammuz wailings was from 20th June till 20th July, when the heat and dryness brought forth the demons of pestilence. The mourners chanted:

Whither went Tammuz? His destination has already been referred to as "the bosom of the earth", and in the Assyrian version of the "Descent of Ishtar" he dwells in "the house of darkness" among the dead, "where dust is their nourishment and their food mud", and "the light is never seen"--the gloomy Babylonian Hades. In one of the Sumerian hymns, however, it is stated that Tammuz "upon the flood was cast out". The reference may be to the submarine "house of Ea", or the Blessed Island to which the Babylonian Noah was carried. In this Hades bloomed the nether "garden of Adonis".

Although Tammuz of the hymns was slain, he returned again from Hades. Apparently he came back as a child. He is wailed for as "child, Lord Gishzida", as well as "my hero Damu". In his lunar character the Egyptian Osiris appeared each month as "the child surpassingly beautiful"; the Osiris bull was also a child of the moon; "it was begotten", says Plutarch, "by a ray of generative light falling from the moon". When the bull of Attis was sacrificed his worshippers were drenched with its blood, and were afterwards ceremonially fed with milk, as they were supposed to have "renewed their youth" and become children. The ancient Greek god Eros (Cupid) was represented as a wanton boy or handsome youth. Another god of fertility, the Irish Angus, who resembles Eros, is called "the ever young"; he slumbers like Tammuz and awakes in the Spring.

Apparently it was believed that the child god, Tammuz, returned from the earlier Sumerian Paradise of the Deep, and grew into full manhood in a comparatively brief period, like Vyasa and other super-men of Indian mythology. A couplet from a Tammuz hymn says tersely:

The "boat" may be the "chest" in which Adonis was concealed by Aphrodite when she confided him to the care of Persephone, queen of Hades, who desired to retain the young god, but was compelled by Zeus to send him back to the goddess of love and vegetation. The fact that Ishtar descended to Hades in quest of Tammuz may perhaps explain the symbolic references in hymns to mother goddesses being in sunken boats also when their powers were in abeyance, as were those of the god for part of each year. It is possible, too, that the boat had a lunar and a solar significance. Khonsu, the Egyptian moon god, for instance, was associated with the Spring sun, being a deity of fertility and therefore a corn spirit; he was a form of Osiris, the Patriarch, who sojourned on earth to teach mankind how to grow corn and cultivate fruit trees. In the Egyptian legend Osiris received the corn seeds from Isis, which suggests that among Great-Mother-worshipping peoples, it was believed that agricultural civilization had a female origin. The same myths may have been attached to corn gods and corn goddesses, associated with water, sun, moon, and stars.

That there existed in Babylonia at an extremely remote period an agricultural myth regarding a Patriarch of divine origin who was rescued from a boat in his childhood, is suggested by the legend which was attached to the memory of the usurper King Sargon of Akkad. It runs as follows: