Eridu God

Eridu (or Eridug) was an ancient city seven miles southwest of Ur. Eridu was the southernmost of the conglomeration of cities that grew about temples, almost in sight of one another, in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia. It was most likely founded close to the Persian Gulf near the mouth of the Euphrates river, but with accumulation of silt at the shoreline over the millennia, the remains of the city are now some distance from the gulf at Abu Shahrain in Iraq.

After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug. In Eridug, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,800 years. Alaljar ruled for 36,000 years. 2 kings; they ruled for 64,800 years. Then Eridug fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira.

Babylonian texts talk of the creation of Eridu by the god Marduk as the first city, "the holy city, the dwelling of their [the other gods] delight".

In the court of Assyria, special physicians trained in the ancient lore of Eridu, far to the south, foretold the course of sickness from signs and portents on the patient's body, which we must not too hastily connect with "symptoms" in our worldview, and they offered the appropriate incantations and magical resources.

Some modern researchers have conjectured that Eridu, to the south of Ur, was the original Babel and site of the Tower of Babel, rather than the later city of Babylon, for a variety of reasons:

1. The ziggurat ruins of Eridu are far larger and older than any others, and seem to best match the Biblical description of the unfinished Tower of Babel.

2. One name of Eridu in cuneiform logograms was pronounced "NUN.KI" (the Mighty Place") in Sumerian, but much later the same "NUN.KI" was understood to mean the city of Babylon.

3. The much later Greek version of the King-list by Berosus (c. 200 BC) reads "Babylon" in place of "Eridu" in the earlier versions, as the name of the oldest city where "the kingship was lowered from Heaven".

4. Proponents of this theory equate Biblical Nimrod, said to have built Erech (Uruk) and Babel, with the legendary name Enmerkar (-KAR meaning "hunter") of the king-list, said to have built temples both in his capital of Uruk and in Eridu.




SUMER




MIDDLE EAST INDEX


ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS INDEX


ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ALL FILES

CRYSTALINKS MAIN PAGE

CRYSTALINKS MAILING LIST, NEWSLETTER, UPDATES

PSYCHIC READING WITH ELLIE







	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Search Crystalinks     Web