Enlil

Nippur was not a capital. It had no dynasty of its own and does not appear to have ruled anything, and that is precisely what made it important. It was the seat of Enlil, and Enlil handed out kingship, so a ruler who wanted his claim over Sumer to be more than a claim of arms went to Nippur.

The mechanism was concrete. Kings from Sargon of Akkad onward rebuilt and endowed the Ekur, Enlil's temple, recorded the fact in inscriptions, and installed family members in its priesthood. Sargon made his daughter Enheduanna high priestess at Ur, and the practice of placing royal daughters in the great southern temples continued for centuries. The Sumerian King List, itself a composition associated with Nippur, presents rule over the land as a single office passing from city to city, which is a theological claim as much as a historical one: at any moment one place holds kingship, and it holds it because Enlil gave it.

The arrangement gave Sumer something like a neutral centre for legitimacy, distinct from whichever city currently had the army. It also gave Enlil's priesthood real leverage, and the literature reflects the tension. The Curse of Agade tells how Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, took a pickaxe to the Ekur, and how in answer Enlil brought down the Gutians from the mountains and the Akkadian empire fell. Whether Naram-Sin did anything of the kind is doubtful, and the poem was probably composed generations later, but as political theology it is unambiguous: the god who gives the mandate can withdraw it, and the temple that records the giving is also the one that records the withdrawal.

One of the oldest Sumerian myths concerning Enlil, generally known by the title Enlil and Ninlil, tells a story modern readers and many scholars have found genuinely troubling rather than simply exotic. In it, the young goddess Ninlil is warned by her mother to avoid bathing in a particular canal because Enlil will see her and desire her; she goes anyway, and Enlil takes her by force.

For this act the assembly of the great gods judges Enlil guilty and expels him from Nippur, banishing him to the underworld despite his standing as a senior deity, a rare instance in Mesopotamian myth of even a major god facing formal consequence for a specific wrong. Ninlil, pregnant, follows him down to the world of the dead, and there Enlil, disguising himself in turn as the gatekeeper and two other underworld figures, has intercourse with her three further times, each union producing a substitute underworld deity meant to stand in for the couple's first child, the moon god Suen (Nanna), so that Nanna can be released to rise into the sky rather than remain trapped below.

The text is direct about Enlil's initial act being unwanted, and Assyriologists have written extensively about how to read a divine narrative that opens with an assault and formal punishment for it, some treating the story chiefly as an origin myth for the moon god's freedom from the underworld, others noting that the myth, unusually for the genre, does not simply excuse what Enlil does, since the gods' own judgment against him is built into the story rather than absent from it. Contested and uncomfortable as it is, the myth remains one of the fullest surviving Sumerian narratives naming Enlil directly, and it shows the tradition sometimes held even its highest gods accountable within its own moral terms.