Ninhursag

Ninhursag, the lady of the stony mountain, is the Sumerian mother-goddess and one of the four great deities of the pantheon alongside An, Enlil and Enki. She is known under an unusual number of names, Ninmah (the exalted lady), Nintu (the lady who gives birth), Damgalnuna, and others, so many that it is not certain the tradition always understood them as one goddess, and her identity is somewhat fluid across time and place. Her essential role is as the shaper of living bodies, the divine midwife and maker of forms. In the myth of Enki and Ninmah, the two deities hold a contest at a feast: Ninmah moulds human beings with various disabilities and challenges Enki to find a place in society for each, and he does; then Enki makes a frail and helpless creature and challenges her in return, and she cannot provide for it, a story that reflects, among other things, on the making of human beings and the accommodation of human frailty.

In another myth, Enki and Ninhursag, set in the paradisal land of Dilmun, she creates plants and heals the ailing Enki by bringing forth deities to cure each of his afflicted body parts. As Nintu she was invoked in childbirth, and several early rulers called themselves her beloved or claimed to be nourished by her milk. Ninhursag is the Mesopotamian image of the generative, body-shaping mother at the origin of life.

The hymn to Ninhursag's temple at Kesh, mentioned in passing as one of her honours, deserves fuller notice on its own terms: the Kesh Temple Hymn is among the oldest pieces of literature preserved anywhere in the world, with copies attested on tablets from the Early Dynastic period, roughly the twenty sixth century BCE, found not only in Sumer itself but as far away as Ebla in Syria, showing that the text was already circulating well beyond its own region within a few centuries of the invention of writing. Remarkably, the hymn continued to be copied by scribes for well over a thousand years afterward, appearing in later curricular collections used to train scribes in Old Babylonian schools around 1800 BCE, alongside other early Sumerian literary works, so that Sumerian students were still learning to write by copying out praise of Ninhursag's temple many centuries after the hymn was first composed and long after Sumerian itself had ceased to be anyone's native spoken language, surviving purely as a learned, literary and liturgical language.

The hymn praises Kesh and its temple in lavish cosmic terms, comparing the sanctuary to the very foundations of the universe, and its longevity in the scribal curriculum reflects both Ninhursag's enduring importance as one of the four great deities of the Sumerian pantheon and the broader Mesopotamian educational practice of using venerable religious poetry as the basic material through which literacy itself was transmitted from one generation of scribes to the next, tying Ninhursag's cult directly to the mechanics of how Mesopotamian civilization preserved and passed on its own writing system.