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The names of over 3,000 Mesopotamian deities have been recovered from cuneiform texts. [19] [16] Many of these are from lengthy lists of deities compiled by ancient Mesopotamian scribes. [19] [20] The longest of these lists is a text entitled An = Anum, a Babylonian scholarly work listing the names of over 2,000 deities.
During the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Sumerian pantheon was said to include sixty times sixty (3600) deities. [16]: 182 Enlil was the god of air, wind, and storm. [27]: 108 He was also the chief god of the Sumerian pantheon [27]: 108 [28]: 115–121 and the patron deity of the city of Nippur.
Initially, the pantheon was not ordered, but later Mesopotamian theologians came up with the concept of ranking the deities in order of importance. A Sumerian list of around 560 deities that did this was uncovered at Farm and Tell Abû Ṣalābīkh and dated to circa 2600 BCE, ranking five primary deities as being of particular importance. [22]
Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag, stating that they were originally the same figure. [3] [4] The oldest of the Anunnaki was Enlil, the god of air [5] and chief god of the Sumerian pantheon. [6] The Sumerians believed that, until Enlil was born, heaven and earth were inseparable. [7]
Mesopotamian mythology refers to the myths, religious texts, and other literature that comes from the region of ancient Mesopotamia which is a historical region of Western Asia, situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system that occupies the area of present-day Iraq.
Enlil, [a] later known as Elil and Ellil, is an ancient Mesopotamian god associated with wind, air, earth, and storms. [4] He is first attested as the chief deity of the Sumerian pantheon, [5] but he was later worshipped by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hurrians.
The history of Sumer spans through the 5th to 3rd millennia BCE in southern Mesopotamia, and is taken to include the prehistoric Ubaid and Uruk periods. Sumer was the region's earliest known civilization and ended with the downfall of the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2004 BCE.
An = Anum, also known as the Great God List, [1] [2] is the longest preserved Mesopotamian god list, a type of lexical list cataloging the deities worshiped in the Ancient Near East, chiefly in modern Iraq.