Inana and Šu-kale-tuda

Author: Traditional Sumerian

Time Period: 2499 BCE–1000 BCE

Country or Culture: Mesopotamia

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

The goddess Inana (Inanna) leaves her holy throne one day and travels up into the mountains. The purpose of her journey from the sky and the earth is to distinguish further between right and wrong, so that she may be able to dispense justice more accurately. Climbing up the mountain, Inana is able to survey the land and its inhabitants. By doing this, she can identify the criminal and the just. She climbs farther and farther up the mountain until she grows weary of questioning and searching.

While Inana is finding a place to rest, the god Enki instructs a raven to perform a variety of agricultural chores around his shrine at Eridug (Eridu). The raven’s chores include chopping up kohl for the incantation of the priests, watering a field with a shadoof (pole, counterweights, and water), and cultivating date palms. The raven obeys Enki’s orders and performs these tasks as a man would.

As Inana travels around the mountain, a young gardener named Šu-kale-tuda (Shukaletuda) arrives to perform his work. He finds that no plants remain, for he had previously pulled them out by their roots and destroyed them. A storm wind blows the dust of the mountain in his eyes, and he is unable to remove it all. Squinting into the sky and the land, Šu-kale-tuda spots Inana, who is just lying down beneath the shade of a poplar tree. At first, he believes her to be a ghost, but judging from her appearance and divine clothing, Šu-kale-tuda realizes that she is a goddess. He approaches her and, as she sleeps, undresses her and has intercourse with her. When he is finished, he returns to his plot. When the sun rises, Inana awakens and inspects herself. Seeing that she has been violated, she becomes furious. In her anger, she turns all of the water in the wells to blood so that the land is irrigated with blood and the inhabitants have nothing else to drink. She searches the land for the man who has violated her but is unable to locate him.

Nervous that he will be found, Šu-kale-tuda goes to his father and explains to him what he has done. His father repeatedly instructs him to hide among the people of the city, where he can blend in with the others and avoid discovery by the goddess, who is searching up on the mountainsides. Still unable to locate the gardener, Inana summons a series of violent storms. This still does not manage to turn up the culprit, so she blocks the highways. No matter what she does, Inana continues to look in the wrong place for Šu-kale-tuda, who successfully remains hidden in the city.

Discouraged by her inability to locate the man who violated her, Inana goes to Eridug and pleads before the powerful water god Enki for guidance and the ability to bring the man to justice. Enki agrees to help her, and Inana then spans across the whole sky like a rainbow. This allows her to locate Šu-kale-tuda, who is attempting to make himself small and unnoticeable in the mountains. Despite his pleas and attempts to explain what happened, she passes judgment upon him. She states that he is to die but that shepherds and bards will sing his name around the land, so that his name will not be forgotten.

SIGNIFICANCE

The myth of Inana and Šu-kale-tuda concerns the goddess Inana, the most prominent female deity in Sumerian mythology and the patron of the city of Uruk (also known as Erech or Unug) in Sumer. As a goddess, she is associated with a wide range of concepts, including war, fertility, love, justice, and fairness. Many evaluations of her myths take a feminist angle, as she was dominant in Sumerian mythology, sometimes more so than patriarchal deities. She has been adapted as the archetype of female transformation and identity.

Contemporary interpretations of Sumerian Inana mythology have noted the astral aspects of the goddess, particularly her relationship with the planet Venus. Research has shown that although the specifics of Venus’s movements in the sky may not have been known at the time, prehistoric southern Mesopotamians may have recognized Venus’s unique appearances in the east and in the west at different times of the year as being those of the same celestial body long before other civilizations did. The Inana interpretations come from the movements of Inana within her stories, which correspond with the movements of Venus through the sky. Scholars believe that in this particular myth, Inana may be in her astral manifestation, in terms of both her physicality and her specific movements. She is seen in the eastern and western horizons and then miraculously leaves the sky to search for her attacker. Also, many scholars suggest that when Šu-kale-tuda is looking to the sky after having mountain dust blown in his eyes, he may be looking to Venus, and that is why he is astounded to see her on the land, near the poplar tree.

In another Inana myth, that of her descent to the underworld, her journey in part describes the setting of Venus in the west and its eventual rising in the east, which corresponds with Inana’s ascension from the underworld. Scholars have noted that these astral interpretations of Inana’s mythology are simply theories, since ancient Sumerian astral mythology was never codified in antiquity.

Enki and Inana interact frequently in Sumerian mythology. In an earlier myth, he attempts to seduce the goddess, but while he gets drunk, she maintains her virtue. In his drunkenness, the god bestows upon Inana the gifts of his me, or decrees of civilized life. Enki was known for helping those who asked him for aid, and true to his character, he helps Inana locate her attacker in this myth.

There are several lines missing from the original text surrounding the tale of the raven and Enki. Scholars are unsure how this diversion relates to the narrative arc of Inana and Šu-kale-tuda as a whole. The two stories do share certain features, such as an emphasis on agriculture and the role played by Enki, but the inclusion of the raven’s tale is confounding to scholars, since the bird does not interact with Inana or Šu-kale-tuda or appear to affect the story at all. Therefore, the myth of Inana and Šu-kale-tuda is sometimes examined without the inclusion of the raven.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Black, Jeremy A., et al., eds. “Inana and Šu-kale-tuda.” Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Faculty of Oriental Studies, U of Oxford, 2006. Web. 24 June 2013.

Cochrane, Ev. The Many Faces of Venus: The Planet Venus in Ancient Myth and Religion. Ames: Aeon, 1997. Print.

Cooley, Jeff. “Inana and Sukaletuda: A Sumerian Astral Myth.” Kaskal 5 (2008): 161–72. Print.

Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford: UP, 2009. Print.

Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Diane Wolkstein. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper, 1983. Print.