著者

辻田 明子

出版者

一般社団法人 日本オリエント学会

雑誌

オリエント (ISSN:00305219)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.54, no.1, pp.1-19, 2011

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In texts of ancient Mesopotamia figure both a female Dumuziabzu and a male Dumuziabzu. According to royal inscriptions, the goddess Dumuziabzu was the tutelary deity of Kinunir (or Kinirša) in Lagaš, whereas the god Dumuziabzu was the son of Enki in a god-list (An = <i>Anum</i>). In earlier studies, these two gods were considered to be identical, and the sex of this god/goddess was occasionally thought to be determined by location; for example, the god is female in Lagaš and male in Eridu. In this context comparison between Dumuziabzu and Dumuzi was also taken into account. Because of the common element dumu-zi in their names, a direct link between them was suggested earlier, but this view is now largely abandoned. In this study, evidence on Dumuziabzu has been thoroughly gathered from documents dating from the third to the first millennium BCE, in order to see as precisely as possible the relation between the female Dumuziabzu and the male Dumuziabzu.<br>&emsp;The following observations have been made. First, the female Dumuziabzu was an influential deity in Lagas in the third millennium BCE. Her worship disappeared almost totally with the decline of Lagaš after the Third Dynasty of Ur. However, her name and the district whose deity she was, Kinunir, were passed down in the literary texts after the Third Dynasty of Ur, even in the lamentations written during the first millennium BCE. Furthermore, a few literary texts indicate some confusion between Dumuziabzu and Dumuzi. It seems that Dumuziabzu came to be considered male since the name contains dumu-zi, and that, because of his association with abzu, he then came to be regarded as one of the gods in Enki's circle.