Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia by Nicole Brisch Fumi Karahashi

Author:Nicole Brisch, Fumi Karahashi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2022-06-13T09:40:45.876000+00:00

The ruler raised his head high in the courtyard of the goddess from Sirara. He offered bread, poured cold water and went to Nanše to pray to her: “Nanše, mighty lady, lady of most precious (?) powers, lady who like Enlil determine fates, my Nanše, what you say is trustworthy and takes precedence. You are the interpreter of dreams among the gods, you are the lady of all the lands. Mother, my matter today is a dream.”6

Gudea refers to Nanše as a “wise dream-interpreter in her own right” (Cylinder A ii 1), but apparently, she was not to be approached directly. The second dream, which Gudea incubates during his construction work, he does not take to Nanše, but instead he performs extispicy on a white kid, presumably to validate that his dream indeed was a communication from Ningirsu. This time he understands the dream without the help of a dream-interpreter.

Presumably, it was a human ensi, who spoke the words of Nanše when she explained Gudea’s first dream to him. In the Hymn to Nanše A, a human dream-interpreter takes part in the New Year’s celebrations preparing silver cups for Nanše. It is unfortunately not certain, whether this person was male or female, it could well be a woman, but it might just as well be a man (Heimpel 1998–2001: 154). After the Ur III period Nanše all but vanishes. She makes rare appearances in learned texts, lexical lists, and rituals.

Ningirsu had promised Gudea both a sign and a pure star to indicate his wishes. Indeed, the first dream includes a vision of a young woman: “who held a stylus of refined silver in her hand, who had placed it on a tablet with propitious stars and was consulting it, was in fact my sister Nisaba. She announced to you the holy star auguring the building of the house” (Cylinder A v 22-vi 2). This must be a reference to a form of astrology even if it probably reflects the selection of a propitious time according to the celestial clock, a mazel tov, rather than omen astrology in the form known from Enūma Anu Enlil and reports the Neo-Assyrian court astrologers. It could also simply be a reference to time keeping and the use of the fixed stars to realign the lunar calendar with the seasons. Nisaba’s relation to time keeping is evident from her epithet as the one who together with Suen counts the days.7 Keeping track of the calendar – and perhaps even of favorable times for beginning an undertaking – would be a natural skill for the “unsurpassed overseer” (ugula nu-diri) directing the activities of the agricultural annual cycle.

Nisaba was the goddess of grain and the scribal arts, including knowledge of “heavenly stars” (mul an). Despite her affinity with the configurations of the stars of the sky, she was not associated with divination of any sort. Somehow, one gets the impression of Nisaba as a strangely ethereal goddess – more of a concept than a goddess in the flesh (or whatever gods are made of).

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