Mesopotamian family tree

Mesopotamian genealogy was not preserved in stories. It was preserved in god-lists — scribal tablets that set out deities in order, with their names, their equivalents in another language, and often their relationships, compiled for training scribes and for temple administration. The great list known as An = Anum runs to thousands of entries. That is the source material for this diagram, and it means the tree is unusually systematic and unusually dry.

Three generations of sovereignty

The oldest layer is straightforward. An (Akkadian Anu) is the sky and the original head of the pantheon, and he recedes into distance without ever being overthrown — a rare case of a sky-father who simply stops being active. Enlil of Nippur, his son, holds effective kingship for most of Sumerian history: he assigns offices, he decrees destinies, and his word is the one that cannot be revoked. Enki (Akkadian Ea) of Eridu, god of fresh underground water, craft and cunning, is Enlil's brother and is the one who solves problems, usually by finding a way around a decree rather than opposing it.

Below them the diagram widens: Nanna/Sin the moon at Ur, son of Enlil; his children Utu/Shamash the sun, judge of gods and men, and Inanna/Ishtar, whose parentage is one of the tree's genuine disputes.

The name problem, drawn twice

Every major node here carries two or more names, because the same deities were worshipped continuously by speakers of different languages. Inanna is Ishtar; Enki is Ea; Utu is Shamash; Nanna is Sin; An is Anu. These are not equivalents in the loose sense that Jupiter is equated with Zeus — they are the same god, called what the local language called them.

The diagram gives the Sumerian and Akkadian names on one node rather than as separate figures, and labels which period a relationship is attested in, because a genealogy from a Sumerian list and one from a Neo-Assyrian list may differ.

Marduk, and a pantheon rearranged by politics

The most instructive thing on this tree is what happens when a city rises. Marduk was a minor god of Babylon. As Babylon became the dominant power, Enuma Elish was composed to make him king of the gods — and the poem does not simply assert it. It stages a crisis in which the older gods, including Enlil's generation, are helpless before Tiamat, and Marduk agrees to fight only on condition that the assembly grants him supreme authority permanently. He wins, splits Tiamat's body into sky and earth, and the gods recite his fifty names.

The fifty names matter genealogically: they are the names and functions of other gods, transferred. This is a takeover documented in a liturgy. Assyria then did the same thing with Ashur, in some cases by copying the Babylonian text and substituting the name.

The diagram shows Marduk in his old position as son of Ea and in his elevated position, with a note naming the text responsible for the promotion.

The primordial couple, and what they generate

Enuma Elish begins with Apsu, the fresh water, and Tiamat, the salt sea, mingling their waters before anything is named. Their offspring are the first gods, whose noise disturbs Apsu; he plans to destroy them and is killed first by Ea. Tiamat's war of revenge produces eleven monsters, which the diagram draws as her creations rather than as births, and her consort Kingu, who holds the tablet of destinies until Marduk takes it.

This cosmogony is Babylonian and comparatively late. Sumerian material has other beginnings — heaven and earth as a united mass separated by Enlil, or Nammu, the primeval sea, as the mother who bears An and Ki. Both are drawn, marked by language and period.

Where the sources disagree

• Inanna's father. An in some texts, Nanna in others, Enlil occasionally. Since her authority derives partly from her descent, the choice is not neutral.
• Ereshkigal. The queen of the underworld is Inanna's elder sister in the Descent, and her wider parentage is inconsistent. Her marriage to Nergal is the subject of a separate story with two surviving versions that end differently.
• Ninhursag / Ninmah / Nintu / Ki may be one mother goddess under several names or several goddesses, and the lists do not settle it.
• Dumuzi/Tammuz, Inanna's consort handed over as her substitute in the underworld, has a shifting status — shepherd, king, god — and his sister Geshtinanna's half-year substitution is the closest thing this tradition has to a seasonal cycle.
• Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine through the goddess Ninsun, appears on the tree at the point where the divine and the royal lines touch, as several Sumerian kings' genealogies do.

Reading the diagram

Solid lines are relationships given consistently across the god-lists. Broken lines carry the alternative with its text, language and period. Nodes carry both Sumerian and Akkadian names. Creations — Tiamat's monsters, the humans made from clay and a slain god's blood in Atrahasis — are drawn with a distinct link, since they are manufacture rather than descent, and in this tradition that distinction carries real theological weight.

For why the evidence is fragmentary and how the tablets were recovered and read, see the Mesopotamian tradition hub.