Nobody in ancient literature has a worse year. Dumuzid — Akkadian Tammuz — is a shepherd god who is courted in some of the most explicitly happy love poetry ever written in cuneiform, handed over to demons by the woman who wrote it, hunted across the steppe, and mourned annually for the next two thousand years by people who had never read any of it.
The songs before the disaster
The Dumuzid–Inanna courtship cycle is a substantial body of Sumerian poetry, and its tone is a shock if you come to it after the underworld material. She talks about her vulva as newly ploughed land and asks who will plough it. He arrives with cream and milk. Her brother Utu argues his case; her mother is consulted; the two of them lie about where she has been. Under his fuller title Ama-ushumgal-anna, roughly "the mother is a great dragon of heaven", he stands for the date palm's yield as much as the sheepfold's, and a hymn will move from bedroom to storehouse without changing register. These texts were copied in scribal schools, which means Sumerian teenagers learned to write on them.
The kings of Isin and Ur used the same material politically, taking the bridegroom's part in a rite of marriage to the goddess. Whether that rite was ever physically enacted, and by whom, is one of the genuinely unresolved arguments in Assyriology; the older confident reconstruction of an annual public consummation rests on less evidence than a century of popular writing assumed.
The substitute
When Inanna comes back from the dead she comes back with an escort of galla demons who will not leave without a replacement. She finds her minister in mourning, and her sons in mourning, and spares them. She finds Dumuzid in Kullab dressed in fine clothes, sitting on a throne, not mourning at all — and she fastens on him the eye of death. It is the single most brutal decision in Sumerian narrative, and the poem makes it a judgement on his behaviour rather than an arbitrary sacrifice.
Dumuzid's Dream takes up the chase. He dreams of rushes torn out, of his churn silent and his cup fallen from its peg, and his sister Geshtinanna interprets it for him line by line and tells him to hide. Utu turns him into a gazelle to escape; the galla are described as demons who eat no food, drink no water, take no gift and know no pleasure, so they cannot be bought off, and they catch him three times. A friend betrays his hiding place. In the end Geshtinanna — the goddess of the vine and of dream interpretation — refuses to give him up under torture and then volunteers to take half his sentence, so the two of them alternate: he below for half the year, she below for the other half.
Why a whole region wept for him
The lament literature about him is enormous and was performed liturgically for millennia — the gala singers had a repertoire of Dumuzid laments in Emesal, a dialect of Sumerian used for goddesses' and lamenters' speech, and it was still being copied in the Seleucid period. The mourning was ritual, seasonal and public.
Its timing is preserved in a calendar still in use. The fourth Babylonian month, Du'uzu, is named for him; it became Tammuz in the Hebrew calendar and Tammūz in Levantine Arabic, where it is simply the word for July. Anyone in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Israel giving the date in the local calendar is using this god's name for the hottest, driest month, when the pasture burns off and the shepherd's world dies. That is the observation the mourning attaches to.
The most famous outside witness is the Book of Ezekiel, where the prophet is shown, around 592 BCE, women sitting at the north gate of the Jerusalem temple weeping for Tammuz — cited as an abomination, and thereby confirming that the rite had reached Judah and was being practised by women in the temple precinct itself.
The dying-and-rising problem
For most of the twentieth century Dumuzid was the standard specimen of a category: the dying-and-rising vegetation god, dying with the crops and returning with them, grouped with Adonis, Attis and Osiris, and used — most influentially by James Frazer in The Golden Bough — as a comparative template that ultimately got applied to Christianity.
The category has been dismantled since. The objections are textual. Dumuzid does not rise; he alternates with his sister, which is a rota, not a resurrection. No Mesopotamian text describes a celebration of his return, and the enormous surviving liturgy is entirely lament. The pattern Frazer needed — death, three days, joyful rising — is not attested for him, and Jonathan Z. Smith's and Tryggve Mettinger's reassessments, from opposite conclusions, both agree that the evidence had been over-read. Mettinger argues a limited case for some Near Eastern figures returning; almost nobody now defends the sweeping version. The honest statement is that a real seasonal lament for a shepherd god was flattened into a comparative type that the sources do not support, and that the flattening still circulates widely.
Questions the shepherd raises
Why does Inanna condemn her own husband?
The poem gives a reason, and readers often miss it because it is delivered in a single image. Everyone else she meets is in mourning dress, sitting in the dust — the proper behaviour of a household whose head has died. Dumuzid is enthroned in clean clothes. He has not merely failed to grieve; he has taken her place. Whether that reads as justice or as a pretext is left to the reader, and both readings have long histories, but the text is not describing a random choice.
Is he the same as Adonis?
Related by transmission rather than identity. The Greek Adonis takes his name from the West Semitic adon, "lord", and the Levantine mourning rites for him — the Adonis gardens, the women's laments — belong to the same regional practice that produced the Tammuz weeping in Ezekiel. So there is a real historical link running through Phoenicia, and there is also a great deal of later syncretism that blurred figures who had been distinct. What does not follow is that the Sumerian shepherd and the Greek youth killed by a boar are one story with two names.
Is Tammuz still used as a name?
Yes, and unusually directly. Because the month name survived intact in Arabic and Hebrew, Tammuz is a living personal name in the Levant and Iraq, borne without any reference to its Sumerian origin — a god's name preserved because it was also a date. His sister's name did not survive that way; her afterlife is in the texts alone, where she is one of the very few figures in this literature to volunteer for the underworld rather than being sent, a decision the descent narrative treats as the only generous act in the whole poem.