Ninhursag

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noun

Synonyms for Ninhursag

the great mother goddess

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Sumer

References in periodicals archive ?

* a "lady of life" or "lady of the rib" (the goddess Ninti in Enki and Ninhursag)

Perhaps the most oft-cited parallel is found in the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninhursag (third millennium BCE), which features an island paradise called Dilmun, a land where predation and death were unknown: The land Dilmun is pure, the land Dilmun is clean; The land Dilmun is clean, the land Dilmun is most bright ...

After Adam: reading Genesis in an age of evolutionary science

The remedy takes the form of Enki's placement within the vulva of the naked birth-goddess Ninhursag, herself a primal source of life.

The myth at the very least and in what is probably its most pragmatic reference celebrates the collaborative production by Ninhursag and Enki of a pharmacopeia of herbal remedies.

As in the earlier exchange (EN 199-217) between Isimud and Enki about names of the plants he will eat in order to "know their hearts" and "fix their destinies" (E1), the scene that describes Enki's final healing (E2) unfolds as a formulaic and highly ritualized pattern of question and response, this time between Ninhursag and the ailing Enki.

His male womb--itself weirdly enwombed in Ninhursag's--acts as a kind of alembic in which deadly plants are concocted and thereafter magically emerge as divine medicinal agents whose powers to heal are thereby "fixed" in the permanent order of things.

Enki and the embodied world

See Kramer and Maier, Myths of Enki, 22-30, on the myth "Enki and Ninhursag" as a "Sumerian paradise myth" about Dilmun, and the critique in P.

Myth, ritual, and order in "Enki and the world order"

That is, many figurines (e.g., the Astarte plaques) represent replicas or "cheap imitations of cult images" used by the many people "unable to visit the Temple daily." The pillar figurines, however, do not signify such replicas; rather, they epitomize a nonspecific "type" of figurine (mother-goddess or dea nutrix) that people in various regions could associate with their own local deities (Ninhursag, Belet-ili, or Mami in Mesopotamia; Asherah in Canaan/Israel; etc.).

Recent interpretations of ancient Israelite religion

and her Sumerian equivalent, the great goddess Ninhursag, bears the same epithet." Since Ninhursag is also a birth goddess, the reviewer wonders whether this indicates a concept relating casting to giving birth to children.

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