Nergal
Nergal was a Mesopotamian god worshiped through all periods of Mesopotamian history, from Early Dynastic to Neo-Babylonian times, with a few attestations indicating that his cult survived into the period of Achaemenid domination. He was primarily associated with war, death, and disease, and has been described as the "god of inflicted death". He reigned over Kur, the Mesopotamian underworld, depending on the myth either on behalf of his parents Enlil and Ninlil, or in later periods as a result of his marriage with the goddess Ereshkigal. Originally either Mammitum, a goddess possibly connected to frost, or Laṣ, sometimes assumed to be a minor medicine goddess, were regarded as his wife, though other traditions existed, too.
His primary cult center was Kutha, located in the north of historical Babylonia. His main temple bore the ceremonial name E-Meslam and he was also known by the name Meslamtaea, "he who comes out of Meslam". Initially he was only worshiped in the north, with a notable exception being Girsu during the reign of Gudea of Lagash, but starting with the Ur III period he became a major deity in the south too. He remained prominent in both Babylonia and Assyria in later periods, and in the Neo-Babylonian state pantheon he was regarded as the third most important god, after Marduk and Nabu.
Nergal was associated with a large number of local or foreign deities. The Akkadian god Erra was syncretised with him at an early date, and especially in literary texts they functioned as synonyms of each other. Other major deities frequently compared to or syncretised with him include the western god Resheph, best attested in Ebla and Ugarit, who was also a god of war, plague and death, and Elamite Simut, who was likely a warrior god and shared Nergal's association with the planet Mars. It has also been proposed that his name was used to represent a Hurrian god, possibly Kumarbi or Aštabi, in early inscriptions from Urkesh, but there is also evidence that he was worshiped by the Hurrians under his own name as one of the Mesopotamian deities they incorporated into their own pantheon.
Two well known myths focus on Nergal, Nergal and Ereshkigal and Epic of Erra. The former describes the circumstances of his marriage of Ereshkigal, the Mesopotamian goddess of the dead, while the latter describes his rampages and efforts of his sukkal Ishum to stop them. He also appears in a number of other, less well-preserved compositions.
Names and epithets
Nergal's name can be translated from Sumerian as "lord of the big city", a euphemistic way to refer to him as a ruler of the underworld. The earliest attested spelling is dKIŠ.UNU, with its standard derivative dKIŠ.UNU.GAL first attested in the Old Akkadian period. Since in the Old Babylonian period the cuneiform signs KIŠ and GÌR coalesced, transliterations using the latter in place of the former can also be found in literature. The variant dNIN.KIŠ.UNU, attested in an inscription of Naram-Sin of Akkad, resulted from the use of a derivative of Nergal's name, KIŠ.UNU, as an early logographic writing of the name of Kutha, his cult center.Phonetic spellings of Nergal's name are attested in cuneiform, as well as in Aramaic and Hebrew.
Meslamtaea and related logograms
Meslamtaea, "he who has come out of Meslam", was originally used as an alternative name of Nergal in the southern part of Lower Mesopotamia up to the Ur III period. It has been proposed that it was euphemistic and reflected the fact that Nergal initially could not be recognized as a ruler of the underworld in the south due to the existence of Ninazu and Ereshkigal, and perhaps only served as a war deity. Meslamtaea with time also came to be used as the name of a separate deity. As attested for the first time in a hymn from the reign of Ibbi-Sin, he formed a pair with Lugalirra. Due to the connection between Nergal and these two gods, who could be regarded as a pair of twins, his own name could be represented by the logogram dMAŠ.TAB.BA and its variant dMAŠ.MAŠ, both of them originally meaning " twins". dMAŠ.MAŠ is attested in Neo-Assyrian theophoric names as a spelling of Nergal's name, though only uncommonly. However, the god designated by this logogram in one of the Amarna letters, written by the king of Alashiya, is most likely Resheph instead.Erra
From the Old Babylonian period onward the name Erra, derived from the Semitic root, and thus etymologically related to the Akkadian verb erēru, "to scorch", could be applied to Nergal, though it originally referred to a distinct god. The two of them started to be associated in the Old Babylonian period, were equated in the Weidner and An = Anum god lists, and appear to be synonyms of each other in literary texts, where both names can occur side by side as designations of the same figure. However, while in other similar cases the Akkadian name eventually started to predominate over Sumerian, Erra was the less commonly used one, and there are also examples of late bilingual texts using Nergal's name in the Akkadian version and Erra's in the Sumerian translation, indicating it was viewed as antiquated and was not in common use. Theophoric names invoking Erra are only attested from Old Akkadian to Old Babylonian period, with most of the examples being Akkadian, though uncommonly Sumerian ones occur too. Despite his origin, he is absent from the inscriptions of rulers of the Akkadian Empire.The similarity between the names of Erra and Lugal-irra is presumed to be accidental, and the element -irra in the latter is Sumerian and is conventionally translated as "mighty".
U.GUR
The logogram dU.GUR is the most commonly attested writing of Nergal's name from the Middle Babylonian period onward. This name initially belonged to Nergal's attendant deity, and might be derived from the imperative form of Akkadian nāqaru, "destroy!". It has been noted that Ugur was replaced in his role by Ishum contemporarily with the spread of the use of dU.GUR as a writing of Nergal's name.IGI.DU
dIGI.DU is attested as a logographic representation of Nergal's name in Neo-Babylonian sources, with the reading confirmed by the alternation between it and dU.GUR in theophoric names. However, in a number of Assyrian texts dU.GUR and dIGI.DU appear as designations of two different deities, with the former being Nergal and the latter remaining unidentified. Authors such as Frans Wiggermann and Julia Krul argue it had the Akkadian reading Pālil. However, states this remains unconfirmed. A deity designated by the logogram dIGI.DU was also worshiped in Uruk, with the earliest references coming from the reign of Sennacherib and the most recent from the Seleucid period, and according to Krul should be interpreted as "a form of Nergal". Paul-Alain Beaulieu instead argues that it is impossible to identify him as Nergal, as both of them appear alongside Ninurta as a trio of distinct deities in Neo-Babylonian sources. According to the god list An = Anum dIGI.DU could also be used as a logographic writing of the names of Ninurta and the Elamite deity Igišta. It could also be used to represent the names of Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. Beaulieu points out that in the Neo-Babylonian period two different deities whose names were rendered as dIGI.DU were worshiped in Udannu, and proposed a relation with Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. The single attestation of dIGI.DU as a representation of the name of Alammuš is an astronomical text is presumed to be the result of confusion between him and Ningublaga, the "Little Twins", with Lugal-Irra and Meslamtaea, the "Great Twins".Other names and epithets
Nergal also had a large number of other names and epithets, according to Frans Wiggermann comparable only to a handful of other very popular deities, with around 50 known from the Old Babylonian period, and about twice as many from the later god list An = Anum, including many compounds with the word lugal, "lord". For instance, he could be referred to as "Lugal-silimma", lord of peace. A few of Nergal's titles point at occasional association with vegetation and agriculture, namely Lugal-asal, "lord poplar"; Lugal-gišimmar, "Lord date palm" ; Lugal-šinig, "Lord tamarisk"; Lugal-zulumma, "Lord dates". However, Dina Katz stresses that these names were only applied to Nergal in late sources, and it cannot be assumed that this necessarily reflected an aspect of his character already extant earlier on. A frequently attested earlier epithet is Guanungia, "bull whose great strength cannot be repulsed", already in use the Early Dynastic period. An alternate name of Nergal listed in the Babylonian recension of the god list Anšar = Anum, de-eb-ri, reflects the Hurrian word ewri, "lord".Character
Nergal's role as a god of the underworld is the already attested in an Early Dynastic Zame Hymns, specifically in the hymn dedicated to Kutha, where he is additionally associated with the so-called "Enki-Ninki deities", a group regarded as ancestors of Enlil believed to reside in the underworld. According to a hymn from the reign of Ishme-Dagan, dominion over the land of the dead was bestowed upon Nergal by his parents, Enlil and Ninlil. He was believed to decide fates of the dead the same way as Enlil did for the living. In one Old Babylonian adab song Nergal is described as "Enlil of the homeland and the underworld ". He was also occasionally referred to as Enlil-banda, "junior Enlil", though this title also functioned as an epithet of the god Enki.In addition to being a god of the underworld, Nergal was also a war god, believed to accompany rulers on campaigns, but also to guarantee peace due to his fearsome nature serving as a deterrent. In that capacity he was known as Lugal-silimma, "lord of peace". He was also associated with disease. As summed up by Frans Wiggermann, his various domains make him the god of "inflicted death". He also played an important role in apotropaic rituals, in which he was commonly invoked to protect houses from evil. Fragments of tablets containing the Epic of Erra, a text detailing his exploits, were used as amulets.