Everything about Enlil totally explained
Enlil (
EN = Lord+ LIL = Air, "Lord of the Open" or "Lord of the Wind") was the name of a chief deity listed and written about in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Canaanite and other Mesopotamian clay and stone tablets. The name is perhaps pronounced and sometimes rendered in translations as
Ellil in later
Akkadian, Hittite and Canaanite literature.
Enlil was considered to be the god of breath, wind, air and space.
Origins
One story names his origins as the exhausted breath of
An (god of the heavens) and
Ki (goddess of the Earth) after sexual union.
When Enlil was a young god, he was banished from
Dilmun, home of the gods, to
Kur, the underworld for raping a young girl named
Ninlil. Ninlil followed him to the underworld where she bore his first child, the moon god
Sin (Sumerian Nanna - Suen). After fathering three more underworld deities (subtitutes for Sin), Enlil was allowed to return to Dilmun.
Enlil was also known as the inventor of the
pickaxe/hoe (favorite tool of the Sumerians) and caused plants to grow.
Cosmological role
Enlil, along with
Anu/An,
Enki and
Ninhursag was one of the four gods of the
Sumerians .
By his wife
Ninlil or Sud, Enlil was father of the moon god
Nanna - (
Suen) (in Akkadian
Sin) and of
Ninurta (also called Ningirsu). Enlil is sometimes father of
Nergal, of
Nisaba the goddess of grain, of
Pabilsag who is sometimes equated with Ninurta, and sometimes of
Enbilulu. By
Ereshkigal Enlil was father of
Namtar.
Cultural histories
Enlil is associated with the ancient city of
Nippur, sometimes referred to as the cult city of Enlil.
At a very early period prior to
3000 BC—Nippur had become the centre of a political district of considerable extent. Inscriptions found at Nippur, where extensive excavations were carried on during
1888–
1900 by John P Peters and John Henry Haynes, under the auspices of the
University of Pennsylvania, show that Enlil was the head of an extensive
pantheon. Among the titles accorded to him are "king of lands," "king of heaven and earth" and "father of the gods".
His chief temple at Nippur was known as
Ekur, signifying 'House of the mountain', and such was the sanctity acquired by this edifice that Babylonian and
Assyrian rulers, down to the latest days, vied with one another in embellishing and restoring Enlil's seat of worship, and the name Ekur became the designation of a temple in general.
Grouped around the main sanctuary, there arose temples and chapels to the gods and goddesses who formed his court, so that Ekur became the name for an entire sacred precinct in the city of Nippur. The name "mountain house" suggests a lofty structure and was perhaps the designation originally of the staged tower at Nippur, built in imitation of a mountain, with the sacred shrine of the god on the top.
Enlil was also the God of weather. According to the Sumerians, Enlil helped create the humans, but then got tired of their noise and tried to kill them by sending a flood. A mortal known as Utanapistim survived the flood, and he was made immortal by Enlil.
Further Information
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