The descendent of dumuzi: a comparative study of dumuzi and adonis

Abstract

The dramatic story of a powerful goddess rising from the netherworld with demons in her wake to curse her husband who had failed to mourn her departure resonated with implications for me. It had all the elements of humanity; love, sex, greed, loyalty and death. Deities returning from the dead also have parallels with Christianity and raised the question of whether there is a collection of dying and rising gods. I was also struck by the role reversals, where for once the females were the most powerful and I was curious to see this reversal in its social context. Though I came from a classical background, I longed to study this Sumerian myth in depth. The scope of a Master's thesis does not allow me to look in depth at the highly complex figure of Inanna and her classical counterpart, Aphrodite, so instead I turned to their mortal consorts Dumuzi and Adonis. Adonis has been treated as a later form of Dumuzi/Tammuz in modern scholarship since Frazer placed the two together in The Golden Bough. While the premise of Frazer's work has been questioned and people no longer accept that, despite their different forms, myths share the same meaning and origin, Adonis is still regarded as a descendent of Dumuzi. However, beyond scholars like Burkert (1979) pointing to the parallels between the two myths, very little work has been done on both Dumuzi and Adonis. Ribichini (1980) is the only exception. The assumption that the two are related has not been developed to examine how the myths have altered and how the myths relate to their surrounding cultures.