Sunday 14 March 2021

Holy fire-drill

The Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I with a torch, worshipping the fire god Nusku. About 1200 BC. The artifact is in Berlin. Pic by petrus.agricola.

In Babylonia and Assyria Nusku is the symbol of the heavenly as well as of the terrestrial fire. As the former he is the son of Anu, the god of heaven...

Well no surprises here. Originally fire from sun descended to earth through lightning...So fire was the child of heaven...

I wrote about this in my article "Sun, Thunder, Fire"...

He was also looked upon as the protector of the family. No surprise here either, as fire has always been "the protector of the family from wild beasts"...

He was also the mediator between humanity and the gods, since it is through the fire on the altar that the offering is brought into the presence of the gods...Fair enough...The smoke of the offerings rises to heaven bringing offerings to the Father Sky...Logical...

The fire-god is also viewed as the patron of the arts and the god of civilization in general. Well a great surprise here...Apparently, because of "the natural association of all human progress with the discovery and use of fire"...

"While temples and sanctuaries to Nusku-Girru are found in Babylonia and Assyria, he is worshipped in a more symbolical form than the other gods"...

What does this even mean? 

Wait for it...

Nusku is basically Asyro Babylonian version of the Sumerian god of fire Gibil, god of fire, the son of An (Sky) and Ki (Earth)...

Well, as I already said, no surprises here. Originally fire from sun descended to earth through lightning...The Sumerians actually spell it out pretty clearly here: The fire is the product of lightning which connects the father sky and mother earth...

In some versions of the Enûma Eliš, Gibil is said to have broad wisdom, and that his mind is "so vast that all the gods, all of them, cannot fathom it". 

Again a great surprise here...Why would fire god be smarter than all the other gods put together?

Some versions state Gibil, as lord of the fire and the forge, also possesses wisdom of metallurgy...Again no surprise here as without fire there can be no metallurgy...

No I went and checked the etymology of the name "Gibil"...I came across a very interesting paper entitled "The Vocabulary of Sumerian" that talks about the habit of Sumerian priests to encode gods' names by inverting them...

So Gibil was written bil-gi, where "bil" means fire and "gi" means reed, stick...So Gibil is not a name. It means fire stick, fire drill...Gibil, the fire god is actually a deified fire stick, the tool used for making fire...



Which is exactly what the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I is worshiping: a fire stick on a throne, altar...

Babylonians and Assyrians are not worshipping Nusku "in symbolical form"...They are worshiping Nusku in his original form, Gi-Bil, Bil-Gi, Fire Stick...

Anyone stopped to think why would Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, people from some of the most developed ancient civilisations, worship a fire stick? If making fire was by their time already a common knowledge for eeee 1 million years (according to official history books)...

Ah wait. I did 🙂

And I published what I thought about it in these three articles: "Fire-drill", "Fire bird", "Prometheus"

Did Sumerians believe that the fire god possessed unfathomable wisdom, because they considered the invention of fire making to be such an amazing thing, that it could only have been a product of "unfathomable wisdom which all gods together could not get". Let alone mortals...

But that is ridiculous....Right? We all "know" that humans have been able to make fire like for ever...

7 comments:

  1. This is interesting in the context of a funny coincidence I found:
    Ancient Greek Promētheús (from πρό “before” + μητις “skill, councel, plan” = "the one who thinks ahead")
    Polish,Czech Przemysław (from pre "for" and myśl "thought" = "the one who thinks ahead".
    Originally in Slavic it meant "hunter, hunting", later also "craft, industry".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Response re. Bilgi/gibil from linguist Peter T. Daniels: "Uh, the study and our knowledge of Sumerian have progressed
    somewhat since 1904."


    https://xue-lin.com/english-translation-of-sumerian-words

    English Sumerian
    smoke/soot/cloud ubilla
    fire izi
    burn tab
    ash (dust) ukum
    -

    (From same source but I think this list is semitic, since it has kalbi for dogs)
    Fire – GIRRU or ISATUM or DINGERGISBAR

    ReplyDelete
  3. because zoroastrians still worship fire (azar).

    ReplyDelete
  4. It would be interesting to find out in how many languages we can find the inverting of words. In serbian we have at, we call it satrovacki

    ReplyDelete
  5. Do you think this 12,5000 year old 9' tall wood totem pole from Ural bog could have been a fire stick God?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/science/archaeology-shigir-idol-.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210323&instance_id=28360&nl=the-morning&regi_id=105029039&segment_id=53988&te=1&user_id=977f157dc53ce95cb2af5b4886b3e41d

    ReplyDelete
  6. I tried to find your post about zito being the word for seed, but couldn't locate it, so I put this note on Chinese character for seed/child here:

    Behind the child’s left knee is a pomegranate, which, like the child itself, symbolizes fertility and progeny, since it is full of seeds (zǐ 子), similar in sound to the word for children (also zǐ 子).

    ReplyDelete