The Mesopotamian Planetary Gods #1: Introduction to the Seven Gods

All too often, Mesopotamian (Babylonian and Assyrian) culture is treated as a kind of pre-history to the Greeks. The Epic of Gilgamesh influenced Homer; the “Chaldaean art” prefigured Greek mathematics, astronomy and astrology; and so on.

But of course the Mesopotamians could only have an influence on the Greeks because they were contemporaries. Accordingly, the kind of influence Mesopotamian culture exerted on the Ancient Greeks changes over time: the poetry that influenced Homer is essentially the same as that which existed in the Ancient Near East in the 2^nd millenium BCE. But the ideas about the planets that were adopted in Plato’s Timaeus reflect an increasing focus on the stars in Near Eastern religion as the 1^st millennium BCE advances.

Not only in Mesopotamia, but also in the wider Imperial Aramaic usage of the Neo-Babylonian (626–539 BCE) and Persian empires (550–330 BCE), the gods associated with the seven classical planets attained an importance that wasn’t necessarily unprecedented in itself – there had been worship of Babylonian and Assyrian gods throughout Syria (and beyond) even in the 2^nd millennium BCE. and of course all of the gods who became associated with the planets were already important, or they would not have become attached to these all-important celestial bodies. What was new was the framework with which these gods were associated. That the visible planets were its primary reference made it much more easily transferable to different languages and regions than the intricacies of the genealogical and mythological frameworks of Mesopotamian religion – the accumulation of what cuneiform-literate scholar had written in Sumerian and Akkadian (=Babylonan and Assyrian) since the 3^rd millennium BCE. This explains not only the spread of Babylonian astrological ideas far beyond the direct sphere of Mesopotamian cultural influence, but also the shape that Mesopotamian religion took in the Christian (or so-called Common) Era, when cuneiform literacy had been lost.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The seven planets – i.e. Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – were known by many names. Moon and Sun had always been considered deities by the Akkadians (Babylonians and Assyrians), so in their cases, there was essentially no distinction between celestial body and god. The Moon was called Sīn, the Sun Šamaš, and the Mesopotamians retained these words when they adopted Aramaic as their spoken language, rather than replacing them with the common words zihrā/sahrā and šemšā (cognate with Šamaš, but treated as a different word).

Of the various technical astronomical names of the other planets, let me give only those that have also been preserved in Greek transcription in the lexicon of Hesychius (presumably excerpted from an astronomical work translated directly from Akkadian; such works are known to have existed, but none have survived). There we have:

            [Mercury] Sechés: the star of Hermes. Babylonians

            [Venus] Deléphat: the star of Aphrodite. By the Chaldaeans

            [Mars] Belébatos [an error for Zelébatos?]: the star of fire. Babylonians

            [Jupiter] Molobóbar: the star of Zeus. By the Chaldaeans

These represent the original Akkadian (Babylonian/Chaldaean) words Šiḫṭu, Dilbat, Ṣalbatānu, Mulubabbar.

Hesychius also gives “Babylonian” Saṓs for Šamaš (reflecting the Late Babylonian pronunciation Šawaš), and “Chaldaean” Aidṓs for the Moon, from Sīn’s epithet Edēšu (Robert Stieglitz, The Chaldeo-Babylonian Planet Names in Hesychius, in: Arbeitman, Fucus: A Semitic/Afrasian Gathering in Remembrance of Albert Ehrman, 1988).

The case of Saturn is unique in that the technical name (which seems to have dropped out of the text of Hesychius’ lexicon), Kayyamānu, Late Babylonian Kayyawānu, hence Aramaic Kēwān, largely displaced the divine name, Ninurta (Late Babylonian/Aramaic ˀEnurt), or rather became a divine name in its own right. Thus Kēwān already appears as a foreign god in the Biblical prophet Amos (8^th century BCE), although the Hebrew was later miscopied as K-y-n instead of K-w-n, and the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, was even more corrupt (with forms like Rompha, Remphan, Rempham, etc.).

Something would later happen to Dilbat – reanalyzed as Libat – in Mandaeism (an indigenous religion of Southern Mesopotamia; see Kevin T. van Bladel, From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marches, 2017 on the group’s origins). In Mandaic (a descendant of the Babylonian dialect of Aramaic), this has become the ordinary name for the planetary deity of Venus, instead of Ištar. In the cases of Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, Mandaeism to this day has retained the old Akkadian theonyms (names of gods) Nabû, Nergal, and Bēl.

Planet	Divine name	Other names	Greek transcr.	Aramaic	Mandaic
Luna	Sīn	Edēšu	Aidṓs	Sīn syn	Sin*
Mercury	Nabû	Šiḫṭu	Sechés	Nabu nbw	Nbo (Enwo)
Venus	Ištar	Dilbat	Deléphat	ˀEstrā ˀstrˀ	Libat (Liwet)**
Sol	Šamaš		Saṓs	Šamaš šmš	Šamiš
Mars	Ner(i)gal	Ṣalbatānu	Belébatos	Nergal nrgwl	Nirigh
Jupiter	Bēl	Mulubabbar	Molobóbar	Bēl byl	Bil
Saturn	Ninurta	Kayyamānu	—	Kēwān kˀwn	Kiwan

*also called Sera, from the common Aramaic sahrā.

**Estra (<Ištar) appears as a somewhat peripheral figure – not always identified with Libat – in Mandaean writings.