CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE SUMERIAN SACRED

MARRIAGE: TEXTS AND IMAGES



Kathleen McCaffrey

T

he nature of a ritual of kingship known as the “Sacred Marriage” has long puzzled

scholars. With one contested exception, the famed Uruk Vase from the

Protoliterate period, the testimony has appeared to be exclusively textual. The present

study identifies the elusive ceremony as a specialized libation performed with twin

pedestal vessels, a ceremony prominently depicted on royal monuments. The visual

testimony and the archaeological footprint of the ritual equipment complement the

texts, providing much-needed information about how the ritual was performed and its

geographical and temporal distribution. The picture obtained by combining varied

perspectives indicates a long-lived tradition and ceremonial specifics that changed

over time.

DEFINING THE SACRED MARRIAGE
Assyriological treatments of the Sacred Marriage usually begin by enumerating a set
of texts that mention a marriage, either between two deities or between a deity and a
human. No Sumerian or Akkadian expression corresponds to “Sacred Marriage,” nor
does any source indicate that Mesopotamians themselves categorized all unions
involving deities under a single banner. The conceptual category employed in the
Assyriological literature derives from Classics, where it originally designated a marriage
between divinities termed the hieros gamos(“sacred marriage”). Upon migrating into
Near Eastern Studies in the early twentieth century (Bidmead 2002 : 20 – 24 ), the hieros
gamosretained its prior connotations and added new referents, most notably a ritual
performed prior to the Old Babylonian period that transformed a Mesopotamian ruler
into the spouse of a goddess.
The vague boundaries of this externally derived classification and the lack of a
theoretical framework provide reason for concern for what qualifies as a sacred
marriage has varied from one scholar to the next. Some scholars use the term in a
limited sense to reference the union of a Sumerian ruler with the goddess Inanna (for
example, Bahrani 2002 : 19 – 21 ), but the imported category has allowed for considerable
extension. Saana Teppo ( 2008 : 75 ) proposes that ecstatic (divine–devotee) unions are
a type of sacred marriage. Beate Pongratz-Leisten ( 2008 : 66 – 67 ) disagrees with the
hypostatic (flesh–soul) unions theorized by Pirjo Lapinkivi ( 2008 : 33 ) but, in common
with many philologists, she groups together cosmogonic (heaven–earth), hierogamic