of beer libated at the Sacred Marriage. The preparation of large quantities of sweet beer
at a festival at Mari is attested in a letter that describes the palace kitchens providing
“ 420 litres of sweet alappnum-beer, the meal of the king and men on the occasion of
offerings to Ishtar, in the garden of the king” (Dalley 2002 : 134 ). In a more literary
context, the juxtaposition of beer with Inanna’s genitals in Sˇu-Suen A(line 20 , Sefati
1998 : 89 , 346 ; Rubio 2001 : 271 ) kasˇ-a-ni-gin 7 gal 4 –a-ni ze 2 –ba-am 3 “like her beer, her
vulva is sweet!” falls into place if the goddess’s vulva is a vessel brimming with beer. The
line that follows in the same composition mentions two types of beer: her kasˇ, the
standard brew, and her kasˇbir, a more diluted drink. Iddin-Dagan A(lines 150 – 158 ,
Reisman 1973 : 190 ) describes the two substances libated at the beer-pouring rite in
greater detail: a light sweet beer made from date syrup and a strong dark beer made
from emmer. The sacred union, therefore, does not seem to have been limited to an act
of simulated copulation. On a deeper level, it also involved mixing liquids that were
paired opposites, perhaps made from the two alternating plants depicted in the lower
half of the bottom register of the Uruk Vase. In common with the binary principle of
composition seen overall in the Sacred Marriage, the contrasting character of Inanna’s
sweet and strong brews suggests that even the libated liquids were gender differentiated,
perhaps conceptualized as male and female semen.
This interpretation of the Sacred Marriage sheds light on a text bearing the modern
title The Message of Lu-digˆira to his Mother(ETCSL T. 5. 5. 1 ), which comes from the
outlying regions of Hattusˇa and Ugarit. Exhibiting similarities in form to the much
later Song of Songs, the trilingual elegy is written in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite.
A Sumerian man, far from home, asks a traveler headed to Nippur to inform Sˇat-Esˇtar,
his “mother,” that he is well. The traveler will recognize her by five aspects, which Lu-
digˆira enumerates. She is: 1 ) an alan“statue” of the fair goddess in the city quarter of
Nippur; 2 ) the morning star; 3 ) rainfall and irrigation water for the crops; 4 ) the akitu-
festival; and 5 ) a palm. Lu-digˆira’s mother can only be Inanna/Ishtar, since no other
Mesopotamian deity is both Venus and the palm. The autumnal akitu-festival
reconstructed in this study accounts for the simultaneous identification of Inanna as
the morning star, one or more cult images in the residential sector of Nippur, the akitu-
festival, and the palm. The fifth description credits Inanna with supplying water for
agriculture.
WATER AND THE FUNCTION OF THE RITE
The identification of new texts and images opens the door to a different understanding
of the beer-pouring ritual performed at the akitu-festivals. An aspect of the Sacred
Marriage that has not been fully apparent from the perspective of the traditional corpus
is the role of water. Texts indicate that akiturituals required river water, with the
specification that the water had to come from both the Tigris and the Euphrates
(Bidmead 2002 : 126 ). The “Place of the Ordeal by Water of the Nation” is mentioned
in both inscription and hymn as the specific spot at the Gipar where the ruler wed the
goddess at the New Year’s festival (Weadock 1975 : 102 ). Royal texts, particularly
inscriptions that appear on stelae that depict the palm libation, proclaim the ruler’s
efforts to provide his people with water. The inscription on the Stele of the Vultures
records a battle over water rights, while the inscription on the Stele of Ur-Namma lists
canals dug by the ruler (Winter 1985 : 24 , 26 ). Offerings to divinized ophidian snakes,–– Kathleen McCaffrey ––