- Kur
:"For the river, see
Kur River ; for the village in Azerbaijan, seeKür ."In
Sumerian mythology , Kur was primarily a mountain or mountains, and usually referred to theZagros mountains to the east ofSumer . The cuneiform for "kur" was a pictograph of a mountain [Sumerian Mythology By Samuel Noah Kramer, p.110] It can also mean "foreign land". Although the word for earth wasKi , Kur came to also mean land, andSumer itself, was called "Kur-gal" or "Great Land". "Kur-gal" also means "Great Mountain" and is a metonym for bothNippur andEnlil who rules from that city. ["Scenes from the Shadow Side", Frans Wiggermann, "Mesopotamian Poetic Language", Brill, 1996, pp. 208-209]Ekur , "mountain house" was the temple ofEnlil atNippur . A second, popular meaning of Kur was "underworld", or the world under the earth. [Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary:Jeremy A. Black, Anthony Green, Tessa Rickards, University of Texas Press, 1992ISBN 0292707940, p 114 ]Kur was sometimes the home of the dead [Sumerian Mythology, By Samuel Noah Kramer, p.110 "passim"] ,it is possible that the flames on escaping gas plumes in parts of the Zagros mountains would have given those mountains a meaning not entirely consistent with the primary meaning of mountains and an abode of a god. The eastern mountains as an abode of the god is popular in Ancient Near Eastern mythology.
The underworld Kur is the void space between the primeval sea (
Abzu ) and the earth (Ma).Kur is almost identical with "Ki-gal", "Great Land" which is the Underworld (thus the ruler of the Underworld is
Erishkigal "Goddess of The Great Land". In later Babylonian myth Kur is possibly anAnunnaki , brother ofEreshkigal ,Enki , andEnlil . In theEnuma Elish inAkkadian tablets from the first millennium B.C.E., Kur is part of the retinue ofTiamat , and seems to be a snakelike dragon. In one story the slaying of the great serpent Kur results in the flooding of the earth [Kramer, p. 112] . A first millennium cylinder seal shows a fire-spitting winged dragon--a nude woman between its wings--pulling the chariot of the god who subdued it, another depicts a god riding a dragon, a third a goddess [Kramer, p 114] .KUR, as a word, can also refer to a variety of other things.
Cuneiform transl|Xsux|KUR cuneiform|
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.