Sin

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A scribe writing a contract at Ur did not date it by a year alone. He set down the day, and the day belonged to a month, and the month had opened when a watcher on a temple platform first caught the thin returning crescent low in the west after sunset and called it out. The month was the god. Thirty was his number, the count of his days, and in some inscriptions the bare cuneiform sign for thirty stood for his whole name, so that to write the figure was to write the god. Time in southern Mesopotamia was lunar before it was anything else, and the lunar measure was a person — the firstborn of the storm, the bull whose horns were the crescent, the patient lord who knew the night.

The Sumerians called him Nanna. The Akkadians who came to share their land called him Su’en, later worn down in speech to Sin, and from very early — already in the Early Dynastic period, before 2500 BCE — the two names were used for one god. Etymology failed even the ancients: an inscription of the ruler Gudea of Lagash speaks of him as a god whose name no one can explain. What was clear was the office. He was the moon, the light hung out over the dark, the keeper of the month, and the oldest of the great luminaries.

The firstborn of Enlil

The genealogy placed him at the head of the visible heavens. Sin was the son of Enlil, the storm-god who held the supreme command of the early Sumerian pantheon, and of Ninlil; in the Sumerian poem Enlil and Ninlil he is the firstborn, conceived when Enlil follows Ninlil to the bank of a canal. That a moon should be born of a storm is its own logic — the sky’s weather giving rise to the sky’s clock — and it set Sin a generation below the highest gods, Anu of heaven and Enlil of the air, but above the children he would father.

For he fathered the rest of the day-sky. His consort was Ningal, “the Great Lady,” and of their union came Shamash — Sumerian Utu — the sun-god, the blaze of noon and the judge of disputes; and, in the dominant tradition, Ishtar, Sumerian Inanna, the planet Venus, the morning and evening star, goddess of love and of war. The arrangement is worth pausing over. In the Mesopotamian heaven the three brightest things — moon, sun, and the brilliant wandering star — were one household, and the moon was the father of the other two. The sun did not beget the moon; the night was elder to the day. The storm-god Ningublaga and other minor deities are named among his offspring in some lists, and a few traditions reach further to attach the storm-god Adad or the queen of the dead Ereshkigal to his line, but it is the triad of moon, sun, and Venus that the genealogy was built to express. Sin stood at its summit.

He carried, accordingly, the dignity of an elder. The crescent was read as the horns of a great bull, and Sin was figured as a bull pasturing the stars — the herdsman of the night sky, his cattle the constellations driven slowly westward. The image was apt twice over: the moon’s curved horns, and the moon’s link to the herds themselves, for the god had a pastoral aspect, invoked over cattle and the dairy and the increase of the byre, called on for offspring and for safe birth, as a power presiding over the slow fertile cycles that move, like him, on a fixed round. Hymns gave him a beard of lapis lazuli, the deep blue of the heavens, and set him in a barge, the curved crescent itself, sailing the dark from horizon to horizon. He went under many names beside the two great ones: Nannar; Ašimbabbar, a form tied to the new light; Namrasit, “shining forth”; Inbu, “the fruit,” for the moon that ripens and is cut and grows again. One Akkadian form of his name, Enzu, was understood as “lord of wisdom,” and the wisdom was specifically the moon’s: older than the sun, more patient, knowing the long cycles, consulted — so one tradition held — even by the other gods, who were said to come to him each month for his counsel on the fates. The sun saw the day and went down; the moon held the count of the whole.

The reconstructed facade of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, the stepped mountain raised over the moon-god’s temple Ekishnugal by King Ur-Nammu around 2100 BCE; lower Mesopotamia, southern Iraq. Photograph by a U.S. service member, 2005. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 / GFDL.

Lord of the month

The moon’s distinctive work was measure. The sun returns the same each day; the moon is the sky’s one body that visibly changes, swelling and thinning on a fixed round, and a people that watched it had a calendar written for them on the dark. The Mesopotamian month began at the first sighting of the new crescent and ran to the next, and so the festivals, the offerings, the king’s ritual obligations, the accounting of debt and interest — the whole shape of public time — hung on the god of the moon. He was, in the most practical sense, the regulator of the year. Where the sun-god judged, Sin counted.

The watching was a labor, because the lunar month and the solar year do not divide evenly. Twelve moons fall short of the sun’s return by some eleven days, and a calendar left to the moon alone drifts backward through the seasons until the spring festival arrives in winter. The remedy was an added thirteenth month, dropped in by decree when the drift grew too wide, so that the ritual year and the agricultural year were kept roughly in step — a correction that required someone to be watching the sky against the seasons and to know when the god’s count and the field’s count had parted. The reckoning of time was thus never a settled mechanism but a continual reading of the moon, and the reading was the work of the temple. To hold the calendar was to hold a kind of authority over the year, and that authority sat with Sin.

His house in the south was at Ur, the city near the head of the Persian Gulf where the temple called Ekishnugal, “house of the great light,” stood at the city’s heart. Over it King Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, raised around 2100 BCE the great stepped tower — the best-preserved ziggurat in Mesopotamia — a brick mountain ascended by three converging stairways toward the shrine on its summit. To this temple, generations earlier, Sargon of Akkad had appointed his daughter Enheduanna (c. 2300 BCE) as en-priestess of Nanna, binding the conquering Akkadian house to the old Sumerian cult; serving as the god’s high priestess she was reckoned the earthly embodiment of his consort Ningal, and the hymns that survive under her name make her the earliest author in world history known by a name. The office she filled was so weighty that a lunar eclipse during her tenure could be read as a verdict on the throne.

For the moon’s changes were not only a clock; they were speech. A halo around the disk, an eclipse, the day on which the first crescent appeared, the horns of the new moon pointing up or aslant — each was a sign let fall, a message the sky addressed chiefly to the king and the land. To read them was a discipline, and the discipline was vast. The great series of celestial omens the scribes assembled, Enuma Anu Enlil — “When Anu and Enlil,” from its opening words — ran to some seventy tablets and thousands of omens, and it opened, fittingly, with the moon. Its first thirteen tablets concern the first appearances of the new moon and its haloes and crowns; tablets fifteen through twenty-two concern the eclipses, encoded by date, by the watch of the night in which they fell, by the quadrant of the disk that darkened, each combination assigned to a region or a city it threatened. An eclipse over the right portion meant one land; over another, another. Out of this watching — patient, recorded, generation on generation — grew the long Mesopotamian science of the sky that the later world would call astrology, and the Chaldeans of Babylon would carry its reputation across the Greek and Roman worlds. The moon-god was its first object and its oldest text.

Modern impression of a greenstone cylinder seal showing King Ur-Nammu of Ur (r. c. 2112–2094 BCE) enthroned, the crescent of the moon-god above the scene; British Museum, London. Photograph by Steve Harris. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

It is worth marking what register these claims occupy. That the month opened on the first crescent, that thirty was the moon’s number, that Enuma Anu Enlil gathered the lunar omens and that Ur and Harran held his temples — these are matters of the tablets, of datable record. That the moon was a bull pasturing the stars, that his beard was lapis and his barge the crescent, that he counseled the gods on the fates — these belong to the frame the worshippers inhabited, the world as the hymns rendered it. Inside that world the moon was a person with a herd and a wisdom; in the record it was a god watched, written, and reckoned with for three thousand years.

The house in the north

Sin had a second great seat, far up the trade roads in the north of Mesopotamia: Harran, on a tributary of the Euphrates in what is now southeastern Turkey, where his temple bore the name Ehulhul, “the house that gives joy.” The cult there is attested already in the eighteenth century BCE, in letters from the kingdom of Mari, and across the second and first millennia Harran’s moon-god grew into a power of state. Assyrian kings swore by the Sin of Harran; treaties invoked him; his temple drew the patronage of the great Neo-Assyrian rulers. When the Median armies sacked Harran around 610 BCE, in the wars that ended Assyria, the Ehulhul was destroyed — and its destruction set up the strangest chapter in the god’s long life.

For the last king of Babylon loved Sin above all gods. Nabonidus, who took the Babylonian throne in 556 BCE, was no scion of the royal house; his mother, Adda-guppi, was a votary of Sin from Harran who lived, by her own funerary inscription, to extraordinary age and never ceased pressing the moon-god’s claims. Nabonidus made those claims policy. He rebuilt the ruined Ehulhul at Harran with deliberate magnificence, and in his inscriptions he exalted Sin to a height the Babylonian establishment found intolerable — naming him king of the gods, claiming for him the “Enlilship, Anuship, and Eaship” that gathered the offices of the three highest powers into the moon alone. On the stele he set up, the king stands beneath three signs: the crescent of Sin, the winged disk of the sun-god Shamash, and the star of Ishtar — and the crescent is rendered largest, the others ranged beneath it, the family of the heavens reordered with the moon at the top.

Granite stele of Nabonidus (r. 556–539 BCE), the king at prayer with a staff before the divine symbols; the crescent of the moon-god heads the celestial signs. Ancient Orient Museum, Istanbul. Photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

This was a quarrel with Babylon itself. The patron god of the capital was Marduk, whose great temple Esagila and whose ziggurat stood at the city’s center, and whose New Year festival — the Akitu — required the king’s presence to take the god’s hand. Nabonidus, devoted to the moon and absent for some ten years at the desert oasis of Tayma in northern Arabia, let the festival lapse; the priesthood of Marduk, whose interest and whose theology he had slighted, turned against him. The “Verse Account,” a piece of propaganda composed after his fall, mocks him as an impious innovator who set a strange god above Marduk and neglected the proper rites. When Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon in 539 BCE without a fight, he was welcomed in Marduk’s name as the restorer of the slighted god — and the moon-king’s reign was over. Whether Nabonidus was a heretic, an antiquarian, or a reformer reaching back to an older theology, his contemporaries’ verdict was written by the priests he had crossed, and it is their account that long colored his memory.

The crescent that outlived the god

Ur fell silent with the rest of Sumer; the gulf retreated, the rivers shifted, and the great ziggurat stood abandoned for two millennia before the spade found it again in the modern age. But the moon-god of the north did not die with Nabonidus. At Harran, improbably, the cult endured. Through the Persian and Hellenistic and Roman centuries the Harranians kept their old gods while the cities around them turned to other faiths, and the planets — the moon foremost — remained the objects of their worship. The Roman emperor Caracalla was murdered near Harran in 217 CE on a journey to the moon-god’s temple. When Christianity became the religion of the empire, Harran kept apart, earning among Christians the name Hellenopolis, the pagan town.

Its survival into the Islamic age turned on a name. The Qur’an grants protection to the “Sabians,” a people of the book whose identity it leaves unspecified, and when — by the tradition reported in the Arabic sources — the caliph al-Ma’mun passed through Harran around 830 CE and demanded that its people declare themselves Muslims, Christians, or Jews, the Harranians took the name Sabian and so claimed a protected status. Under that name the Sabians of Harran persisted for centuries more, their religion now fused with Neoplatonic philosophy and Babylonian planet-lore — a star-worship that ranked the moon, whom they still called Sin, among the spiritual powers governing the world. In their system the planets were held to be living governors set by the one God over the spheres, each with its temple, its metal, its day, its proper hour; the moon kept its old primacy among them, the nearest of the heavenly bodies and the measurer of the month, as it had been at Ur and at the first Ehulhul. The Arabic writers who described them — with the wary fascination owed to a surviving paganism — recorded a calendar of festivals, a hierarchy of planetary rites, and a learning in the courses of the stars that made Harran a byword for astral wisdom. From its schools came astronomers, mathematicians, and translators who carried Greek and Mesopotamian science into Arabic learning, the great Thabit ibn Qurra among them, himself a Sabian of Harran. The moon-cult that had opened the calendar at Ur three thousand years before flickered on at Harran into the eleventh or twelfth century, almost the last living thread of the old Mesopotamian religion, before its temples were at last pulled down. That the religion of the tablets should have ended not in Sumer but here, in a philosophers’ paganism on the Roman-Persian frontier, under a name borrowed from a verse of the Qur’an, is one of the long improbable arcs of the ancient world.

What remained was the sign. The crescent that the Sumerians read as the horns of the bull of heaven, that headed Nabonidus’s stele above the sun and the star, that the Harranians kept when every other Mesopotamian god had gone — the crescent rides still over the region that first gave it a name and a face. The god beneath it has been gone for a thousand years; the recovered tablets give him back his hymns and his thirty days. The horns endured the worshipper.

See also

• Ur — the moon-god’s city in the south, and its great ziggurat
• Harran — the northern seat of Sin and his temple Ehulhul
• Sabians of Harran — the star-worshippers who kept the moon-cult into the Islamic age
• Shamash and Ishtar — the sun and Venus, the moon-god’s children
• Astrology and the Chaldeans — the celestial divination grown from the lunar omens

→ Related: Ur · Harran · Sabians Of Harran · Shamash · Ishtar · Astrology · Chaldeans · Marduk · Babylon · Nabu · Anu · Nergal · Gilgamesh · Enki · Tiamat · Ereshkigal · The Apkallu · Eridu · Nineveh · Etemenanki · The Sumerians · The Assyrians