Topics (move over topic to see place in topic list)
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
01 Religious and ideological doctrines and imagery
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
Keywords
androgyny
eunuchs
priests
Period
Neo-Assyrian Empire
Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian Empires
Channel
Neo-Assyrian texts
Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian texts
Text
The evidence suggests that some of Ištar’s or Mullissu’s prophets were castrates. There are two prophecies for Esarhaddon from Bayâ and Ilussa-amur, which clearly state the prophets were at the same time both a woman and man, as the name has a feminine determinative but the person in question is referred to as DUMU (“son”) or with a masculine pronoun. The same practice also applied to Mari, where there were castrate assinnu-prophets in the service of the goddess Annunitum (= Ištar), two of them known by their proper names. The assinnu named Šelebum falled into trance in the temple of the goddess and delivered an oracle for the king (ARM 26 213), another assinnu, named Ili-haznaya also delivered an oracle (ARM 26 212).
Lapinkivi, Pirjo. The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative Evidence. State Archives of Assyria Studies 15. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Coprus Project 2004.
