Three thrones had been erected in the great hall of the temple. The left-hand one bore the sign of Enlil, and the right-hand one had the sign of An. But the throne in the center was flanked on each side by the towering bundle of reeds, looped at the upper end, which is the sign of the goddess; for Inanna holds the power in Uruk.
On the throne of Enlil rested the scepter of the city, and on the throne of An was the golden crown that my father had worn when he was king. But on the throne in the center sat the priestess Inanna so resplendent that it pained my eyes to look upon her.
She wore no clothing that night. Yet she was far from bare, for her body was covered in every place by ornaments, beads of lapis cascading down over her breasts, a plate of gold in a triangle over her loins, golden braid in her hair, a circlet of gold about her hips, a jewel in her navel, jewels at her hips and nose and eyes, two sets of earrings in the shape of the new moon, one of gold and one of bronze. Beneath this her skin was oiled; by the light of the torches she gleamed like a being lit with an inner radiance.
Behind and to the sides of the thrones stood those officials of the court who had not gone down into the pit with Lugalbanda: the high constable, the throne-bearer, the war-chamberlain and the water chamberlain, the secretary of state, the supervisor of fisheries, the gatherer of taxes, the overseer of stewards, the master of the bound aries, and many more. The only one I did not see among them was the great lord who had placed the horned crown of divinity on my dead father's brow. He was missing for good reason, for he was the man upon whom Inanna had chosen to bestow the kingship this day, and the king at that time was not permitted to enter the temple of the goddess until he was summoned by her to do so. In later years
I saw to it that the custom was altered.
The summoning of the new king into the temple wasmany hours in coming, or so it seems to me in recollection. First came prayer and libations, the invocation of each god in turn, commencing with the lesser ones, Igalimma who is the doorkeeper of the gods and
Dunshagana their steward, and Enlulim the divine goatherd and
Ensignun the god of charioteers, and so many others that I could hardly keep a tally of them, until Enki and Enlil and An finally were reached. The hour was late and my eyelids were heavy, and to remain awake was a struggle.
And I grew terribly restless. No one seemed to remember that was there, or to care. The chanting droned and droned' and at one point I wandered away into the darkness beyond the torchlight finding an entrance somehow into a passageway that led to a mass of lesser chapels. It seemed to me that I heard the fluttering ofinvisible wings there, and scratchy laughter far away. I grew fearful and wished I were back in the great hall. But I was unable to find the way Desperately I called upon Lugalbanda to guide me.
But instead of Lugalbanda, one of Inanna's handmaidens came for me, a tall sparkling-eyed girl of ten or eleven years. All she wore were seven strings of blue beads about her waist and five amulets of pink shell tied to the ends of her hair, and her body was painted down front and sides with serpent motifs. She laughed and said,
"Where are you going, son of Lugalbanda? Are you trying to find the gate of the nether world?"
I despised the mockery in her voice. I drew myself tall, though she remained taller still, and said, "Let me be, girl. I am a man."
"Ah, a man! A man, are you! Yes, so you are, son of
Lugalbanda! You are a very great man!"
Now I could not tell whether I was being mocked or not. I began to shake from anger at her, and from an inner rage at myself, for not understanding the game she was playing with me. I was too young then. Taking me by the hand, she drew me against her, as though I were a doll, and she put my cheek against the buds of her breasts. I smelled the sharp perfume of her. "Little godling," she murmured, and again her tone was somewhere on the borderland between irony and true deference. She stroked me and called me by my name, very familiarly, and told me hers. When I struggled and tried to pull away, she took both my hands in hers and tugged me about so that my eyes looked into her eyes. She held me and whispered fiercely, "When you are king, I will lie in your arms!" In that moment her tone held no mockery at all.
I stared at her in amazement. Once again I felt that strange pressure in my brow that was the god brushing against the edges of my soul, merely for a moment. My lip trembled, and I thought I would cry, but I did not permit it of myself.
"Come," she said. "You must not miss the coronation ceremony, litfie godling. One day you will need to know how these things are done."
She took me back to the great hall just as a great flourish of music was sounded, flutes and double flutes, the long trumpets, the cymbals and tambourines. The new king had made his entrance at last. He was bare to the waist, wearing a flounced skirt below. His long hair was plaited and wound round his head and gathered behind. He lit a globe of incense and set down gifts before each of the thrones, a golden bowl filled with some fragrant oil, and a mana of silver, and a richly embroidered robe. Then he touched his forehead to the ground before Inanna, and kissed the ground also, and gave her a woven basket filled to overflowing with grain and fruits. Now the goddess rose from the throne and stood glittering like a beacon in the torchlight. "I am Ninpa the Lady of the Scepter," she said in a voice so deep I could not believe it was a woman's; and she took the royal scepter from the throne of Enlil and gave it to the king. "I am Ninmenna the Lady of the Crown," she said, and took the golden crown from the throne of An and placed it upon the head of the king. Then she called him by his birth-name, which from that moment onward could never be uttered again; and then she called him by his king-name, saying, "You are Dumuzi, the great man of Uruk. So the gods decree."
There was no mistaking the sounds of surprise in the halclass="underline" gasps, murmurs, coughs. What I did not learn until long afterward was the reason for the surprise, which was that the new king had chosen to call himself by the name of a god, and not a minor god at that. No one in memory had done that before.
I knew of Dumuzi the god, of course. Any child would know his tale-the divine shepherd who wooed the goddess Inanna and won her for his wife, and reigned as king in Uruk for thirty-six thousand years, until Inanna, so that she might rescue herself from the demons of the nether world who held her captive, sold him to them to take her place below the ground. To pick that name by which to reign was strange indeed. For the tale of Dumuzi is the tale of the defeat of the king by the goddess. Was that the destiny that Uruk's new ruler sought for himself?. Perhaps he had considered only the grandeur of the first Dumuzi, and not his betrayal and downfall at the hand of Inanna; or perhaps he had not considered anything at all. Dumuzi he was, and king he was.
When the rite was done the new king led the traditional procession to the palace for the final phase of his ceremony of investiture, followed by all the high dignitaries of the city. I also returned to the palace, but only to go to my own bedchamber. While I slept, the lords of the realm presented gifts to Dumuzi and laid down their badges and other insignia of office before him, so that he would have the right to select his own officials. But the custom long has been that such changes are never made on the day of the coronation, and so Dumuzi declared, as kings had always declared before him, "Let everyone resume his office."
All the same, changes soon were forthcoming. The one most important to me was that my mother and I left the royal palace that had been my home all my life, and took up residence in a splendid but far less imposing dwelling in the Kullab district, westward of the temple of An. It was to An's service that my mother dedicated the rest of her life, as his chief priestess. She is now a goddess in her own right, by my decree, so that she might be reunited with Lugalbanda. For if he is in heaven, then it is fitting that she be at his side. And though I have said that I do not believe he is in heaven, nevertheless it may be that he is, and in that case it would have been remiss of me not to have sent Ninsun to join him there.