Sin and Nanna, the Moon god of Mesopotamia from Ur to Harran

In Mesopotamia the Moon was a male god, father of other gods and lord of one of the oldest cities in the world. The Sumerians called him Nanna, the Akkadians Suen and later Sin. For about three millennia, from the end of the fourth millennium BC to the Persian period, his cult accompanied the history of the region, and his crescent, drawn like a boat floating in the sky, became one of the most widespread symbols of the ancient Near East.

The lord of Ur

The main centre of Nanna's cult was Ur, in the south of present-day Iraq. Here, at the end of the third millennium BC, King Ur-Namma, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, had a great ziggurat built, the stepped tower that supported the god's temple. The remains of this building, excavated and partly restored in the twentieth century, are still among the most impressive monuments of Mesopotamia. Many centuries later, in the sixth century BC, the Babylonian king Nabonidus also had restoration work carried out there.

In Sumerian theology Nanna was the son of Enlil, the great god of Nippur, and the father of Utu, the Sun, and of Inanna, the goddess of the morning and evening star. The hierarchy is significant: for the Mesopotamians it was the Moon that begot the Sun, not the other way round. The calendar, based on lunar months, made the god the keeper of the measure of time and of religious festivals.

Enheduanna, the priestess poet

One of the most famous names linked with Nanna is that of Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, whom her father appointed high priestess of the god at Ur around the twenty-third century BC. Tradition attributes to her a series of hymns, including compositions dedicated to Inanna and a collection of hymns to the temples of Sumer. For this reason she is often described as one of the first authors whose name we know, although some scholars debate how much of those texts really goes back to her.

The office of high priestess of Nanna remained for centuries a role of great prestige, often entrusted to the daughters of kings. An alabaster disc discovered at Ur during the excavations led by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s shows Enheduanna taking part in a rite, and it is one of the most precious testimonies to this figure.

The journey to Nippur and the cult of Harran

A Sumerian composition narrates Nanna's journey to Nippur. The god loads a boat with gifts, passes through several cities and reaches the temple of his father Enlil, from whom he receives prosperity for Ur in return. The text probably reflects a real procession of divine statues along the canals, and shows the Moon as a god who travels, brings abundance and binds the centres of the land together.

In northern Mesopotamia, at Harran, stood another great sanctuary of Sin, the Ehulhul. Nabonidus' mother, Adad-guppi, was a devotee of the god, and Nabonidus himself, the last king of Babylon before the Persian conquest of 539 BC, promoted his cult with a fervour that earned him the hostility of the priesthood of Marduk. At Harran the veneration of the Moon survived in various forms until the Middle Ages, a tenacious memory of one of the oldest gods in history.