Sarpanit
Sign in to saveZarpanitu (also romanized as Ṣarpānītu) was a Mesopotamian goddess regarded as the spouse of Marduk. Not much is known about her character, though late sources indicate that she was associated with pregnancy and that she could be assigned similar roles as her husband, including that of queen of the gods. She was originally worshiped in Zarpan, a village near Babylon, though the latter city itself also served as her cult center.
Key facts
- Deity.type
- Mesopotamian
- Deity.name
- Zarpanitu
- Deity.image
- Assurbanipal’s Acrostic Hymn to Marduk and Zarpanitu.jpg
- Deity.caption
- Tablet with a hymn to Marduk and Zarpanitu attributed to Ashurbanipal. British Museum.
- Deity.deity_of
- Queen of the gods, goddess of pregnancy
- Deity.other_names
- Erua, Papnunanki, Elagu, Laḫamun
- Deity.cult_center
- Zarpan, Babylon
- Deity.spouse
- Marduk
- Deity.children
- Nabu, Ṣilluš-ṭāb, Katunna
via Wikipedia infobox
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Article
11 sectionsContents
- Name
- Additional names
- Character
- Associations with other deities
- Family and court
- Syncretism
- Worship
- Outside Mesopotamia
- Mythology
- References
- Bibliography
Zarpanitu (also romanized as Ṣarpānītu) was a Mesopotamian goddess regarded as the spouse of Marduk. Not much is known about her character, though late sources indicate that she was associated with pregnancy and that she could be assigned similar roles as her husband, including that of queen of the gods. She was originally worshiped in Zarpan, a village near Babylon, though the latter city itself also served as her cult center.
==Name== The most common spelling of Zarpanitu's name in cuneiform was dzar-pa-ni-tum. It is romanized as Ṣarpānītu instead by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, but this choice has been criticized by Wilfred G. Lambert, who points out that while cuneiform does not differentiate between the sounds z and ṣ, supplementary evidence for the former option is provided both by various scholarly etymologies of the name and by texts written in the Aramaic alphabet, which does differentiate between z and ṣ. The Aramaic spelling zrpnt is known from the Sefire inscriptions. Authors such as Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Andrew R. George, Joan Goodnick Westenholz and Takayoshi Oshima (who was responsible for the relevant entry in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie) also favor romanizing the name with a z. However, romanizations starting with ṣ also continue to be used in Assyriological literature.