Nergal (Sumerian: dKIŠ.UNU or ; ; Aramaic: ܢܸܪܓܲܠ; ) was a Mesopotamian god worshiped through all periods of Mesopotamian history, from Early Dynastic to Neo-Babylonian times, with a few attestations indicating that his cult survived into the period of Achaemenid domination. He was primarily associated with war, death, and disease, and has been described as the "god of inflicted death". He reigned over Kur, the Mesopotamian underworld, depending on the myth either on behalf of his parents Enlil and Ninlil, or in later periods as a result of his marriage with the goddess Ereshkigal. Originally either Mammitum, a goddess possibly connected to frost, or Laṣ, sometimes assumed to be a minor medicine goddess, were regarded as his wife, though other traditions existed, too.
His primary cult center was Kutha, located in the north of historical Babylonia. His main temple bore the ceremonial name E-Meslam and he was also known by the name Meslamtaea, "he who comes out of Meslam". Initially he was only worshiped in the north, with a notable exception being Girsu during the reign of Gudea of Lagash, but starting with the Ur III period he became a major deity in the south too. He remained prominent in both Babylonia and Assyria in later periods, and in the Neo-Babylonian state pantheon he was regarded as the third most important god, after Marduk and Nabu.
Nergal was associated with a large number of local or foreign deities. The Akkadian god Erra was syncretised with him at an early date, and especially in literary texts they functioned as synonyms of each other. Other major deities frequently compared to or syncretised with him include the western god Resheph, best attested in Ebla and Ugarit, who was also a god of war, plague and death, and Elamite Simut, who was likely a warrior god and shared Nergal's association with the planet Mars. It has also been proposed that his name was used to represent a Hurrian god, possibly Kumarbi or Aštabi, in early inscriptions from Urkesh, but there is also evidence that he was worshiped by the Hurrians under his own name as one of the Mesopotamian deities they incorporated into their own pantheon.
Two well known myths focus on Nergal, Nergal and Ereshkigal and Epic of Erra. The former describes the circumstances of his marriage of Ereshkigal, the Mesopotamian goddess of the dead, while the latter describes his rampages and efforts of his sukkal (attendant deity) Ishum to stop them. He also appears in a number of other, less well preserved compositions.
Names and epithets
Nergal's name can be translated from Sumerian as "lord of the big city", a euphemistic way to refer to him as a ruler of the underworld. The earliest attested spelling is dKIŠ.UNU, with its standard derivative dKIŠ.UNU.GAL first attested in the Old Akkadian period. Since in the Old Babylonian period the cuneiform signs KIŠ and GÌR coalesced, transliterations using the latter in place of the former can also be found in literature. The variant dNIN.KIŠ.UNU, attested in an inscription of Naram-Sin of Akkad, resulted from the use of a derivative of Nergal's name, KIŠ.UNU, as an early logographic writing of the name of Kutha, his cult center.
Phonetic spellings of Nergal's name are attested in cuneiform (dné-ri-ig-lá in Old Assyrian Tell Leilan, dné-ri-ig-la in Nuzi), as well as in Aramaic (nrgl, nyrgl) and Hebrew (nēregal in the Masoretic Text).
Meslamtaea and related logograms
Meslamtaea, "he who has come out of Meslam", was originally used as an alternative name of Nergal in the southern part of Lower Mesopotamia up to the Ur III period. It has been proposed that it was euphemistic and reflected the fact that Nergal initially could not be recognized as a ruler of the underworld in the south due to the existence of Ninazu (sometimes assumed to be the earliest Mesopotamian god of death) and Ereshkigal, and perhaps only served as a war deity. Meslamtaea with time also came to be used as the name of a separate deity. As attested for the first time in a hymn from the reign of Ibbi-Sin, he formed a pair with Lugalirra. Due to the connection between Nergal and these two gods, who could be regarded as a pair of twins, his own name could be represented by the logogram dMAŠ.TAB.BA and its variant dMAŠ.MAŠ, both of them originally meaning "(divine) twins". dMAŠ.MAŠ is attested in Neo-Assyrian theophoric names as a spelling of Nergal's name, though only uncommonly. However, the god designated by this logogram in one of the Amarna letters, written by the king of Alashiya, is most likely Resheph instead.