Dumuzid, the Shepherd

Dumuzid the Shepherd
The marriage of Inanna and Dumuzid
Other names	Dumuzi
Title	King of Sumer
Spouse(s)	Inanna

Dumuzid (sometimes transcribed as Dumuzi), called "the Shepherd", from Bad-tibira in Sumer, was, according to the Sumerian King List, the fifth predynastic king in the legendary period before the Deluge. The list further states that Dumuzid ruled for 36,000 years.

"Dumuzid the Shepherd" is also the subject of a series of epic poems in Sumerian literature. However, in these tablets he is associated not with Bad-tibira but with Uruk, where a namesake, Dumuzid the Fisherman, was king sometime after the Flood, in between Lugalbanda "the Shepherd" and Gilgamesh.

Among the compositions involving Dumuzid the Shepherd are:

Later poems and hymns of praise to Dumuzid indicate that he was later considered a deity, a precursor of the Babylonian god Tammuz. In Tablet 6 of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh rebuffs Ishtar (Inanna), reminding her that she had struck Tammuz (Dumuzid), "the lover of [her] youth", decreeing that he should "keep weeping year after year". Pictured as a bird with a broken wing (an allallu-bird, possibly a European or Indian roller), Dumuzid now "stays in the woods crying 'My wing!'" (Tablet 6,ii,11-15). Another possible identification for this bird is the northern or red-wattled lapwing, both of which species are well known for their distraction displays where a wing is dragged on the ground as if broken in order to divert a potential predator from the lapwing's nest. The mournful two-note call of these birds also evokes the Akkadian kappi, "My wing!".