Ibn Wahshiyya
The Nabataean Agriculture
10th century CE
translated by Jason Colavito
2026
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NOTE |
The ancient god Dumuzid (Tammuz) was an ancient god of agriculture and shepherds worshiped across Mesopotamia and the Levant. He was the consort of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar) and one of the early antediluvian kings of Bad-tibira and Uruk. He is also known from Ezekiel 8:14’s reference to the women who weep for him at the annual commemoration of his death. Based on cuneiform texts known in early twentieth century, scholars concluded that Dumuzid/Tammuz died but did not return to life. Only in 1963 did a cuneiform discovery of a poem about the return of Dumuzid from the underworld prove that his resurrection was a key part of his myth cycle. However, the story had not been entirely forgotten. A euhemerized version of Tammuz’s story appears in a section on the Syriac calendar in the Nabataean Agriculture, a tenth-century Arabic translation of an earlier Syriac text believed to date from the fifth or sixth century. In the passage, Tammuz’s death and resurrection are preserved, though the euhemerized nature of the story, rendering him a human culture hero, required him to ultimately die. The account is likely the last witness to the death and resurrection of Tammuz as a living tradition. The Nabataean Agriculture has never been translated into English, but fortunately al-Maqrizi quoted the relevant passage in Book II, chapter 6 of his fifteenth-century Al-Khitat with minimal paraphrasing. The text below is translated from the French edition of the second volume of Maqrizi's Al-Khitat published by U. Bouriant in 1900.
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Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn Qay ibn Wahshiyya, in his book The Nabataean Agriculture, reports that according to the accounts of the Copts [sic for Nabataeans], who allegedly discovered this within their own texts, the month of Tammuz owes its name to a man whose story is both lengthy and wondrous. This man had urged the king to worship the seven planets and the twelve signs of the Zodiac; the king ordered him put to death, yet Tammuz, having been slain, came to life once more. The king had him executed several more times through the use of ghastly tortures, but after each killing, Tammuz invariably revived; ultimately, however, he died. All these months derive their names from virtuous and learned men who once lived among the Nabataeans, during the era when they inhabited the region of Babel, prior to the arrival of the Chaldeans. For this Tammuz was neither a Chaldean, nor a Canaanite, nor a Hebrew, nor a Jaramīqa; he was one of the ancient Ḥazānāsīs (Harranians?). It is for this reason that they assert that each of their months bears the name of a man from ages past, claiming, for instance, that Tešrīn I and Tešrīn II were two brothers skilled in the sciences, as were Kānōn I and Kānōn II. As for Šḇāṭ, it is the name of a man who lay with a thousand virgin women yet begot or fathered no offspring whatsoever; consequently, they placed him at the very end of the monthly cycle due to his inability to procreate, and, for that very same reason, they reduced the number of days allotted to his month. To this day, all the Sabaeans, also known as Babylonians or Ḥazānāsīs, lament and weep for Tammuz during the month that bears his name. They observe a festival dedicated to Tammuz; moreover, they have assigned a greater number of days to this particular month and have consecrated it specifically to women. During this time, all the women grieve, lament, and weep for Tammuz, observing a prolonged period of mourning. And they know nothing more of him than what they recount as follows: “We found that our ancestors lamented over Tammuz during the festival dedicated to Tammuz.”
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Source: U. Bouriant, Description topographique et historique de l'Égypte, vol. 2 (E. Leroux, 1900), 435-436.
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