Page Content (OCR)
174 Then, as he was tending the garden, Sargon could not believe his eyes: One day the queen, After crossing heaven, crossing earth, Inanna— After crossing Elam and Shubur, After crossing... The hierodule approached weary, fell asleep. I saw her from the edge of my garden; I kissed her and copulated with her. Inanna, instead of being angry, found Sargon to be a man to her liking. Sumer, its civilization a millennium and a half old by then, needed a strong hand at the helm of its King- ship—a Kingship that, after the glorious one in Uruk, kept changing capitals; the changes led to conflicts among the cities and eventually between their patron-gods. Seeing in Sargon a man of action and resolve, Inanna recommended him as the next king over all of "Sumer and Akkad." He also became her constant lover. As Sargon stated in another text known as the Sargon Chronicle, "When I was a gar- dener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and fifty years I exercised Kingship." It was in the reign of the successors of Sargon as kings of Sumer and Akkad that Inanna/Ishtar incorporated the conjugations with the king into the ceremonies of the New Year Festival, formalizing them into the rite of the Sacred Marriage. In earlier times it was the gods who gathered to relive and retell, on the occasion of the New Year, the epic of Creation and the odyssey of the Anunnaki in coming to and _ staying on Earth; the festival was called A.KI.TI—"On Earth build Life." After Kingship was introduced, and after Inanna began to invite the king to her Gigunu, a reenactment of the death of her sex partner—and then his replacement by the king— was incorporated into the festival's proceedings. The essence of the procedure was to find a way to have the king spend the night with the goddess without ending up dead ... On the outcome depended not only the king's personal fate, but DIVINE ENCOUNTERS