DUMUZI. The god Dumuzi (Akkadian: Tammuz) appears very early in the cuneiform documentation, and an echo of him is still present today, since the month of July in Middle Eastern calendars bears his name. In the history of cuneiform Mesopotamian literatures, the tradition on the god is discontinuous. From the Old-Babylonian period (the twentieth through the sixteenth century BCE), nonhomogeneous songs about the god and the goddess Inanna have been found. Thorkild Jacobsen (1976, pp. 23–73) gathered them into a single plot, segmented in four sections:

1. courtship songs
2. wedding songs
3. death and lament songs
4. search and return songs

There is no evidence to ascribe the search and return songs to the god's return from the netherworld, so it must be removed from Jacobsen's otherwise valid reconstruction. The first two sections are clearly connected to that type of hieros gamos in which the king, playing the role of Dumuzi, married the...