Hello hukkana:
Well, I can't entirely follow your statement that they are pushing a "certain agenda" - your blend of sarcasm is making it difficult for me decide whether you perceive this series is pro-feminist or anti-feminist. Perhaps you can clarify this.
As for charting the mistakes, this assumes that there are mistakes - and as annoying as I find the theme song, little animated characters and the presenter, it's not necessarily the case that there are mistakes. It comes down to how good are his sources, most likely.
Ningikuga - A lessor know wife of Enki
A big problem with his presentation is that it is, of course, quite oversimplified. The pantheon of Mesopotamia shows a degree of variation as you progress from one period to another, for example. I think the very tip of the hierarchy, An, Ki, Enlil, Enki, Namma, are fairly stable. There are disputes about the origin of Enlil and his place in the early pantheon. What was his relationship to An, for that matter. And when you go lower than that, there is the potential for variant traditions of parentage and familial relations. For example, the ORRAC write up for Nanna states:
oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/nannasuen/index.html :
"In the Sumerian myth Enlil and Ninlil (ETCSL 1.2.1), the moon god is described as the first-born son of Enlil and Ninlil, and the moon god's three brothers are listed: Nergal-Meslamtaea, Ninazu (both underworld deities) and Enbililu (who was responsible for irrigation). There has been some suggestion that this position as the 'first born son of Enlil' might reflect the importance of Ur during the Ur III period. There are also occasional references to a paternal/fillial relationship between An and the moon god (Klein 2001: 295-7), but such are probably general references to An in his role as father of all the gods (Krebernik 1993-98b: 364-5)."
Was Ningikuga the wife of Enki and the mother of Ningal?So this goddess Ningikuga mentioned by crash course as the sister of Enki and the mother of Ningal, is an example of a goddess featured in variant traditions. I was curious where crash course got its information from about this goddess. The information below the video says that the sources are: "David Leeming, The World of Myth: An Anthology and Thury & Devinney, Introduction to Mythology." Well, I didn't have access to the full text of the Thury and Devinney, but the table of contents makes it unlikely that the information would occur in this book. I glanced through the Leeming, it doesn't seem to deal with the pantheon and only seems to mention Enki for his role in the flood and in the Enuma Elish. No mention of Ningikuga that I could find. A later book by Leeming (Leeming 2004 - "Jealous Gods and Chosen People: the Mythology of the Middle East) does sketch the Sumerian pantheon, and makes mention of Enki and his spouse Damkina but not Ningikuga.
Ningikuga is certainly an obscure goddess, not mentioned in basic reference works like Black and Green's "Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia." Nor is she mentioned in Peter Espak's work on Enki, surprisingly. Overwhelmingly, the wife of Enki is observed to have been Damkina. This does not mean that other information is invalid however, this is all a big lesson in shades of grey. It all depends on which information you choose to privilege. Thorkild Jacobsen 1976 (The Treasures of Darkness..) p. 124-125 states that Ningikuga was the wife of Enki and the mother of Ningal, as stated in the crash course video. This he bases on the text TuMNF IV 7 88 , see below, Krebernik and Cavigneaux take note of it. G. Leick in her "Dictionary of Ancient Near East Mythology" makes use of Jacobsen's comment identifies Ningikuga as the mother of Ningal.
One could stop there with the comment of T. Jacobsen and say that Ningikuga as wife of Enki is demonstrable correct. There is however further perspective (not necessarily contradicting perspective) in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie volume 9 to consider, in a comment made by M. Krebernik and A. Cavigneaux. The comment reads as follows:
Nin-gikuga (dNin-gi-ku-ga) "Herrin
der reinen Rohrs". 1. im altbab. An =
Anum-Vorläufer (TCL 15, 10: 87) nach
dDam-gal-nun-na im Umkreis von Enkil
Ea erwähnte Göttin. In An = Anum Il 178
(R. Litke, God-Lists 108) ist sie mit Damkina
geglichen.
2. In An = Anum III 28 (Litke, God-Lists
140) ist N. mit der Göttin Ningal* geglichen;
nach dem altbab. balbale TMH NF 4, 7 ii 88 (= ]. G. Westenholz, Fs. A.
Sjöberg [1989 551: 88) hingegen ist sie
deren Mutter. Die Emesal-Form dGa-saan-
gi-kü-ga in einem sum. Liebeslied (c.
Wilcke, AS 20 [1976] 294: 4) bezieht sich
wohl ebenfalls auf Ningals Mutter. Vgl.
Mondgott*, Ningal
To break that down in English, they state:
i) In the Old Babylonian forerunner to the the late godlist AN = Anum, Ningikuga is mentioned in the circle of Enki after Damgalnuna (=Damkina).
ii) In Column 2 line 178 of the later AN = Anum, Ningikuga is identified with Damkina.
iii) In Column 3 line line 28 of the later AN = Anum, Ningikuga is identified with Ningal (this seems to be a contradiction to the modern mind. Contradictions were not necessarily a problem for ancient theologians, this was before Artistotelian logic.) Krebernik and Cavigneaux seem to mark this contradiction by mentioning here that in an Old Babylonian hymn (TMHNF 4 7, which influenced Jacobsen), Ningikuga is instead the mother of Ningal.
Indeed, in the hymn TMHNG 4 7, which is known as "A Love Dialogue between Nanna and Ningal" (the title as it appears in F.S. Sjoberg p. 551) we see line 88 wherein Nanna speaks to Ningal about visiting her in her house, where she lives with her mother Ningikuga:
ama-ugu-zu Nin-gi-k[u3-ga-ra . . .]
"(to) your mother who bore you, Ningikuga"
So we could say that Ningikuga is distinct from Damkina and Enki had two wives. Or is we favor later theological trends, we could consider Enki to have had just Damkina as a wife (since Ningikuga is either identified with Damkina, or with her daughter Ningal. Or both.)
Ereshkigal:
Researching the Sumerian pantheon can be extremely annoying. Reference works of all sorts show a marked tendency to ignore questions or information which is difficult to provide. So, for example, Black and Green 1992 totally ignore the question of Ereshkigal's parentage; D. Katz' discussion of Ereshkigal says nothing about it, at least not in the focused discussion of the goddess on page 410. Leick's Dictionary of Ancient Near Easter Mythology does mention that she was the sister of Inanna, so does the ORRAC entry:
oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/erekigal/index.html It would appear then that, since Ereshkigal was the sister of Inanna, her parents should be Nanna and Ningal. In her dissertation on the myth Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, p. 415, Alena Gadotti seems to take it that Enlil is Ereshkigal's father and I'm not sure why she states that (no explanation is given). It's possible that she may be following Kramer who saw the cosmic episode at the start of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld as an indication that Ereshkigal 'may originally have been a sky goddess' - this was already disputed by Jacobsen in his 1946 JNES article "Sumerian Mythology: A Review Article" p. 145.
In summary, I don't think the content on the Crash Course video is especially wrong - the truth is probably much more complex then this presentation implies. But it aims to be a crash course.
