What do you think is Sumer's word Dingir(god)'s etymology?

[rakovsky]

The Esoteric Codex: Mesopotamian Deities By Troy Kynard says:

The concept of divinity in Sumerian is closely associated with the heavens as is evident from the fact that the cuneiform sign doubles as the ideogram for sky and that its original shape is the picture of a star. The original association of divinity is thus with bright or shining hierophanies in the sky.

A book called Names (1977) says:

The /din/ does appear in a very common Sumerian word, /dingir/ for which the /-gir/ may be suspected of being an agent~noun suffix, seen for example in /ligir/ “prince, ruler," with the /li-/ probably beingthe same morpheme found in the verb ...

books.google.com/books?id=oEtQAQAAIAAJ&q=%22for+which+the+-gir+may+be+suspected+of+being+an%22&dq=%22for+which+the+-gir+may+be+suspected+of+being+an%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjO8pKe4O7OAhXLsB4KHZQ3BsoQ6AEIIDAA


Gods in the Desert: Religions of the Ancient Near East By Glenn S. Holland proposes:

The cuneiform ideograms used to represent [Dingir] associate the idea of a god with the heavens. This implies that the term is essentially spatial, that the idea of a god in Mesopotamia originally had more to do with location than with essence. The gods are those beings that live in heaven, not on earth where human beings live.

Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars By Alasdair Livingstone looks to a post-Sumerian Mesopotamian Semitic work, in which:

Heaven (pronounced 'sha-me') is equated with the phonetically identical phrase for "of water" (sha me). THe sign AN which may represent the god Anu, or the word for "god", dingir, is equated with the fire god, Girra. Either a theological equation of Girra with Anu, or the phonetic similarity between girra and dingir, or something else, could be involved.

This brings to mind a claim on a New Indology website equating or associating Dingir with the Hindu Angiras/Agni, Agni being a fire god:
New Indology: Sumerian and Indo-European: a surprising connection
new-indology.blogspot.com/2015/05/sumerian-and-indo-european-surprising.htm

Of course, a weakness in the reliability of equating Angiras and Dingir is that Hinduism's text about Angiras is in Indo-European Sanskrit, rather than in Sumerian. But Angiras appears to be a very old concept in Hinduism, so it could date back to the Indus Valley period and have commonality with the Sumerians' mythology or word Dingir.

The entry Gerra (god) in Wikipedia, says:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerra_(god)
Gerra (also known as Girra) is the Babylonian and Akkadian god of fire, derived from the earlier Sumerian deity Gibil.

So etymologically it's questionable that Dingir is Girra, as Girra is a Semitic word. Yet there could be an explanation reflected in the Semitic writing referred to above, in that associations with fire, or perhaps sparks or lighting, could be a core meaning of Dingir.

[rakovsky]

The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia By Archibald Henry Sayce says:

I can still see no better etymology for dimmer, dingir, "god", than the one I proposed in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 143 viz "dim", "to create" or "make". From the same root we have dim or dimma, offspring, which illustrates the antithesis between the Sumerian who regarded generation as an act of creation and the Semite who regarded creation as an act of generation. In W A I. , dim takes the place of dumu, "son". Dimme and dimmea show that in dimmer the final consonant is a suffix.

Dim- does mean to create or fashion, according to lexicons.
Urnamma of Ur in Sumerian Literary Tradition By Esther Flückiger-Hawker

Notice by the way the resemblance between Sumerian "dim" (make, create) and Proto-Indo-European Tim/Tem- Build, Building . See eg. Greek Demo ( build), Slavic Dom (House), Latin Domus (House).
The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship By Allan R. Bomhard, John C. Kerns

This however is not to label Sumerian as an Indo-European language, only to note some connections that are possible. Some Turkic scholars also see similarity between Turkic and Sumerian root words, but this theory about a Turkic-Sumerian close relationship is not the standard one.

[us4-he2-gal2]

rakovsky:





Welcome to enenuru. I certainly invite you to peruse our introductions thread, a standard step here. I am pleased to see someone looking hard at these fundamental issues such as you have brought up in recent days: dingir, monotheism (debatable) and Nammu. It seems like your appetite for information is quite strong if you are posting with this determination.


You have obviously collected quite a bit of information on Mesopotamian religion, however if you have come to a community like this I can only imagine that you seek to improve and add to it. In that regard, it may be best to weed out certain types of information sources and to acquire and use other types of sources. Enenuru attempts to be a 'breidge to academia' helping all new comers with the perusal of published academic sources, should that be their desire.


Generally speaking, there is no reason to trust non-academic sources like this Esoteric Codex: Mesopotamian Deities by Troy Kynard, published by lulu.com. And don't misunderstand me: I came from the public, I started with public domain books on Mesopotamia long before I ever went to university. I know from experience. It isn't that non-academic authors are in reality incapable of delivering top notch information to people, it is that they are not motivated to do so. Look at the Necronomicon, or the works of Z. Sitchin - these books sell like crazy and are in available most public bookstores to purchase. Public domain authors are of course in it for the money and as a result there is little integrity in their information.


My main suggestion is to divide academic sources from non-academic sources, throw the pile of non-academic sources into the trash. It sounds harsh and extremely judgmental, but the actual word that describes this process is discernment. I did the same in the past, and I have more research opportunity now than I ever imagined then.


A major problem for all developing researchers is how to get ones hands on Assyriological research. Because these books are not intended to turn a profit, and would never sell to the public anyway, they are printed in very small numbers (sold mainly to university library and interested professors). Because the number of printings is low, the sale price of the books must cover the over all costs of printing and distribution etc., meaning, Assyriological books are very expensive. The interested public may now turn to academic.edu see explanation here and download many academic articles on Mesopotamia for free. There are other ways to acquire academic material without buying the books outright, which outside most peoples budgets.


A second suggestion I would make about sources is that we generally try to avoid, or use only with extreme caution, Assyriological works written before 1940. Anything before 1960 is suspect even. This is because the understanding of Akkadian and Sumerian language has made significant steps forward in the last 50 years, and translations made before this are now considered to be full of errors and misunderstandings. Hence, if you are going to cite Archibald Henry Sayce, it is only advisable to do so for the purpose of constructing a history of interpretation.



As for a good comment on the phenomena of the dingir, there is that made by G. Selz, in his article The Divine Prototypes (available at academia.edu here. Selz notes that the dingir existed already in the earliest phases of writing in the Uruk period and it does probably represent a star - but it did not feature consistently in the names of divine beings during the third millennium. This could mean, according to Selz, that the process of "astralization" i.e. whereby divinity was becoming associated increasingly with the stars, was occurring around the time that writing itself was being invented...however, it also means that the nature of divinity itself is not solely in the stars, as we see many earlier deities were not marked by the dingir in the earliest texts. This is all theory of course, there is no evidence that allows for definite answers, but Selz' comments are based on pretty good logic. You can either download the Selz article at the link I gave above or see my earlier discussion of it here, bottom of the thread.

[santakku]

I was a little late finding this, but I just wanted to offer my encouragement and interest in further posts on this. I would second us4-he2-gal2's comments on sources, although I was impressed with the reservation you showed in dealing with what you had. In short, whilst you could definitely build on firmer ground, you've done a great job with what you had.

Sumerian is famous for being discovered to be a lost relation of every known language. One by one, these arguments are very convincing, but by the time you read a few you'd become convinced Sumerian is a bastardised form of Turkish adopted by Celtic settlers from China and bearing influences from native Australian dialects. A lot is just coincidence, but some I think are genuine links, just for specific words. I see no problem with one Sumerian word having a Chinese relation and another a Turkish one.

Now to dingir. I think the dim2 - tem connection is a very strong candidate for Indo-European influence. I was previously aware of the Sumerian word /temen/, which has the clear parallel in Greek. I had thought we were dealing with a loanword, which way I wasn't sure, but I think if dim2 - tem provides a parallel verb, the connection is stronger. I think that the case that dingir derives from dim2 + x is far from closed, however. On the other hand, dingir is polysyllabic, making a compound or loanword etymology significantly more likely.

A good academic dictionary of Sumerian is psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-frame.html