Dumuzi, later known in Akkadian and beyond as Tammuz, is the Sumerian shepherd-god of fertility and the type of the dying-and-returning deity in Mesopotamian religion. He is the husband, or beloved, of the great goddess Inanna (Ishtar), and a large body of Sumerian love poetry celebrates their courtship in tender and sensuous terms, the shepherd wooing the queen of heaven. His fate is bound to hers.
In the myth of Inanna's descent to the underworld, the goddess is allowed to return to the living only if she provides a substitute to take her place among the dead. Finding on her return that Dumuzi, far from mourning her, is seated in splendour on his throne, she gives him up to the demons who accompany her. His sister Geshtinanna, in grief, offers to share his fate, and it is settled that Dumuzi will spend half the year in the underworld and his sister the other half, so that he departs and returns with the turning of the seasons. His disappearance was mourned in rites of lamentation across Mesopotamia, and the annual weeping for the dead god survived for many centuries; the practice is even referred to, disapprovingly, in the Hebrew Bible, where women are described weeping for Tammuz. Dumuzi is the earliest well-attested figure of a pattern, the beautiful young god who dies and rises with the vegetation, that recurs across the ancient world.