Sin

Sin, Sumerian Nanna, is the Mesopotamian moon-god, whose waxing and waning crescent measured out the months and governed the calendar, and who was accordingly a god of time, reckoning and the wisdom of the night. He is the father of the sun-god Shamash and of Inanna-Ishtar, so that in the Mesopotamian scheme the moon is the parent of the sun rather than its lesser companion. His two great cult centres were Ur in the far south, where his temple, the great ziggurat, still stands, and where the ruler's daughter served as high priestess (entu), an office famously held by Enheduanna, the earliest author known by name, and Harran in the far north, where his worship persisted remarkably late, surviving into the Islamic period. His symbol is the crescent moon, likened to the horns of a bull.

Sin's northern cult at Harran had a dramatic later chapter under the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus (reigned 556 to 539 BCE), an unusually devoted worshipper of the moon-god who rebuilt Sin's temple there, the Ekhulkhul, "House of Rejoicing," and appears to have sought to elevate Sin above Babylon's own patron Marduk. This religious preference proved controversial enough with the Marduk priesthood that some historians connect it to Nabonidus's decade-long withdrawal to the Arabian oasis of Tayma, and, ultimately, to Babylon's fall to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BCE.

The priestly office at Sin's temple in Ur that placed a king's daughter at its head produced one of the most remarkable figures in the whole of ancient literature. Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the king who founded the first Mesopotamian empire in the twenty fourth century BCE, was installed by her father as high priestess, entu, of Sin at Ur, a position of real religious and political weight meant to bind the newly conquered Sumerian south to Akkadian rule through the person of the royal family. She is credited with a body of hymns, including the Sumerian Temple Hymns addressed to the great sanctuaries of Mesopotamia's cities, and with a composition known as the Exaltation of Inanna, in which the poet speaks in her own voice about being driven from her office during a political rebellion and pleads with the goddess Inanna for restoration, a text often cited as the earliest surviving work of literature whose author can be identified by name, since Enheduanna names herself directly within the poem.

Whatever her personal devotion to Inanna expressed in that famous work, her formal institutional role throughout her career remained tied to Sin, the moon god of Ur, whose temple household she led for decades under two successive kings, and modern historians and literary scholars increasingly treat her not merely as an ancient curiosity but as a founding figure in the history of authorship itself, a voice that used the platform of a very old lunar priesthood to write some of the most personal literature to survive from the third millennium BCE.