Siris or Siraš was a Mesopotamian goddess associated with beer. She was also worshiped in Ebla , where her name was spelled as Zilaš . Cognates of her name are also present as terms referring to alcoholic beverages or deities associated with them in languages such as Ugaritic and Hebrew . She was closely associated with another goddess of similar character, Ninkasi , though the nature of the connection between them varies between sources. She is attested in a variety of texts, including god lists, offering lists and a variant of the Ballad of Early Rulers .
37-525: Siris may refer to: Mythology [ edit ] Siris (goddess) , the Mesopotamian goddess of beer Siris (mythology) , a figure in Greek mythology; also known as Sinis Places [ edit ] Siris, Magna Graecia , an ancient city in southern Italy Siris, Sardinia , an Italian commune Sinni (river) (Latin: Siris ), Italy Siris, Jenin ,
74-614: A Palestinian town Serres , a city in Macedonia called Siris by the Ancient Greek historian Herodotus People [ edit ] Michael Siris (born 1945), American attorney P. Siris (1705–1735), English dancing master and choreographer Other uses [ edit ] Albizia or Siris, plants in the legume genus, also known as silk trees Siris (band) , an international rock group Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) The main character from
111-482: A complaint by Tushratta to Akhenaten about the situation: I...asked your father Mimmureya [i.e., Amenhotep III] for statues of solid cast gold, ... and your father said, 'Don't talk of giving statues just of solid cast gold. I will give you ones made also of lapis lazuli. I will give you too, along with the statues, much additional gold and [other] goods beyond measure.' Every one of my messengers that were staying in Egypt saw
148-574: A cylinder seal) was found. It was inscribed with "Amarna Cuneiform" and held a letter which appears to be part of the Amarna correspondence. "To Lab'aya, my lord, speak. Message of Tagi: To the King (Pharaoh), my lord: "I have listened carefully to your missive to me ...(illegible traces)" Amarna Letters are politically arranged in a rough counterclockwise fashion: Amarna Letters from Syria/Lebanon/Canaan are distributed roughly: Early in his reign, Akhenaten ,
185-531: A depiction of this goddess and Ninkasi. Another similar image has been identified on an object which might have originally been a part of an instrument or a gaming board. Amarna letters The Amarna letters ( / ə ˈ m ɑːr n ə / ; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets , and cited with the abbreviation EA , for "El Amarna") are an archive, written on clay tablets , primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between
222-525: Is a blessing, "may Siraš rejoice over you!" It has been suggested that while only attested in Syrian copies of the text, it nonetheless originates in a variant of the composition which originally arose in Mesopotamia. According to Julia M. Asher-Greve, Siris might also be represented in Mesopotamian visual arts, as a seal with a depiction of two goddesses seemingly holding drinking cups according to her might be
259-567: Is as plentiful as dust. May my brother cause me no distress. May he send me much gold in order that my brother [with the gold and m]any [good]s may honor me. Note: Many assignments are tentative; spellings vary widely. This is just a guide. William L. Moran summarizes the state of the chronology of these tablets as follows: Despite a long history of inquiry, the chronology of the Amarna letters, both relative and absolute, presents many problems, some of bewildering complexity, that still elude definitive solution. Consensus obtains only about what
296-520: Is not directly attested, though Krebernik notes it is not implausible that she was connected with more than one alcoholic beverage in this area. Siris and Ninkasi , another goddess associated with beer, are juxtaposed in various texts, for example in god lists. They could be regarded as sisters as attested in a version of the Weidner god list with explanatory notes from Assur . However, in other sources they could be treated as equivalents, for example in
333-426: Is obvious, certain established facts, and these provide only a broad framework within which many and often quite different reconstructions of the course of events reflected in the Amarna letters are possible and have been defended. ...The Amarna archive, it is now generally agreed, spans at most about thirty years, perhaps only fifteen or so. From the internal evidence, the earliest possible date for this correspondence
370-472: Is sometimes assumed Ningishzida was associated with wine. An alternate proposal is that it depended on his character as an underworld god, as underworld and beer deities might have been associated with each other to illustrate the negative effects of excessive alcohol consumption. In the Weidner god list, Siris and other beer deities are placed between Laṣ and Nungal , which might be another example supporting
407-573: Is the final decade of the reign of Amenhotep III , who ruled from 1388 to 1351 BC (or 1391 to 1353 BC), possibly as early as this king's 30th regnal year ; the latest date any of these letters were written is the desertion of the city of Amarna , commonly believed to have happened in the second year of the reign of Tutankhamun later in the same century in 1332 BC. Moran notes that some scholars believe one tablet, EA 16, may have been addressed to Tutankhamun's successor Ay or Smenkhkare . However, this speculation appears improbable because
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#1732851981906444-505: The Infinity Blade series of games A 1744 treatise on natural philosophy by Irish philosopher George Berkeley See also [ edit ] All pages with titles containing Siris Siri (disambiguation) Sirius (disambiguation) Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Siris . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change
481-488: The Amarna letters , Abdi-Tirši ("servant of Tiršu"). Cognates are also present in Phoenician ( trš ) and Hebrew ( tîrôš ) as ordinary nouns referring to wine or grape must . Most likely all of these words were derived from a common Semitic root possibly referring to fermentation , reconstructed as *ṮRŠ by John F. Healey. In Mesopotamia Siris was associated with beer . As summarized by Manfred Krebernik, she
518-839: The Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru , or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom , spanning a period of no more than thirty years in the middle 14th century BC. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna , the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten , founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1351–1334 BC) during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt . The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in
555-847: The Pushkin Museum in Moscow; and 1 in the collection of the Oriental Institute in Chicago . A few tablets are at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels. The archive contains a wealth of information about cultures, kingdoms, events and individuals in a period from which few written sources survive. It includes correspondence from Akhenaten's reign ( Akhenaten who
592-502: The Amarna archives were closed by Year 2 of Tutankhamun , when this king transferred Egypt's capital from Amarna to Thebes. A small number of the Amarna letters are in the class of poetry . An example is EA 153 , entitled: "Ships on hold" , from Abimilku of Tyre . This is a short, 20-line letter. Lines 6–8 and 9-11 are parallel phrases, each ending with "...before the troops of the king, my lord." -('before', then line 8, line 11). Both sentences are identical, and repetitive, with only
629-452: The Nippur god list, Siris and Ninkasi are preceded by the deity Nintiḫal, who might be the mother of the former. She might be the same deity as Ninti , who was the mother of Ninkasi. In An = Anum , Siris is listed in a section dedicated to the courtiers of Enlil . Manfred Krebernik argues that the deities of beer were placed in his circle because the goddess responsible for grain from which
666-507: The beverage was made, Nisaba , was closely associated with him due to being viewed as his mother-in-law. A text only known from late copies referred as Gattung II in Assyriological literature refers to Siris as the "great cook of An ," but this role is not attested for her otherwise. In Ebla , Siris (Zilaš) was associated with a local version of the god Ea , Ḥayya . In a Mesopotamia incantation to which Wilfred G. Lambert assigned
703-933: The collections of various museums. The initial group of letters recovered by local Egyptians have been scattered among museums in Germany , England , Egypt , France, Russia, and the United States. Either 202 or 203 tablets are at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin ; 99 are at the British Museum in London; 49 or 50 are at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; 7 at the Louvre in Paris; 3 at
740-734: The corpus of texts from Nippur from the Kassite period . According to the Nippur Compendium , a text known from Neo-Babylonian copies, she was worshiped in the temple of Gula in this city, which at the time bore the ceremonial name Eurusagga. She is still attested in a text from this city from the Achaemenid period . Siris was also worshiped in Assur , where she had her own sanctuary, in Isin , and in Babylon in
777-730: The culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period. Though most are written in Akkadian, the Akkadian of the letters is heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who probably spoke an early form of Proto-Canaanite , the language(s) which would later evolve into the daughter languages of Hebrew and Phoenician . These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation. These letters, comprising cuneiform tablets written primarily in Akkadian –
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#1732851981906814-435: The god list An = Anum and Neo-Assyrian versions of Lugalbanda myths. Richard L. Litke states that a single text might refer to Siris as a male deity and Ninkasi's husband, but according to Manfred Krebernik no references to either of them having a spouse are known. The view that a tradition in which Siris was considered Ninkasi's daughter is documented in some copies of An = Anu m is considered unconvincing today. In
851-435: The gold for the statues with their own eyes. ... But my brother [i.e., Akhenaten] has not sent the solid [gold] statues that your father was going to send. You have sent plated ones of wood. Nor have you sent me the goods that your father was going to send me, but you have reduced [them] greatly. Yet there is nothing I know of in which I have failed my brother. ... May my brother send me much gold. ... In my brother's country gold
888-556: The history and the chronology of the period. Letters from the Babylonian king, Kadashman-Enlil I , anchor the timeframe of Akhenaten's reign to the mid-14th century BC. They also contain the first mention of a Near Eastern group known as the Habiru , whose possible connection with the Hebrews —due to the similarity of the words and their geographic location—remains debated. Other rulers involved in
925-427: The language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform , the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia . Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language , Canaanite-Akkadian ; one especially long letter—abbreviated EA 24 —was written in a late dialect of Hurrian , and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language. The known tablets total 382 and fragments (350 are letters and
962-454: The latter theory. The oldest reference to Siris occurs in an Eblaite offering list, while in Mesopotamia the first known instance of her name spelled syllabically occurs in an Old Babylonian incantation from Isin . She is also attested in various god lists, including An = Anum , the Nippur god list and the Weidner god list. A single theophoric name invoking Siris has been identified in
999-493: The letters include Tushratta of Mitanni, Lib'ayu of Shechem, Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, and the quarrelsome king, Rib-Hadda , of Byblos , who, in over 58 letters, continuously pleads for Egyptian military help. Specifically, the letters include requests for military help in the north against Hittite invaders, and in the south to fight against the Habiru. During excavation in 1993 a small, damaged, clay cylinder (first thought to be
1036-473: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Siris&oldid=1254728350 " Categories : Disambiguation pages Disambiguation pages with surname-holder lists Hidden categories: Articles containing Latin-language text Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Siris (goddess) Siris' name
1073-519: The pharaoh of Egypt, had conflicts with Tushratta , the king of Mitanni , who had courted favor with his father, Amenhotep III , against the Hittites. Tushratta complains in numerous letters that Akhenaten had sent him gold-plated statues rather than statues made of solid gold; the statues formed part of the bride-price that Tushratta received for letting his daughter Tadukhepa marry Amenhotep III and then later marry Akhenaten. An Amarna letter preserves
1110-451: The regional language of diplomacy for this period – were first discovered around 1887 by local Egyptians who secretly dug most of them from the ruined city of Amarna, and sold them in the antiquities market. They had originally been stored in an ancient building that archaeologists have since called the Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh . Once the location where they were found was determined,
1147-713: The rest literary texts and school texts), of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln , which came out in two volumes (1907 and 1915) and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available. Only 26 of the known tablets and fragments were found in their archaeological context, Building Q42.21. The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on
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1184-514: The ruins were explored for more. The first archaeologist who successfully recovered more tablets was Flinders Petrie , who in 1891 and 1892 uncovered 21 fragments. Émile Chassinat , then director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo , acquired two more tablets in 1903. Since Knudtzon's edition, some 24 more tablets, or fragments, have been found, either in Egypt, or identified in
1221-488: The temple of Mandanu , Erabriri, where she had a seat named Ekurunna, "house of liquor." A variant of the Ballad of Early Rulers from Ugarit and Emar adds a reference to Siris which is not attested in known Mesopotamian copies of the same text. The composition is often interpreted as an example of "wisdom literature" or as a drinking song. The exact reasons behind Siris' inclusion are not certain. The line mentioning her
1258-522: The title The First Brick , Siris is said to be one of the deities created by Ea from clay taken from the Apsu . In a number of texts, Siris appears alongside Ningishzida . For example, tablet VII of Maqlû contains a formula labeled as "the incantation of Siris and Ningishzida." They are also invoked together in Muššu'u and in Šurpu . The connection might be based on a shared association with alcohol, as it
1295-549: Was also titled Amenhotep IV ), as well as his predecessor Amenhotep III 's reign. The tablets consist of over 300 diplomatic letters; the remainder comprise miscellaneous literary and educational materials. These tablets shed much light on Egyptian relations with Babylonia , Assyria , Syria , Canaan , and Alashiya ( Cyprus ) as well as relations with the Mitanni , and the Hittites . The letters have been important in establishing both
1332-453: Was commonly written in cuneiform logographically as ŠIM, ŠIM✕A, or ŠIM✕NINDA, though syllabic phonetic spellings are known too. A theonym attested in the texts from Ebla, Zilaš ( Zi-la-šu ), is presumed to be another writing of the name too. Other related theonyms include trṯ , attested in the Ugaritic texts , and Tiršu, known from a theophoric name of a ruler of Hazor mentioned in
1369-513: Was connected with production, consumption and the effects it had on humans, but not necessarily with innkeepers responsible for its sale. Her name functioned as a metonym for the beverage itself in Akkadian texts. When used in this context, it was written syllabically and without the so-called "divine determinative" ( dingir ), a sign used to indicate a word is a theonym in cuneiform. The Eblaite sources associate her with wine and honey. In Mesopotamian texts association between Siris and wine
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