Nergal: The Mesopotamian God of Death, War, and Destruction
Nergal (also known as Erra and Irra) is the Mesopotamian god of death, war, and destruction. He began as a regional, probably agricultural, god of the Babylonian city of Kutha in the Sumerian Early Dynastic I period (circa 2900-2750/2700 BCE) and was venerated through the Neo-Babylonian period…
Nergal's trajectory from obscure agricultural deity to pan-Mesopotamian god of death and pestilence traces how mythological systems absorb and encode catastrophic cultural memory — relevant to the question of whether destruction-deity archetypes carry fos
Original author: Joshua J. Mark