Erra, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

There were times in Mesopotamia when plague swept the cities, when armies came down from the mountains, when the harvest failed and the rivers ran red, and the surviving people sought a god to whom they might attribute the calamity. That god was Erra — sometimes called Irra, sometimes identified with Nergal of Cutha — the god of plague and indiscriminate war, whose passions were not the cold strategies of high gods but the hot frenzies of slaughter for slaughter's sake.

His great epic, composed (so a colophon tells us) by one Kabti-ilani-Marduk, who claimed to have received it in a dream from Ishum the herald, runs to five tablets and tells how Erra was incited to madness by his Seven companions, the Sebitti, who whispered to him that war was being neglected and that his weapons were rusting. Erra was persuaded. He approached Marduk, who was then ruling at Babylon, and tricked the great god into stepping down briefly from his throne — for Marduk's robes, said Erra, needed cleaning, and Marduk in his vanity agreed to allow this. The throne empty, Erra raged. He overturned the cities of the south; he set brother against brother; he laid waste sanctuaries and good men together with bad. The poem describes his violence with appalling vividness, in the voice of a god who recognizes no proportion.

It was Ishum, his herald, who at last persuaded him to stop — not by argument but by reciting back to him the catalogue of his own destructions, until even Erra was sated with what he had done. The poem ends with Erra accepting praise as a scourge of mankind: a frightening conclusion, and one which Babylonian and Assyrian readers seem to have valued, for fragments and amulets quoting the epic's final lines were carried as protections against plague.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The Erra Epic is one of the four major Akkadian poems alongside the Enuma Elish, the Gilgamesh, and the Atrahasis. It was probably composed in the eighth century BCE, in the troubled period between the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian ascendancies, and the chaos described in the poem may reflect actual political collapse and the suppositions made about its causes. The colophon attributing it to Kabti-ilani-Marduk "who received it in a dream from Ishum" is unusual — Mesopotamian poems are seldom signed — and suggests a late literary self-consciousness. Verses of the Erra Epic were indeed inscribed on small clay amulets, examples of which survive in numerous museum collections, and were worn against pestilence: the poem doubled, that is, as a kind of magical text, the recitation of which was held to placate its protagonist.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Named as the same god asNergalsometimes called Irra, sometimes identified with Nergal of Cutha
Companion ofThe Sebittiincited to madness by his Seven companions, the Sebitti
Companion ofIshumIt was Ishum, his herald, who at last persuaded him to stop
Rival ofMardukHe approached Marduk, who was then ruling at Babylon, and tricked the great god into stepping down briefly from his throne

The same god in other rooms

The ancient sources themselves name these as one god under different names. See Nergal and Erra hung together

The Cradle of CitiesNergal

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for Akkad, Babylon and Assyria. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 3400–3000 BCE: Uruk-period writing and monumental temple economies create the earliest recoverable administrative setting for named divine institutions.
c. 2900–2350 BCE: Early Dynastic city-states preserve local cults, hymns, royal inscriptions, and god lists; later copies often transmit older compositions.
c. 2334–2154 BCE: The Akkadian Empire expands bilingual and imperial patterns of divine identification without erasing local cult titles.
c. 2112–2004 BCE: Ur III administration and scribal schooling standardize many Sumerian literary and liturgical forms.
c. 2000–1600 BCE: Old Babylonian schools copy major myths, laments, hymns, debates, and heroic narratives in the form most often used by modern editors.
c. 1650–1200 BCE: Hittite and Hurrian archives at Hattusa transmit Anatolian myths, imported Syrian materials, and ritual compositions.
c. 1400–1190 BCE: The tablets of Ugarit preserve the Baal Cycle, Kirta, Aqhat, ritual lists, and a dense Late Bronze Age West Semitic pantheon.
c. 1000–612 BCE: Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires collect, revise, and politically reinterpret older learned traditions.