Kishar was the rim of the world, the totality of the earth as it met the encircling sky. She was sister and wife to Anshar; and from their union came forth Anu, the lord of the heavens, and the long line of his descendants.
Before thisApsu
Next on the wallTiamat
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Kishar, like Anshar, is a cosmographic principle personified in the Enuma Elish (Tablet I, lines 12–13). She has no surviving myth of her own, and is named only in the genealogies. The pairing of Anshar and Kishar — heaven-totality and earth-totality — is a tidy theological construction that probably reflects the systematizing mind of the Babylonian priesthood rather than a living cult. No temple to Kishar is known.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Sibling ofAnsharShe was sister and wife to Anshar
- Consort ofAnshar
She was sister and wife to Anshar
Parent ofAnufrom their union came forth Anu, the lord of the heavens
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for Sumer. 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.