Son of Enlil, warrior and farmer god, associated with Nippur and Girsu, and the hero of Lugal-e, the long Sumerian poem in which he defeats the demon Asag in the mountains and organises the stones, some of which are cursed and some blessed for their conduct in the battle.
The reading built on Lugal-e
Zecharia Sitchin reads Lugal-e as the Second Pyramid War: Ninurta besieging the Enkite gods inside the Great Pyramid of Giza and then entering it, around 8670 BCE by his own calculation, to strip out its crystals and instruments one by one. The poem’s stones become the pyramid’s components, and the empty, apexless chambers become the evidence of the removal.
The identification that does the real work
In The Wars of Gods and Men Sitchin states that the Erra Epic refers to Ninurta by the epithet Ishum, and gives no ground for it. In the poem and in the god-lists Ishum is a distinct deity, Erra’s herald and counsellor, a divine night watchman equated in bilingual texts with Sumerian Hendursanga; Andrew George’s 2015 study sets out the evidence. That equation is what welds the nuclear strike of 2024 BCE to the Pyramid Wars six thousand years earlier, and it is Sitchin’s own.
Connections
Enlil · Enki · Marduk · Erra Epic · The Wars of Gods and Men · Zecharia Sitchin · Great Pyramid of Giza · Anunnaki · Michael S. Heiser