IF WE ARE TO BELIEVE the many legends of the world, merfolk swam through the waters of our planet long before recorded history, where they fascinated the ancients—just as they do modern people today. Like the earliest human civilizations, the earliest mermaid myths come from Mesopotamia, and date back several thousand years.
Virtually all ancient cultures give accounts of strange, hybrid aquatic creatures, some of them considered divine in nature. At a time when spirits of all kinds populated the universe and the world was a mysterious place, our ancestors believed that potent deities controlled the great oceans and mighty rivers. Many of the myths of these cultures overlap or bear similarities, as do their deities. Centuries of trade, war, and migration facilitated the exchange of ideas in the ancient world, as still happens today, merging foreign concepts with indigenous beliefs to create a colorful blend of legends and lore.
Assyria—Birthplace of the Mermaid
Mermaid researchers say our first real mermaid came from Assyria (Syria). According to myth, the ancient Assyrians worshiped Atargatis, a powerful moon and fertility goddess, and associated her with life-giving water.
Mythology connects both the moon and water with the dark, mysterious, and ever-changing nature of women. Early people both revered and feared their female deities. These qualities, which people throughout the ages have associated with mermaids, may have originated with Atargatis—the goddess-turned-mermaid who threw herself into a lake after her catastrophic tryst with a shepherd (see Chapter 1)—and continue to this day.
In the first century C.E., Syrian writer Lucian described Atargatis’s temple in the city of Ascalon on the Mediterranean as being richly appointed, with a gold ceiling and doors. The temple held a golden statue of her, covered with gemstones, and another of her consort, the god Hadad. A sacred lake near the temple was filled with pampered fish. An altar sat in the middle of the lake, and worshippers could swim to it if they wanted to make offerings to the goddess.
Atargatis’s fame spread to Greece and Rome, and eventually through Europe and Britain as the Romans traversed the continent, bringing her legend with them. The Greeks called her Derketo, the Romans Dea Syria, meaning “the Syrian Goddess.”
THE BIRTH OF THE CONSTELLATION PISCES
A Greek story says that long ago an egg fell from the sky into the Euphrates River. A fish pushed the egg to shore and Derketo (the Greek name for Atargatis) hatched from it. She asked Zeus to acknowledge the fish’s help by forming the constellation Pisces, the zodiac sign represented by two fish. Ever after, fish were sacred to her.
Babylonian Water Divinities
One of the greatest of the ancient water deities was the Babylonian goddess Tiamat. Mythology honors this dragon-goddess and her consort, Apsu, as the parents of all the other Babylonian deities. Tiamat, it’s said, even created the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. When her murderous son Marduk cut her in half, the two rivers gushed from her eyes.
According to Thorkild Jacobsen, former professor of Assyriology at Harvard University and author of The Sumerian Kinglist, in the beginning “all was a watery chaos.” Two primal forces, Tiamat (the sea) and Apsu (the fresh water that existed underground), mingled and created the other gods and goddesses. “They engendered the god of heaven, Anu, and he in turn the god of the flowing sweet waters, Ea.”
The ancient Babylonians believed the Earth floated on fresh water. Ea, the god of wisdom, art, farming, and building, was also considered the ruler of these primal waters. Some images show him as a merman, with a human torso and the tail of a fish. When Ea wanted to teach knowledge to humankind, he sent the Apkulla—wise beings who supposedly had existed from the beginning of time—to carry out the task. Some of these sages appeared as human-bird composites. Others dressed in the skins of fish.
When the Babylonians wanted to “sign” documents, they used sealstones—stones carved with their personal emblems—and pressed them into hot wax as seals. One sealstone dating back to the eighteenth century B.C.E. shows a half-human half-fish creature—the earliest-known depiction of a mermaid.
MARINE BIOLOGIST OR MERMAID?
In the 1983 movie Local Hero, a Texas oil company wants to buy an entire Scottish village as a site for a refinery. The film features an unusual character named Marina, which means “watery area.” A marine biologist, she has webbed toes and appears to live in the sea. Marina is also the name of the little mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale.
Sumerian Water Deities
Deities of all kinds populated ancient Sumer (Sumeria) as well as Assyria and Babylonia. Gods and goddesses governed every facet of Mesopotamian life—they even ruled the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers between which these city-states lay. Sumerian divinities included numerous human-animal hybrids—some benevolent and some malevolent—from whom researchers believe mermaids may have evolved. These include not only the familiar fishtailed creatures we commonly think of as merfolk, but also humans with fish heads or fish-shaped hoods, people dressed in scaly garments, and men with fish skins draped on their backs.
One of ancient Sumer’s most important deities was a sea goddess named Nammu who birthed humankind. They thought of her as the goddess of the primeval sea, the mother of heaven and Earth—the Primordial Mother.
The Sumerians also honored a water god, Enki, who was their equivalent of Babylon’s god Ea. Known as the lord of water and wisdom, Enki was sometimes pictured in early artwork with water flowing from his shoulders. He also has ties to the serpent deities found in other cultures—his symbol, much like the caduceus adopted by doctors as their emblem, showed two serpents wrapped around a staff. We even find parallels between Enki and Noah, the man who built the ark in Christian mythology. In Sumerian mythology, Enki taught a man named Ziusudra to build a boat that would save human beings during the flood.
A SPLASH OF ENLIGHTENMENT
When it came time for people to leave their primitive ways behind, Sumerian myths say a mermaid emerged from the ocean to educate humanity in social, scientific, and artistic areas.
The Arabian Nights
Imagine the beautiful Scheherazade thousands of years ago delighting the Persian king Shahryah with magical tales of mermaids. The stories she tells in One Thousand and One Nights (known as The Arabian Nights in the English-speaking world) explore fantastic and fanciful worlds where anything can, and does, occur. Here we find familiar accounts of mermaids who bedazzle sailors with their glorious singing, and then either drown or devour the helpless men. But many other merfolk and water deities also play starring roles in these tales.
The Adventures of Bulukiya
One of the 1001 stories in this beloved compilation, this tale features a seafarer who comes upon whole societies of mermaids while searching for an herb that will confer immortality.
Djullanar the Sea-girl
This tale describes sea people who, although anatomically human, lived in the underwater realms. They married earthly humans and produced offspring who could breathe underwater.
Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman
In this story a fisherman who goes to live underwater discovers a world with practices and values that are entirely different from those on Earth, and where the inhabitants don’t wear clothes or work.
Julnar the Sea-Born and Her Son King Badr Basim of Persia
Here a king falls in love with a beautiful sea-born creature who tells him she and her kind “walk in the waters with our eyes open, as do ye on the ground.”
This fascinating collection of stories, drawn from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Egyptian, and Indian folklore over a period of many centuries, shows how from antiquity merfolk sparked the imaginations of diverse populations—just as they do today.
MAIL A MERMAID
Mermaids make colorful subjects for postage stamps. A picture of a selkie female with her captor appears on a Faroese 5.50 KR stamp. The English 90p stamp features a blue mermaid, modestly covering her breasts. In Australia, a mermaid by artist Aaron Lee Pocock graces the 60c stamp.
