Talk:Gugalanna

Taurus obscured by the sun?

The exact sense in which Taurus, a constellation of stars that are, by definition, only visible at night, is obscured by the sun, a star that is by definition only visible during the day, would need to be explained for this article to make any logical sense. How exactly does the sun obscure Taurus when they are not even visible at the same time of day? Cottonshirtτ 06:26, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Morning.

The concept of the sun being "in" Taurus means that it rises within Taurus. — LlywelynII 01:31, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Move

At some point, this should be moved to Bull of Heaven, this figure's COMMON ENGLISH name. See Talk:Bull of Heaven. — LlywelynII 01:40, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Should it really? There's already a redirect, and that's not even a full translation of the name.--Portrayer Phantasos (talk) 02:32, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

@LlywelynII: and @Portrayer Phantasos: I think that an egregious conflation may have occurred in this article; I am pretty sure that Gugalanna and the Bull of Heaven are actually entirely different, unrelated figures. Black & Green 1992 has two separate entries for them and does not mention anything about a connection between them. Furthermore, they translate Gugalanna's name as "canal inspector of An", which sounds nothing at all like "Bull of Heaven". Finally, it hardly makes sense to associate the two figures, since Gugalanna is definitely a chthonic Underworld deity; he is the husband of Ereshkigal, the queen of the Underworld. The Bull of Heaven, on the other hand, is, obviously, a celestial bull from the Epic of Gilgamesh. I think the conflation between the two may have arisen from the fact that, in Inanna's Descent into the Underworld, she tells the gatekeeper that she is descending because she wants to attend the funeral rites of "Gugalanna, the husband of my elder sister Ereshkigal". Somewhere along the line, some idiot must have interpreted this as referring to Gilgamesh's slaying of the Bull of Heaven, since, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna mourns the Bull of Heaven's death, even though the passage in Descent never makes any reference to the Bull of Heaven. That makes all the rest of this just a mess resulting from everyone else (including myself) uncritically taking that bizarre conflation as factual without consulting any secondary sources. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:33, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

I just rewrote the article using reliable secondary sources. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:48, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Ok. So now I am reading that apparently there is some genuine argument that Gugalanna and the Bull of Heaven are the same figure ([1]). That makes me feel less embarrassed about having thought that for the past three years (or however long I have been reading about ancient Mesopotamia). I am still going to keep the articles separate, however, but I will add note that some consider them to be the same figure, especially since there seems to be a stronger case that Gugalanna is the same figure as Ennugi (as reported by Black & Green) or Ereshkigal's other husband Nergal ([2]) rather than the Bull of Heaven. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:54, 29 March 2018 (UTC)