Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld and the Dumuzi corpus
The Sumerian composition in which Inanna descends to the netherworld, dies, is revived, and must provide a substitute: her consort Dumuzi, the shepherd-king, is seized by the galla demons and dragged below. The text ends with the famous arrangement: Dumuzi spends half the year in the netherworld and his sister Geštinanna the other half. Together with the Dumuzi laments and the later Akkadian Descent of Ishtar, it is the core dossier for the Mesopotamian "dying god," and — via the Tammuz wailing attested in Ezekiel — for the westward spread of his cult.
The "rising" half of Dumuzi's pattern rests on the closing lines assigning the half-year alternation ("you, half the year; your sister, half the year") — known from the ends of the Descent tradition and the related text "Dumuzi and Geštinanna"; before Sladek's era of editions, scholars (following Frazer) assumed a return that the then-known texts did not show (Sladek 1974; ETCSL c.1.4.1).
Dumuzi dies as a substitute for Inanna — not in a vegetation cycle per se; the agricultural overlay (laments for the god as dying vegetation/flocks) lives in the separate lament literature.
Ezekiel 8:14 (early 6th c. BCE): women at the Jerusalem temple "weeping for Tammuz" — class-2 dated evidence that the Mesopotamian god's mourning rites had traveled west and were practiced in Judah.
The half-year-return ending was recovered piecemeal (the key fragment published only in the 1960s); older comparative literature (Frazer-era) on "Tammuz the risen god" is unreliable. Composition vs. attestation separated per rule: OB copies are the attestation; Ur III composition is inference. Whether the alternation counts as "rising" in any sense comparable to later resurrection language is precisely what the J. Z. Smith–Mettinger debate contests.
dying-rising-god