In Sumerian mythology, Kur was primarily a mountain or mountains, and usually referred to the Zagros mountains to the east of Sumer. It is possible that this name for the area coincides with the still present modern day Kurds who inhabit much of the Zagros mountains. The cuneiform for "kur" was written ideographically with the cuneiform sign 饞喅, a pictograph of a mountain.[1] It can also mean "foreign land". Although the word for earth was Ki, Kur came to also mean land, and Sumer itself, was called "Kur-gal" or "Great Land". "Kur-gal" also means "Great Mountain" and is a metonym for both Nippur and Enlil who rules from that city.[2] Ekur, "mountain house" was the temple of Enlil at Nippur. A second, popular meaning of Kur was "underworld", or the world under the earth.[3]
Kur was sometimes the home of the dead,[4] it is possible that the flames on escaping gas plumes in parts of the Zagros mountains would have given those mountains a meaning not entirely consistent with the primary meaning of mountains and an abode of a god. The eastern mountains as an abode of the god is popular in Ancient Near Eastern mythology.
The underworld Kur is the void space between the primeval sea (Abzu) and the earth (Ma).
Kur is almost identical with "Ki-gal", "Great Land" which is the Underworld (thus the ruler of the Underworld is Ereshkigal "Goddess of The Great Land". In later Babylonian myth Kur is possibly an Anunnaki, brother of Ereshkigal, Enki, and Enlil. In the Enuma Elish in Akkadian tablets from the first millennium BC, Kur is part of the retinue of Tiamat, and seems to be a snakelike dragon. In one story the slaying of the great serpent Kur results in the flooding of the earth.[5] A first millennium BC cylinder seal shows a fire-spitting winged dragon鈥攁 nude woman between its wings鈥攑ulling the chariot of the god who subdued it, another depicts a god riding a dragon, a third a goddess.[6]
KUR, as a word, can also refer to a variety of other things. Cuneiform KUR 饞喅 historically means "mountain" but came to refer to "land" in general and as a determiner is placed before the name of a state or kingdom (see also URU). The Assyrian pronunciation is m芒t.