Dumuzi vs Telipinu

Shepherd god and consort of Inanna, taken to the underworld in her place after her return from the land of the dead. Dumuzi's death and the yearly mourning for him, later widely known as Tammuz, became one of the most enduring cult patterns of the ancient Near East.

Dumuzi was a shepherd chosen as consort by the goddess Inanna. When Inanna returned from the underworld and found Dumuzi failing to mourn her absence, she had him seized and dragged down to the underworld in her place, and his sister Geshtinanna later arranged to share his fate, each spending half the year below.

Dumuzi was a shepherd god chosen by Inanna as her husband in the sacred marriage celebrated in Sumerian courtship poetry, a union understood to secure the fertility of flocks and fields. Sumerian literature preserves an extended cycle of courtship poems describing Inanna's choice of Dumuzi over a rival farmer, and their union was ritually reenacted in the sacred marriage rite associated with Mesopotamian kingship.

A Hattian god of farming and growth, son of the Storm-god, whose angry departure makes the whole land barren until a bee finds him asleep and a ritual soothes his rage.

Telipinu is a Hattian deity of agriculture and growth, called in the myth the son of the Storm-god. He is best known from the Disappearance of Telipinu (CTH 324), one of several Hittite "vanishing god" texts in which a deity leaves in anger and the world begins to die. The same pattern is told of the Storm-god, the Sun-god, the mother goddess Hannahanna, and others; Telipinu's version is simply the best preserved.