Did this Sumerian Goddess give the Hindu gods their ＂arms＂

Something really cool clicked with me when I was making the last video, mostly focused on the idea that where we see civilizations emerge, with domesticated animals and crops, goddesses of fertility also become connected to war, with the many aspects of the Eye of Ra, but most intimately with Hathor and Sekhmet, Tuanana or Ishtar and Sumer, and Durga and Kali in the Vedic cultures of Northern India. They also all have this lion power, but when looking at these images of Ishtar and Durga, it just hit me that the whole idea of the Hindu gods having multiple arms is conveying the same idea of Inanna with all this weaponry behind her, all these tools which are the Mi. It's spelled M-E, we chose to spell it that way in English, it's a huge pet peeve of mine. I have heard real scholars, not just YouTube guys, saying everything from Mi to Me or May, however you want to pronounce it. I'm going to say May just so we don't get confused with the English word Mi, like myself. But the point is that these depictions are trying to solve the same visual problem. The gods are thought to control many different powers at once, but how do you express that they're the ones that have those powers? So in Sumeria, it's more crowding these symbols onto the character, almost like a video game character with too many weapons, they're overburdened, or like how you can just pull all these different weapons out of your back. In ancient Mesopotamia, divine power wasn't treated as some vague spiritual essence, it existed in this concept of the May. These are numerable, specific powers that structure reality itself. Super side tangent, go read Snow Crash. It'll seem really weird and goofy at first, but I promise it gets very profound. It's in the cyberpunk style, and it is considered one of the greatest science fiction novels. Written in 1992, when the whole idea of computer coding and the internet was becoming more popular, the author is weaving in Sumerian concepts of coding reality, and you get a pretty fair understanding of this ancient mindset. What we call the laws of physics, the rules of this universe were controlled by gods, and everything from kingship, the concept of truth, the biological act of fertility, the physical act of warfare, arts like music, and even the abilities to ascend into different heavens or descend into the underworld, these were all done through these technologies, these kind of devices, this very hard for us modern to grasp idea of it being kind of like a mix of a spell and a device. In the Sumerian myth, Inanna and Enki, the text is very explicit about this. Enki does not simply bless Inanna, he hands her power, piece by piece. Quote, he gave her the May, the May of lordship, the May of godship, the May of the throne, the May of kingship, the May of truth, the May of descent into the netherworld, the May of ascent from the netherworld. But he is physically handing her these things slash abstract concepts. That same text later goes on to say, quote Inanna took the May, she loaded the May on the boat of heaven, she joyfully set off from Iridu toward Uruk. So, like I said, it might sound silly, but it really is like a video game character being able to pull out all kinds of different machine guns or swords and bows and bombs. You have them in some abstract sense and then iterate them in some physical sense when you use them in the world. And that's exactly what we see in depictions of Inanna and her later Akkadian form Ishtar, where they are bristling with these May, these devices clustered around her or radiating from her back, while also being called weapons. In Akkadian hymns, she's described as, quote, girded with weapons, battle and combat are her garment. While in Vedic and later Hindu traditions, this same idea is showing up, but the visual solution changes. Instead of surrounding their deities with just these symbols of power, the deity's body itself expands. Gods like Durga, Kali and Vishnu, and a ton of others, they're shown with multiple arms, each holding a specific weapon or symbol. And the texts help us explain their meaning. In the Devi Mahatmaya, Durga is created when the gods pool their powers and each god gives her a weapon. Quote, from Shiva, she received a trident, from Vishnu, a discus, from Varuna, a conch, from Agni, a spear, from Vayu, a bow, from Indra, a thunderbolt. And so how are you supposed to show all these different things she has? They just give the goddess many arms so that she can hold all the at once when you're visually representing her in some painting or a carving. The text even says, quote, with many arms, bearing many weapons, shining with the brilliance of a thousand suns, she filled the three worlds with her splendor. And this same logic is explicit in descriptions of Vishnu. In the Vishnu Purana, Vishnu's four arms are tied directly to his cosmic functions. Quote, in his four hands, he bears the conch, the discus, the mace and the lotus, by which he preserves, governs and dissolves the universe. Each object corresponds to a role and you want to visually show off each of those roles at once. Instead of just having them on her back or floating around her with anana, the Vedic way of showing this is to have Vishnu or Durga clearly holding on, being the bearer of these powers. That power is literally in their hand. But it's kind of funny, that seems to come from a very simple idea and I think if you had to pick, the Sumerian likely influenced the Vedic because it's also true that this is not a universal all over the world. It's not like every god across Europe or Asia or in Egypt, they don't all have their powers floating around them or in their hand. The fact that these two are so similar and literally neighbors with the earliest Vedic settlements being right there along the Persian Gulf, the broad Indus Valley civilization, we know for sure that early on they had a ton of trade going back and forth. And since the general consensus is that the Sumerian was first and we see more Sumerian influence in Indus seals and motifs. And if you watched my video on the Basal Eurasian connection to the Sumerian origins, that the Persian Gulf was a rich marsh not too long ago. Both groups, what we later call Sumerian and Vedic, were likely influenced by a civilization that was flourishing in what is now under the Persian Gulf. And that's why these two cultures are so rich so early right along what is now the coast of that region. But I hope you like this, there are a ton of cool little points like this that make for much shorter videos. Please hit that like button, it really is the best way to help me out on YouTube. I've started the membership so you have early access to videos, maybe other perks in the future one day, we'll see. But yeah, like and subscribe and all that good stuff and I'll see you in the next one.