You never really know a god or goddess in the Sumerian pantheon unless you understand their names and where they come from. Each god has a name that tells not only what they were called, but also who they were. Their names were descriptive and told something about them.
The Akkadians adopted the Sumerian religion and the Sumerian gods, but called them by different names. These different names weren't different gods, but rather different ways to understand the same gods. The Akkadian language was vastly different from the language of the Sumerians meaning that the symbols and words that could be used to describe the gods would be different, but the gods were still the same.
The Sumerian language is interesting in that every word could be used to mean about a half dozen things, and some words could be given many more definitions than that. This pun filled language is useful in understanding their culture in that each word association told a little more. It can be confusing in that the same word could be used to mean something vastly different in two differing contexts.
Though it is perfectly valid to use the Akkadian language to talk about the gods, we will be using the Sumerian names to differentiate between Sumerian and later Babylonian beliefs. The Babylonians used the Akkadian language, but over time they changed some of the core Sumerian beliefs.
The Gods in Brief
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