widely accepted as the hero's father in Mesopotamian tradition, and references are known from other texts, for example the Poem of the Mattock. As there is no indication that Ninsun was ever envisioned as a mortal woman, rather than a goddess, references to deceased mother of Gilgamesh present in the text Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld most likely refer to an unrelated tradition regarding the hero's origin. The god list An = Anum enumerates ten deities regarded as children of Ninsun and Lugalbanda alongside them. The first among them, a goddess named Šilamkurra, was worshiped in Uruk in the Seleucid period, where she appears in a ritual text alongside Uṣur-amāssu, Ninimma and otherwise unknown Ninurbu. In An = Anum, Gilgamesh occurs separately from Ninsun and her other family members on a different tablet, possibly in the company of Enkidu though the restoration of the latter's name is uncertain. A sukkal (attendant deity) of Ninsun appears in the same list after Lugalbanda's sukkal Lugalhegal, but the full name cannot be fully restored due to the state of preservation of the tablet. According to Richard L. Litke, the name starts with lugal and ends with an-na, but one more sign present between these two elements is not preserved. There is evidence that as early as in the Old Babylonian period, Ninsun could be equated with Gula in theological texts, for example in two column versions of the Weidner god list. An association between these two goddesses is also present in the Hymn to Gula composed by Bulluṭsa-rabi, which identifies the eponymous goddess with a large number of other female deities, among them Nintinugga, Ninkarrak, Nanshe and Ninigizibara. Joan Goodnick Westenholz notes that while syncretism between different medicine goddesses is not unusual, the presence of Ninsun in this text is, especially since it preserves information about her usual character instead of reinterpreting her as another similar deity. A similar equation between Ninsun's and Gula's respective husbands, Lugalbanda and Ninurta, is also attested, though it was likely secondary and there is no evidence Ninurta was ever referred to as Gilgamesh's father. Ninsun could also be identified with the mother of Dumuzid, Duttur, which according to Manfred Krebernik indicates that the latter was likely viewed as a goddess associated with livestock in general rather than specifically with sheep, as originally proposed by Thorkild Jacobsen. It is also possible that this equation was the result of