Belili was a Mesopotamian goddess. This name refers both to a sister of Dumuzi known from some of the texts pertaining to his death, and to a primordial deity paired with Alala and listed in enumerations of ancestors of Anu. There is no consensus among researchers if they should be considered one and the same. Name Belili's name has no plausible etymology in Sumerian or any Semitic language, and based on its structure it has been compared to other divine names whose origin also remains a mystery, such as Alala, Aruru, Bunene and Zababa. Belili is also attested as an ordinary given name, one of the so-called banana names known from both Mesopotamia and Elam. Names with this structure are particularly common in the earliest Akkadian documents from Gasur (later known as Nuzi). It has been proposed that such names, both divine and ordinary, originate in a substrate language (so-called "proto-Euphratic"), but this conclusion is not universally accepted, and Gonzalo Rubio points out that they might simply represent a naming pattern among speakers of Akkadian. Manfred Krebernik suggests that they were a type of hypocorism (pet name). The proposal that the theonym Belili was a contracted or corrupted form of the epithet Belet-ili is regarded as baseless today. Character Belili appears in two distinct roles in Mesopotamian texts, as a sister of Dumuzi and as a primordial deity counted among the ancestors of Anu. Andrew R. George and Wilfred G. Lambert consider the sister of Dumuzi and the ancestor of Anu to be the same goddess. However, according to Manfred Krebernik, it is uncertain if Belili the sister of Dumuzi and Belili the primordial deity were related in any way. Sister of Dumuzi An explicit reference to the Belili as Dumuzi's sister is only present in the myth Ishtar's Descent, though they appear together in other texts as well. Other deities considered to be Dumuzi's relatives were Geshtinanna, well attested as his sister, and their mother Duttur. Belili is described as a mourner in the incantation series Šurpu, which might be a reference to her relation to Dumuzi. It has been argued that similar to Belet-Seri, Belili was understood as the Akkadian counterpart of Geshtinanna. However, Manfred Krebernik considers Belili and Gesthinanna to be two independent goddesses each of whom could be described as Dumuzi's sister. Furthermore, both of them appear in separate roles in the myth Dumuzi's Dream. Primordial