Duttur (Sumerian language:𒀭𒁍𒁺, dBE-du) was a Mesopotamian goddess best known as the mother of Dumuzid. She frequently appears in texts mourning his death, either on her own or alongside Geshtinanna and Inanna. It is often assumed that she was associated with sheep. Name The name of Dumuzid's mother was usually written as dBE-du. The cuneiform sign BE has two possible readings, sír and dur7. Duttur is the commonly accepted reading of the name in modern scholarship, though the variant Durtur is also in use. Other attested writings include the Emesal forms Zertu and Zertur and Akkadian Dutturru. A rare spelling only known from the Old Babylonian period is Turtur. However, dTUR.TUR is also attested as a name of an unrelated deity worshiped in the Ur III period, sometimes written with the plural morpheme -ne and as a result interpreted as either "the small gods" (Dingir-TUR.TUR-ne) or "the divine children" (ddumu-dumu-ne). Duttur's name could also be represented logographically by the cuneiform sign U8, "ewe." The same logogram could also be used to represent the name of the unrelated deity Ga'um, the shepherd of Sin, whose gender varies between sources. In at least one case, in an Assyrian god list fragment, U8 is used to write the names of them both without equating them. The etymology of Duttur's name is not known, but it has been pointed out that it might have originally been a name with a reduplicated syllable, similar to various well attested Mesopotamian hypocorisms as well as to the name of another member of Dumuzi's family, his sister Belili. Character Thorkild Jacobsen proposed that Duttur should be understood as a deification of the ewe (adult female sheep). This proposal has been subsequently accepted by other researchers, such as Bendt Alster, but according to Manfred Krebernik the evidence is not clear, as Duttur's name shows no etymological affinity with any attested terms related to sheep. He also notes that Duttur could be associated with Ninsun, who was connected with wild cows instead. On this basis he proposes that while she was definitely a goddess associated with livestock and pastoralism, she was not necessarily exclusively connected with sheep. In Mesopotamian literature, Duttur was usually characterised as a mourning mother. She commonly appears in laments detailing her son Dumuzid's capture by the galla, in which she is one of the three goddesses who can be described as mourning him, the other two