... It appears from a Sumerian Dynastic List that the Sumerians believed Tammuz to have been a man who reigned in Erech for a hundred years.  He seems also to be described as a hunter: "Dumuzi, the hunter (?), whose city was... ruled for a hundred years" (L. W. King, Legends of Babylon and Egypt in relation to Hebrew Tradition, 1918).  This description, as Professor King points out, recalls the death of Adonis in Greek mythology.  Tammuz became a god of vegetation, and reference is made to the annual festival of mourning for the death of the god in Ezekiel viii. 14.  This annual mourning for Tammuz (or Adonis) is "the scenic commemoration of a divine tragedy in which the worshippers take part with appropriate wailing and lamentation" (W. Robertson Smith, R.S.); and it is thought that in point of form it supplies the closest parallel to the fasting and humiliation on the Hebrew Day of Atonement.  The mother of Tammuz was Ishtar, but in course of time she came to be regarded as his wife, just as the Egyptian Isis became the wife of Osiris.  Both the Babylonians and the Hebrews named the fourth month of the year after the god... (An Encyclopedia of Religions, Canney, 1921)