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Ninirigal or Ninirigala was a Mesopotamian goddess associated with Kullaba, a district belonging to the city of Uruk. Her character is poorly known beyond her role as a tutelary goddess of this area. Her husband was a god known under the name Nunbaranna, most likely an epithet of the fire god Gibil.
A goddess named Nin-UNUG who appears in the Early Dynastic Zame Hymns, which describe her as the tutelary deity of Kullaba (also spelled Kullab), a district of Uruk, is sometimes assumed to be Ninirigal, though this remains uncertain and the reading Ninunug is also considered a possibility. If not prefaced by the dingir sign, which functioned as determinative designating names of deities, nin-unug, in this case agreed to mean "the lady of Uruk", was instead an epithet of the incantation goddess Ningirima, as indicated by inscriptions of Lugal-zage-si, or Inanna, as attested in a single inscription of Utu-hengal.
Ninirigal received offerings in Nippur in the Ur III period, but she is overall sparsely attested after the Early Dynastic period.
According to Julia Krul, it is possible that in the Seleucid Empire period, Ninirigal was "reinvented as protectress of the Irigal". In this context this ceremonial name designated an entirely new temple of Ishtar and Nanaya. It is disputed if the name of the temple should be read as Irigal or Ešgal, though Krul argues the former is more likely Ninirigal is absent from and legal texts from Seleucid Uruk, and there is no indication that she was worshiped in this city in the Neo-Babylonian period. Her reintroduction to the pantheon of the city was most likely related to the antiquity and local character of her cult, similar as in the case of Pisangunug.
Since Ninirigal appears in some of the copies of the myth Nanna-Suen's Journey to Nippur, even though in the standard version Sud is instead present in the same passage, according to Manfred Krebernik it is possible in certain contexts these two deities were conflated. However, he also notes it is not impossible that the inclusion of Ninirigal is only a scribal error.
While it has been argued in early scholarship that Ninirigal was related to or identical with Inanna, no evidence in favor of this theory is available, even though she was also worshiped chiefly in the territory of Uruk. In one ritual text from the same city she appears alongside the medicine goddesses Bau and Gula/Meme.
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