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Ancient Mesopotamian Gods: Mythology, Cult, and Scripture Uri Gabbay

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Mesopotamian Religion: Introduction and Sources

The study of ancient Mesopotamian religion is important first and foremost for its own sake. However, it is also important for comparative studies regarding other ancient Near Eastern religions most notably biblical religions. Since ancient Mesopotamia was the dominant political and cultural power in the ancient world until the rise of the Achaemenid and later the Hellenistic empires, it of course also exerted an influence, whether positive or negative, on other ancient societies. We have a wealth of sources for the study of ancient Mesopotamian religion: thousands of cuneiform tablets written in Sumerian and Akkadian, stemming from about 3000 BCE up to about the first century CE, but also archaeological, nontextual evidence such as temple architecture and iconography on reliefs and cylinder seals. Despite this wealth of sources, we do not have an Akkadian or Sumerian treatise on the religious doctrines of ancient Mesopotamia that might explain their religion to outsiders such as ourselves. Rather, our knowledge of Mesopotamian religion comes from the analysis of texts written for use by the societies of ancient Mesopotamia themselves—usually, but not exclusively for religious use. For instance, Sumerian myths, which we might have expected to discover in a religious environment, such as a temple library, are actually often known to us from tablets that were written for the classroom by students who were training to be scribes; similarly, much of our knowledge about the temple cult comes not from religious texts but from administrative documents written by those who managed the large institution of the temple. Gathering all these materials is a painstaking task, but it gives us a broad view of Mesopotamian religion from multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, we must remember that we are dealing with a dead civilization, and U. Gabbay (*) Department of Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 A. Tsuneki et al. (eds.), Ancient West Asian Civilization, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0554-1_12

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while any treatment of religion, even modern religion, is a difficult task, it is even harder when we are dealing with the defunct religious system of ancient Mesopotamia (Oppenheim 1977: 171–83). One thing we know for certain is that ancient Mesopotamian religion was a polytheistic religion, with thousands of gods in its pantheon.1 Each god could have various aspects: a regional aspect—the god was related to a certain city; a natural aspect—the god was associated with an element of nature or the cosmos, such as water or the sun; and a characteristic aspect—the god was associated with a certain trait, usually of human nature or society, such as wisdom or justice. Thus, for example, the god Utu/Shamash was regionally connected to the city of Sipp