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Mesopotamians

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Mesopotamian names the shared civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys rather than a single people, taking in the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians in turn. What they held in common was a pantheon of city gods housed in temple households, a cosmology of heaven, earth and the underworld, and a scribal culture of cuneiform omens, laws and epics. The individual peoples are catalogued separately, and what is gathered here is what they share.

Facts
Origins
Origin Region
The Tigris and Euphrates valleys, in what is now Iraq and northeastern Syria. 1
Language Family
Sumerian, an isolate, and Akkadian, East Semitic within Afro-Asiatic, written in the same script and used side by side for two thousand years. 2
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
City gods housed in temple households that owned the land around them; a cosmology of heaven, earth and an underworld from which nobody returns; and divination as the chief means of learning what the gods intended. 3
Practice
Practice Status
Discontinued as a state religion 3
Learn More
The City God and the Household of Heaven

Mesopotamian religion begins from the fact that each city belonged to a god. Nippur was Enlil's, Uruk was Inanna's and An's, Eridu was Enki's, Ur was Nanna's, and the temple was the god's house in a literal sense, with a household, a table, an estate and dependants. Nicole Brisch's survey shows the pantheon working as a divine assembly that decides, quarrels and delegates, with a functioning bureaucracy of lesser gods beneath it.

Humanity's place in that arrangement is stated plainly in the creation narratives Stephanie Dalley translates. People were made so that the gods might rest from digging the canals. Service is therefore the point, and the flood story, preserved in the Atrahasis poem and again in Gilgamesh, turns on the gods' irritation at the noise their servants make.

Personal religion sat below the state cult. A person had a personal god who acted as advocate and whose withdrawal left them exposed, and the incantation collections address the illnesses, curses and ghosts that follow from such exposure. Francesca Rochberg's work shows how divination bound the two levels together, since the same reading of a liver, a star or a birth omen served both a king's campaign and a household's decision.

Cuneiform, Sumer and a Literature Recovered

Mesopotamia names a civilization rather than a people, and the peoples running through it, Sumerians, Akkadians, Amorites, Kassites, Assyrians and Babylonians, spoke unrelated languages while sharing one written tradition. Cuneiform, developed at Uruk before 3000 BCE for accounting, was adapted first to Sumerian and then to Akkadian, and Sumerian survived as a learned and liturgical language for two thousand years after it ceased to be spoken, much as Latin later did.

The scribal schools are why so much survives. Copying was how the script was taught, so hymns, laments, proverbs, myths and king lists were reproduced across centuries. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, assembled by Jeremy Black and colleagues at Oxford, makes that body of composition readable in translation, and it is far larger and stranger than the handful of famous epics suggests.

Recovery was a nineteenth century achievement. Excavation at Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon produced tablets faster than they could be read, and the decipherment of cuneiform opened them. The immediate public impact was religious. The identification in 1872 of a flood account older than Genesis, announced by George Smith to a London audience, forced a reconsideration of the sources of the Bible that has not stopped since.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses is a peer-reviewed open academic reference, part of the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus project at the University of Pennsylvania, with entries..."

Source Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and GoddessesNicole Brisch (ed.)

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Robert K. Englund's Archaic Administrative Texts from Uruk is a specialist scholarly edition of some of the earliest known written texts, proto-cuneiform administrative tablets from the Uruk IV..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "W. G. Lambert and A."

Source Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the FloodW. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "W. G. Lambert's Babylonian Creation Myths, published posthumously by Eisenbrauns in 2013, is the standard scholarly critical edition and study of Babylonian creation texts including the Enuma Elish..."

Source Babylonian Creation MythsW. G. Lambert

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The head of the Palmyrene triad, worshipped alongside Yarhibol and Aglibol as the city's presiding god of sky and cosmic order, his name and much of his character carried from the Mesopotamian..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "sprites and ghosts that ancient Mesopotamians believed could affect their lives," including the belief that each person received a protective personal deity at birth, one that could not always be..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "A scholarly essay by Clare Fitzgerald, published by New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, checked directly at its own URL."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "E.C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, surveys how ancient societies across Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Americas, Britain, China and elsewhere read the sky as religiously and politically..."

Eridu, Sources

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Fuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa and Seton Lloyd conducted the excavation reported in this official volume from Iraq's State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage, documenting the ancient..."

Source EriduFuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa and Seton Lloyd

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Markham Geller's Evil Demons, published in the State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts series in 2007, is the standard critical edition of the sixteen-tablet canonical Akkadian Utukku Lemnutu..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary works entry by entry from the excavated iconographic and textual record of Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian religion, giving each deity, demon or symbol..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The Gudsisu Festival was a Sumerian agricultural festival centred on the city of Nippur, marking the beginning of the plowing season and invoking divine sanction for the year's cultivation."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, edited by John Bodel and Saul Olyan, is a scholarly comparative volume examining domestic religious practice, ancestor veneration, household gods and..."

Source Household and Family Religion in AntiquityJohn Bodel and Saul M. Olyan (eds.)

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Iskar Zaqiqu, the Assyrian Dream Book, read here from A."

Source Iskar Zaqiqu (the Assyrian Dream Book)Anonymous (Neo-Assyrian scribal tradition)

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "sprites and ghosts that ancient Mesopotamians believed could affect their daily lives, drawing on the Museum's own collection of cuneiform tablets and incantation texts."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Stephanie Dalley's is the standard scholarly translation of major Mesopotamian myths, including the Epic of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, working directly from the cuneiform textual tradition rather than..."

Nusku, Deities

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "A Sumerian and Akkadian god of fire and light who serves as sukkal, or divine vizier, to Enlil, carrying messages and standing as witness to Enlil's decrees."

Palmyrene, Pantheons

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The pantheon of Palmyra, the caravan city of the Syrian desert, headed by the triad of Bel, the sky and cosmic order god whose temple dominated the city until its 2015 destruction, and his two..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Rulers, emperors and monarchs held political sovereignty, whatever their religious significance beyond it: the Roman emperors under whom Christianity moved from persecuted sect to state church, the..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The glyph of Sagittarius is an arrow rising to the right, crossed near its base by a short bar taken to represent the drawn bow or bowstring."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The eight-pointed star belongs to Inanna in Sumerian and Ishtar in Akkadian, and it is a planetary sign before it is a personal one: the goddess is identified with Venus, the morning and evening star."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Erica Reiner's Surpu, published in the Archiv fur Orientforschung series in Graz in 1958, is the standard critical edition of the Sumerian and Akkadian incantation series used in ancient..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The Mesopotamian temple functioned not merely as a shrine but as the economic and administrative household of its resident god, called simply e in Sumerian, literally house."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The Alphabet of Ben Sira is the primary text itself, an anonymous medieval Hebrew work, likely composed sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries, that survives as the earliest source naming..."

Source The Alphabet of Ben SiraAnonymous

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Andrew George's edition is the standard critical scholarly edition of the Gilgamesh epic, working directly from the cuneiform tablets themselves to set out the documented relationship between the..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The Epic of Gilgamesh is an oratorio for soprano, tenor, baritone and bass soloists, mixed choir and orchestra by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, composed near Nice, France, at the turn of..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Francesca Rochberg's study traces the documented history of Mesopotamian celestial divination directly from the cuneiform astronomical record, and its specific, checkable contribution is..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Tzvi Abusch is an Assyriologist specializing in Mesopotamian magic and religion, and this Brill critical edition is his modern scholarly edition of Maqlu, the ancient Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft..."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The Seven Tablets of Creation is Leonard William King's early twentieth century translation and study of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, originally published by Luzac and cited here..."

Source The Seven Tablets of CreationLeonard William King

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The Sumerian King List is an ancient Mesopotamian text, composed in its surviving early second millennium BCE form, that names Gilgamesh among the rulers of the first dynasty of Uruk."

Source The Sumerian King ListAnonymous

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Ugaritic is a cuneiform alphabet of thirty signs, pressed into clay with a wedge-tipped stylus in the same physical technique as Mesopotamian cuneiform but sharing none of its sign shapes and none..."

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "The glyph of Virgo is an M-like figure whose final stroke turns back on itself in a closed loop."

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "A community-maintained tertiary reference on Mesopotamian prayer, directly examined."

Source Wikipedia, "Mesopotamian Prayer"Wikipedia contributors

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "A 2007 documentary by Peter Joseph, released for free online distribution."

Source Zeitgeist: The Movie (Peter Joseph, 2007)Peter Joseph (director)

Originated In

Iraq, Countries
Mesopotamia, Regions

Related To

Sumerians, Cultures
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
David M. Eberhard, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.), SIL International, 2024View the Source
3. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary
Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British Museum Press, 1992
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
Stephanie Dalley, Oxford University Press, 2000View the Source
Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses
Nicole Brisch (ed.), Oracc / Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, University of Pennsylvania, 2011View the Source
The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture
Francesca Rochberg, Cambridge University Press, 2004View the Source
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gabor Zolyomi and others, University of Oxford, 2006View the Source
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