Mesopotamian Religion

"Mesopotamian religion" is a convenience, and it conceals more than most such labels. The region between the Tigris and the Euphrates was not a single polity for most of its history, and the span usually covered runs from the fourth millennium BCE into the first century CE, a longer stretch than separates the present day from the founding of Rome.

The peoples and languages changed. Sumerian was spoken in the south in the third millennium and survived for two thousand years afterwards as a learned and liturgical language, much as Latin later did. Akkadian, a Semitic language, became the vernacular and divided into Babylonian and Assyrian dialects. Amorites, Kassites, Arameans and Chaldeans entered the picture at different points, each bringing gods and absorbing others.

The gods changed with them, mostly by equation rather than replacement. Sumerian Inanna and Akkadian Ishtar were treated as one goddess; Utu and Shamash, Nanna and Sin, Enki and Ea were paired in the same way. Scribes compiled long god-lists precisely to keep these correspondences straight, which is evidence of continuity and of confusion at once.

Rank followed politics. In the older Sumerian arrangement An held nominal seniority while Enlil of Nippur exercised effective authority. Marduk of Babylon, a minor figure in early material, became head of the pantheon as Babylon became the dominant power. Assyria promoted Ashur on the same principle, in at least one case by reworking a Babylonian composition to substitute its own god for Marduk.

The practical consequence is that any single pantheon presented as the Mesopotamian one is a snapshot of a particular city in a particular century. Read backwards over the whole period, it describes a religion that never existed.

A Mesopotamian temple was not primarily a place of congregation. It was the house of a god, run as a great estate, and the god was present in it as a cult statue rather than merely symbolised by one.

The statue was made in a workshop and then, through rituals conventionally rendered as the washing and the opening of the mouth, separated from its manufacture and made able to eat, smell and act. Thereafter it was served: meals set before it and later removed for the king or the staff, clothing changed on a schedule, jewellery inventoried, transport arranged when it travelled to visit another god. Temple archives record the fields, herds, boats, weavers, brewers, bakers and scribes needed to sustain this, which made the major temples among the largest economic institutions in their cities.

The capture of a statue by an enemy was correspondingly serious, described as the god departing or being carried off, and its return was worth commemorating in an inscription. So was rebuilding. A king who restored a temple recorded that he had found the foundations laid by his predecessors and followed them exactly, and buried an inscription for whoever came after him.

Kings were the gods' stewards, chosen and sustained by them, and responsible for temples, canals, justice and defence. A few were treated as divine in their own right, the practice appears with the Akkadian ruler Naram-Sin and again under the Third Dynasty of Ur, but this was exceptional rather than normal, and the standard royal posture in the texts is one of service and of anxiety about whether that service has been accepted.

Public participation came mainly at festivals, above all the New Year rites at Babylon, in which the divine statues processed and the king underwent a ceremony of humiliation and reinstatement before Marduk.

Mesopotamian scholarship treated the world as legible. The gods were held to write their intentions into things, and trained specialists were employed to read them.

Extispicy, the examination of a sheep's liver and entrails, was the high-status method, with clay models and long compendia used in training. Celestial omens were collected in a vast series covering the moon, sun, planets, weather and earthquakes, and the correspondence of Assyrian court scholars in the seventh century BCE shows kings receiving continual reports and advice. The astronomical records kept for this purpose ran for centuries and were precise enough to be of use to later Greek astronomers, which is a by-product of divination rather than its aim. An unfavourable omen was not a fixed sentence: rituals existed to avert it, including the substitute-king rite, in which another man occupied the throne to absorb a predicted danger.

The narrative literature survives mostly on tablets from scribal libraries, above all the Assyrian royal collection at Nineveh. Enuma Elish relates Marduk's defeat of Tiamat, the making of the world from her body, and the creation of humanity to carry the gods' workload. Atrahasis and the flood episode within the Epic of Gilgamesh describe a deluge sent against a noisy and overpopulated humanity, and a survivor instructed to build a boat. The resemblance to the biblical flood narrative was recognised as soon as the tablets were read in the 1870s and has been argued over ever since.

The underworld in these texts is bleak and universal. It is a house of dust from which there is no return, where the dead are said to eat clay, and it is not divided by merit. What made a difference was not virtue but whether the living kept up the offerings, and therefore whether one had descendants to make them. The unburied and the unremembered were worst off, and were thought capable of troubling the living.