Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, home to Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria, gave us the oldest religious literature that survives in the words of its own believers, because it was here that writing itself was invented. On clay tablets in cuneiform we can read, from the third and second millennia BCE, the myths, hymns, prayers, omens, and rituals of a civilization directly, the creation epic Enuma Elish, in which Marduk slays the chaos-mother Tiamat and builds the world from her body; the Epic of Gilgamesh, with its flood story and its meditation on mortality; the descent of Inanna/Ishtar into the underworld.

The Mesopotamian gods, Anu the sky, Enlil the storm, Ea/Enki the god of wisdom and the sweet waters, Inanna/Ishtar of love and war, were tied to particular cities and housed in temples atop great stepped ziggurats, and their cult centred on feeding and serving the gods so that they would maintain the order of the world. Mesopotamian religion also developed an elaborate science of divination, reading the future in the livers of sacrificed animals, in the movements of the planets (the origin of astrology and astronomy alike), and in dreams and omens. Its influence radiated outward: its flood story, its astral religion, and its underworld imagery all left deep marks on the Bible and on later Western thought. The region also remains the homeland of two living ancient faiths, Mandaeism and Yazidism.

Mesopotamian religion is the oldest that can be read in its own words, and the reason is an accident of materials. Cuneiform was impressed into clay, and clay that has been through a fire becomes ceramic and survives indefinitely. Libraries burned, and burning is what preserved them.

The single richest recovery is the collection assembled at Nineveh under Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BC, excavated in the mid nineteenth century and now largely in the British Museum. It supplied the flood narrative that reached the public in 1872 and immediately changed the terms of European discussion about Genesis. Temple archives, omen compendia, hymns, incantations and the astronomical diaries fill out the picture from many other sites.

The bias in the record is scribal and institutional. These are the documents of temple and palace bureaucracies, produced by a small trained class, so ritual procedure and state theology are well represented and private devotion much less so. Letters and personal names are among the few windows onto what an ordinary person thought the gods were for.

Two practical constraints remain. Excavation has recovered far more tablets than have been published, so a substantial part of the corpus has never been read by anyone. And decipherment was itself contested in the nineteenth century and settled only by controlled tests, which is why the earliest translations should be used with care.