World Civilizations: Mesopotamia, Part 8 - Religion, the World of Gods and Men, and Civilizational Constants

Religion: The World of Gods and Men

First, regarding gods and temples: Mesopotamians believed in a variety of gods. Each god had a Sumerian name and an Akkadian name, and both were considered to be equivalent. The Sumerian and Mesopotamian deities might have been different originally, in pre-civilizational times. But by the time they had interacted and constituted a single civilizational identity, their gods had merged and were considered equivalent. We will see this happening to Rome when it interacts with Greece. People say that ancient pagans were tolerant of “other religions”. But the very words “other” and “religion” would not have made sense to them.

Religion was not a separate category in the life of non-Abrahamic peoples, and they did not have any word for that in their languages: just as there was no distinction between nature and the divine, there was no distinction between the religious and the secular. Also, there were no “other” gods in the ancient worldview. There were simply no false gods. In other words, the existing variety of gods was accepted - whether part of one’s own culture or another.

If the ancients encountered other gods of other cultures, they simply thought that this was either a new god that they had not known about so far; or that it was a god that they already knew of, but with a different name and a different form for a different set of peoples. For example, there is only one sun. So, if a Mesopotamian came to India and found out about sūryaḥ, the Hindu god of the sun, he would simply think that this sūryaḥ is simply his own sun god shamash but with a different form and different attributes for the Indian peoples. The same is reciprocative - you must have already felt that shamash is a form of our sūryaḥ.

Each city also had its own special god who was considered supreme by its city-men, among all the other gods. And when that city became the seat of the Mesopotamian empire, the patron god of that city was elevated as the national god of the empire. This is how Ashur, the patron god of the city of Ashur became the patron deity of the Assyrian Empire and Marduk, the patron god of the city of Babylon became the head of the gods in the Babylonian empire and its mythology. But no god had absolute power and commanded exclusive devotion like the Abrahamic god. And as said, since Mesopotamians were ravaged by unpredictable flash floods and storms, there is generally a mild dose of cultural pessimism in their faith. They view the world as highly unpredictable. This is reflected in their gods too and their gods are lofty, mysterious and as unpredictable as the climate. By the way, get used to gods having two names in a bilingual Mesopotamia - a Sumerian one and an Akkadian one! Some important gods in the Mesopotamian pantheon are:

1. An (Akkadian: Anu) - sky god
2. Enlil (Akkadian: Ellil) - god of earth and storms
3. Enki (Akkadian: Ea) - god of water and wisdom
4. Inana (Akkadian: Ishtar) - mother goddess and goddess of love, fertility, and justice
5. Utu (Akkadian: Shamash) - god of sun, divine judge, god of justice, and patron god of travelers
6. Akkadian cylinder seal (d. 2300 BCE), depicting the deities Inanna, Utu, Enki, & Isimud (4)

Civilizational Constants

Despite the diversity in language, culture and the gods and practices, there were civilizational constants that united all of the Mesopotamian cultures into a single civilization. If this does not remind you of India, I don’t know what else will! This will hold true for almost all civilizations that we will encounter in the future. They are:

• Pantheon: There was a group of larger divinites worshiped across all of Mesopotamia apart from the city-specific and community-specific divinities.
• Sacred epic: There was the Sumerian epic about a historical king of Uruk (who later was deified as god) named Gilgamesh (≈ 2700 BC) which resonated sacredly with all of Mesopotamian people and translated into all the languages of Mesopotamia - first written in Sumerian and then translated into Akkadian and other dialects. Gilgamesh was the counterpart of our Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata in the Mesopotamian world.
• Pilgrimage: Pilgrimage sites had people from all over visit, thus interconnecting the geography and reinforcing the common civilisational thread. The most important among all of them is the city of Nippur, which was the counterpart of our Kāśī in the Mesopotamian world. For any king, having control over Nippur provided divine legitimacy to his rule.
• Script: Cuneiform continued to be the script for all Mesopotamian languages and even many other languages outside the Mesopotamian world adopted this script. We already saw this in the previous article.
• Common sacred language: Sumerian was the sacred language. Even though it died out as a spoken language, it was still considered an important divine language, and Sumerian & Akkadian are considered themselves civilizational twins even though they are linguistically of very diverse origins. We saw this, too, in the previous article.

References

Image 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamash#/media/File:Tabletof_Shamash(2).jpg

Image 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#/media/File:TheSun_by_the_Atmospheric_Imaging_Assembly_of_NASA’s_Solar_Dynamics_Observatory-_20100819.jpg

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mesopotamian-religion/The-Mesopotamian-worldview-as-expressed-in-myth

Image 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listof_Mesopotamian_deities#/media/File:Ea(Babilonian)-_EnKi(Sumerian).jpg

Image 4: https://www.iransafar.co/zagros-mountains/

Image 5: https://www.freepik.com/premium-ai-image/sumerian-temple-complex-with-ziggurat-its-center-illustration_75320557.htm

Example: Ezra 10:1 “Now while Ezra was praying and making confession, weeping and prostrating himself before the house of God, a very large assembly, men, women and children, gathered to him from Israel; for the people wept bitterly.”

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/synagogue?q=synagogue

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/ecclesiastic?q=ecclesiastic

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/masjid

Ian Rutherford “Religious Travel and Pilgrimage in Mesopotamia and Anatolia: Problems of Evidence and Typology”, Proceedings of the 11th Melammu Workshop, Barcelona, 29–31 January 2020

Image 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#/media/File:Ishtar_on_an_Akkadian_seal.jpg

Black, Jeremy; Green, Anthony (1992), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Austin: University of Texas Press, ISBN 0714117056

Authored by Rama Seshan Chandra Sekaran. Published by Brhat