Mesopotamian Religion

Mesopotamian religion grew up with the world’s first cities. In the fourth millennium BCE, the people of southern Iraq built towns around temples on the floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates, and at Uruk, around 3200 BCE, they began to write. The earliest tablets are temple accounts, a reminder that religion and economy were bound together from the start. Over the next three thousand years the region saw Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians rise and fall, but they shared a single religious world that each generation inherited and adapted.

In that world every city belonged to a god. Enlil owned Nippur, Enki Eridu, Nanna Ur, Inanna and An Uruk, and later Marduk Babylon and Ashur the city that bore his name. The god’s house, the temple, stood at the city’s centre, and the king ruled as the god’s servant and steward. When one city conquered others, its god rose in rank, and this is why the pantheon changed over time. Marduk, a minor deity in the third millennium, became king of the gods as Babylon became the dominant power.

The Sumerian language, already dead as a spoken tongue by the early second millennium, survived in temples as a sacred language, much as Latin did in medieval Europe. Scribes copied Sumerian hymns with Akkadian translations for well over a thousand years more. The oldest author known by name, Enheduanna, a daughter of Sargon of Akkad who served as high priestess at Ur around 2300 BCE, is credited by tradition with hymns to Inanna.

Mesopotamian myths imagine the universe as a state governed by an assembly of gods. The great gods, often called the Anunnaki, decided destinies, and lesser deities, demons and spirits filled the world below them. In the Atrahasis story, humans were created from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slain god so that they could take over the toil of the gods, digging canals and producing food. Human life therefore had a clear purpose: to serve the gods, above all by keeping their temples supplied.

The gods were powerful but not always kind. In the flood story, Enlil, disturbed by the noise of mankind, decides to destroy humanity, and only the cunning of Enki saves one man and his family. Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation poem, tells how the young god Marduk defeated Tiamat, the primeval salt sea, split her body to make heaven and earth, and received kingship from the other gods. Recited at the New Year festival, the poem explained why Babylon and its god stood at the centre of the world.

The most famous Mesopotamian work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, asks what humans can hope for. Gilgamesh, a king of Uruk, loses his friend Enkidu and seeks immortality, only to learn from the flood survivor Utnapishtim that it belongs to the gods alone. Mesopotamians generally pictured the afterlife as a dim underworld where the dead ate dust, and their hope lay in a good life, a good name and descendants who would make offerings.

Worship centred on the statue of the god in the temple’s inner shrine. After a ritual of washing and opening of the mouth, the statue was believed to be the god’s living presence. Priests woke, washed, clothed and fed it with lavish meals twice a day, while musicians played and lament singers soothed its moods. Ordinary people rarely entered the inner rooms, but they joined festivals when statues were carried through the streets, and they prayed to personal gods who were thought to speak for them in the divine assembly.

Temples were also great households. They owned fields, orchards, flocks and workshops, employed farmers, weavers and brewers, and stored grain against famine. Above them rose the ziggurat, a stepped tower of mud brick. Its precise use is uncertain, but it lifted the god’s house towards heaven, and the great ziggurat of Babylon, Etemenanki, is widely thought to lie behind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Mesopotamians believed the gods wrote their intentions into the world, and specialists learned to read them. Diviners examined the livers of sacrificed sheep, astrologers watched the moon and planets, and scholars compiled huge omen collections. To track the heavens accurately, Babylonian astronomers kept diaries of observations for centuries and developed mathematical methods that later shaped Greek astronomy. Exorcists, meanwhile, fought demons of disease with incantations and amulets.

Mesopotamian religion did not end with a single conquest. When Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE he presented himself as Marduk’s chosen ruler, and the temples carried on under Persian, then Macedonian and Seleucid kings. In the Hellenistic period priests at Uruk still rebuilt the temple of Anu, and the priest Berossus explained Babylonian traditions to a Greek audience. But temple wealth and royal support declined, Greek and Aramaic replaced Akkadian, and fewer scribes learned cuneiform. The last securely dated tablet, an astronomical almanac from Uruk, was written for the year 79/80 CE.

Some threads ran on. The moon god Sin was worshipped at Harran into the Islamic era, where the community known to Arabic writers as the Sabians of Harran survived until about the eleventh century. Traces of Mesopotamia live on in other ways too: the month of Tammuz, named after the shepherd god Dumuzi, in the Jewish calendar and in Levantine Arabic; the sixty-minute hour and 360-degree circle, inherited from Babylonian counting; and the signs of the zodiac, which took shape in Babylonian astronomy. Small modern pagan groups have also sought to revive the worship of the Mesopotamian gods.

Mesopotamian religion was never a single fixed system. Local gods could merge with greater ones, so that the Sumerian Inanna and the Semitic Ishtar became one goddess, and the Sumerian Enki was identified with the Akkadian Ea. Scholars compiled long god-lists to bring order to this crowd of divine names, and some late theological texts even describe the other gods as aspects of Marduk or of Ninurta. Historians debate how far such texts reflect a move towards a single supreme god; most see them as learned speculation within a still polytheistic religion. What is clear is that the tradition was learned, self-aware and constantly reinterpreted by its own priests and scholars.

For almost two thousand years the religion was known mainly through the Bible and Greek writers. Then nineteenth-century excavations at Nineveh and other sites brought back the tablets themselves, and when George Smith read a flood story on one of them in 1872, the ancient gods of Mesopotamia re-entered the modern imagination.