Chapter 3. Mesopotamia: Gods, Temples and Kings

Long before the Indo-Iranian tribes reached the plateau (see ch. 6), the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates had a religion of cities, temples and written theology. Its first evidence comes with writing, around 3500 BC. It ended only with the Christianisation of Mesopotamia in the first centuries AD. The reference shelf calls it “a consistent and coherent tradition” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Later parts of this study return to it often: Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC (ch. 14), Judah’s exiles lived there (ch. 28–29), and Greeks and Romans learned “Chaldean” astrology from it. This chapter reports what the library’s sources say about its gods, temples, myths, divination and sacred kingship.

The pantheon: An, Enlil, Enki, Inanna and Marduk

The reference shelf describes the religion as polytheistic and also henotheistic. Each city exalted its own patron: Enki at Eridu, Enlil at Nippur, Ishtar at Arbela, Ashur at Assur, Marduk at Babylon. K. Tallqvist counted about 2,400 divine names. The gods ate, drank and got drunk, but they were immortal and surrounded by a terrifying radiance (melammu). Jean Bottéro is quoted as holding that they were “high-up masters who had to be obeyed and feared, as opposed to loved and adored” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion].

The sky god An (Anu) and Enlil, “a king of the gods and a controller of the world”, stood at the top [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Paul Collins notes that a ruler proved his hold on the south by dedicating objects in Enlil’s Ekur temple at Nippur. He also notes a myth in which Enlil gives Enki the me, “the fundamental components of life and culture, such as kingship and war”. In Collins’s account Enki, god of sweet water at Eridu “as early as 2500 BC”, came to be seen as “the source of divine knowledge that had, at the very beginning of time, established civilization, which was understood as the rule of kings” [Collins, The Sumerians, #64812]. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green add that Enki “was thought to have occupied the abzu”, the underground fresh water, “since before the creation of mankind” [Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, #70458]. Inanna/Ishtar, goddess of sex and war, was a deity for whom “nothing is prohibited”. Her cult could include frenzied dancing and ritual crossing of gender boundaries [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion].

Sources: Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; Wikipedia: Babylonian astrology; Black and Green, #70458; Constantin Daniel, Gândirea asiro-babiloniană în texte, #25445 (Eanna as “the temple in the city of Uruk of Anu and Ishtar”).

Houses of the gods: temples, priests and economy

According to the reference shelf, the temple was literally the god’s house. The god lived in a cult statue whose mouth was “opened” (pet pî) and “washed” (mes pî) so that it could see and eat. The statue was dressed and given two banquets a day behind a curtain. In theory the king led the cult. Below him served exorcists (āšipu, mašmašu), lamentation priests (kalû), singers and diviners (bārû) [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Walter Krauss describes the same roles. The kalu chanted laments, the baru “interpreted the will of the god”, the shailu (“the one who asks”) had to discover the worshipper’s sin, and the ashipu and mashmashu recited spells against demons [Krauss, Civilizaţia Asiro-Babiloniană, #23933].

How much of the economy the temples controlled is a debated question in its own right. Collins recounts that in the 1920s Anton Deimel studied about 1,700 tablets from the temple of the goddess Baba at Lagash. Deimel “concluded that all of the cultivable land in the state, as well as its workforce, had belonged to the temple.” Collins presents this “temple-state” idea, along with the “hydraulic state”, as one of the influential models of early Sumerian government [Collins, #64812, “Temple-states and hydraulic states”]. The building hymn of Gudea that he quotes states the ideology plainly: the ruler drives the temple’s foundation pegs “so deep they could take counsel with Enki” [Collins, #64812].

Enuma Elish and the rise of Marduk

Enūma Eliš (“When on high”) runs to about a thousand lines on seven tablets. The reference shelf calls it “the only complete surviving account of ancient near eastern cosmology”. At first only Apsu and Tiamat exist, “their waters commingling as a single body”. Ea kills Apsu, and Marduk is born inside him. When Tiamat makes war, the gods accept Marduk as their champion, and the price they pay is supremacy over them all. Marduk shoots Tiamat through the heart and splits her body into sky and earth. He sets the stars and the calendar and orders Babylon and Esagila built. Humanity is made from the blood of the rebel Kingu so that men “would serve the gods” [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš]. Black and Green note the variants. In Atra-hasis clay is mixed with a slain god’s blood, while in the Epic of Creation man is made “apparently… solely from the blood of a slain god, Qingu” [Black and Green, #70458].

The date of the epic matters politically, and it is disputed. Most scholars now place it under the Second Dynasty of Isin, after Nebuchadnezzar I brought Marduk’s statue back from Elam. Stephanie Dalley “still proposes” an Old Babylonian date. Late Assyrian copies replace Marduk with Ashur [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš]. Black and Green add that from about 1300 BC the Assyrians tried to identify Ashur with Enlil, “an effort to cast him as the chief of gods” [Black and Green, #70458, “Assur”]. In both cases the god of the ruling city takes over the cosmogony.

Gilgamesh, the flood and the land of no return

Black and Green summarise how the Epic of Gilgamesh ends. The flood hero Ut-napishti cannot grant immortality, but he “is still able to offer restored youth” through a plant. Gilgamesh loses the plant and goes home to Uruk “despondent”. A twelfth tablet adapts the Sumerian Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Nether World [Black and Green, #70458, “Gilgameš”]. Irving Finkel writes that the flood story “surfaces in three distinct cuneiform incarnations, one in Sumerian, two in Akkadian” [Finkel, The Ark Before Noah, #87636]. Black and Green state that “from Mesopotamia the myth of the universal Flood spread to Ugarit, and to Palestine, where it was incorporated into the Hebrew Book of Genesis,” and possibly into the Greek flood myths [Black and Green, #70458, “Flood”].

The afterlife was bleak. On the reference shelf’s account all the dead went to the underworld (Arallû, Ganzer, Irkallu) “irrespective of social status or the actions performed during their lifetime”. The Descent of Ishtar says of them that “dust is their food and clay their nourishment” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Black and Green add that the ghost (gidim) needed regular funerary offerings. Unfed, it could “become restless and liable to haunt the living”. Those who had died violently might “return and ‘seize’ living persons” [Black and Green, #70458]. These sources describe no judgment of the dead, unlike the Indo-Iranian bridge (ch. 6) and the Egyptian weighing of the heart (ch. 4).

Reading the gods’ will: divination and astrology

The gods were thought to have fixed destinies in advance, and humans could read them. The methods were oil on water, the entrails of sacrificial animals (extispicy), birds, dreams and the sky [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Black and Green illustrate an Old Babylonian clay model of a sheep’s liver inscribed with omens, “probably used as an aid in teaching divination” [Black and Green, #70458]. Markham Geller describes the liver literature as “highly specialized explanatory texts”, built on the omen formula “if you perform an extispicy (liver examination) and…” [Geller, Ancient Babylonian Medicine, #69076].

Astrology used the same logic. The reference shelf dates scholarly celestial divination from about 1800 BC. It cites the series Enūma Anu Enlil, some 7,000 omens on 70 tablets, and says that early astrology was “solely mundane”: its concern was the king and the land. The planets were gods: Jupiter was Marduk, Venus Ishtar, Saturn Ninurta, Mercury Nabu and Mars Nergal. A bad omen could be diverted onto a substitute. One scholar writes to Esarhaddon about an eclipse: “As a substitute for the king, I will cut through a dike… No one will know about it.” Ulla Koch-Westenholz is quoted as arguing that the system “shares some of the defining traits of modern science” [Wikipedia: Babylonian astrology]. Geller shows the court politics of the craft. The scholar Marduk-šāpik-zēri, applying for a royal post, shows off by reinterpreting a bad celestial omen in the king’s favour [Geller, #69076, “The Politics of Medicine”].

Kingship by divine appointment: from the King List to Hammurabi

The Sumerian King List opens with nam-lugal, “kingship”. It runs from antediluvian reigns of thousands of years, through the flood, to kingship passing from city to city. The reference shelf calls it a composition “likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims to power” of rival city-states [Wikipedia: Sumerian King List]. In early Assyria the title “king” belonged to the god Ashur, and the human ruler was “steward of Assur”. In the Neo-Assyrian empire the king was “not a god” but “the chief servant of the chief god” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion].

Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750 BC) put the doctrine on stone. His stele shows him before Shamash, god of justice. In its prologue he says the gods gave him rule “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak”. The same article records that he built his power by “military prowess, diplomacy, and treachery”. The laws apply the lex talionis and grade penalties by class. Assyriologists disagree about what the stele is: legislation, a record of royal verdicts, or, following F. R. Kraus, a scholarly treatise of the “list science” type, like the omen series. Owen Jenkins remarked on “an astonishing absence… of all theological or even ceremonial law” in it [Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi]. The reference shelf is also inconsistent about Marduk’s rank in this period. One article says Hammurabi raised Marduk “to a position of supremacy alongside Anu and Enlil”. Another says that Marduk was then only a mediator between the great gods and the king [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš].

The Babylonian legacy: Judaism and later esotericism

Comparison with the Bible began as soon as George Smith published the Nineveh flood tablets in the 1870s [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš]. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies records that Friedrich Delitzsch “argued that Old Testament religion was heavily dependent on the Babylonian culture”. It also notes that “the first nine chapters of Genesis—from creation to the Flood—have Mesopotamian parallels” [Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, #363277]. Finkel holds that “the story of the Flood in the Bible came into Hebrew from an older story in Babylonian cuneiform”. He sees the infants Moses and Sargon in their coracles as “a similar borrowing”, and he finds Talmudic word-play paralleling devices “long established in the native Babylonian academies” [Finkel, #87636]. Michael Heiser reads the relationship as polemic. In his account the biblical writers “saw Babylonian knowledge as having demonic origins”, tied to the antediluvian sages (apkallu) [Heiser, The Unseen Realm, #61791].

The esoteric line ran through astrology and the sages. Berossus, a priest of Bel in the third century BC, passed the creation myth and the fish-sage Oannes to the Greeks [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš]. Egyptian Hermetic literature “informs the oldest Hellenistic writings on Greco-Babylonian astrology” [Wikipedia: Hermes Trismegistus] (ch. 4, ch. 45). Manichaeism later absorbed “local Mesopotamian religion” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Modern alternative authors in the library read the myths literally. Zecharia Sitchin treats the Anunnaki as a real dynasty in which “Marduk challenged the grant of Sumer and Akkad… to the offspring of Enlil and claimed the right to… Bab-Ili (Babylon)” [Sitchin, When Time Began, #75551]. He also argues that the Babylonians rewrote the Sumerian creation epic, replacing Ninurta’s name with Marduk’s [Sitchin, A douăsprezecea planetă, #25283]. The catalogue summary of Gerald Clark’s book describes it as extending this into a claim that the Anunnaki engineered humans as slave labour [Clark, The Anunnaki of Nibiru, #71252]. None of the Assyriological works cited above takes this view.

Key points

• Mesopotamian religion was urban and henotheistic. An, Enlil and Enki led the early pantheon, and Marduk and Ashur rose with Babylonian and Assyrian power [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; Collins, #64812].
• The temple was the god’s house and the statue its living presence. Exorcists, lamenters and diviners served it [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; Krauss, #23933]. Deimel’s “temple-state” is one influential model of temple economy [Collins, #64812].
• Enūma Eliš makes Marduk king by conquest and makes humanity from a rebel god’s blood to serve the gods. Its date is disputed (Isin II for most scholars, Old Babylonian for Dalley) [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš].
• Black and Green and Finkel trace the flood story from Sumerian and Akkadian versions into Genesis [#70458; #87636].
• All the dead shared one dim underworld, with no judgment described; unfed ghosts could haunt the living [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; #70458].
• Extispicy and celestial omens were state sciences. The planet-gods and substitute rituals passed into later astrology [Wikipedia: Babylonian astrology; Geller, #69076].
• Kings ruled as servants chosen by the gods. Hammurabi’s prologue says so, though his laws themselves contain almost no theology [Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi].
• The legacy runs from Delitzsch’s dependence thesis and Finkel’s borrowing argument to Hermetic astrology and Sitchin’s Anunnaki [#363277; #87636; #75551].