Religion In Ancient Mesopotamia

Considered by many to be the birthplace of civilization, Mesopotamia was a large society situated in the Fertile Crescent of western Asia and northeast Africa roughly between the years of 5000 BCE and 3000 BCE. Credited with a panoply of influential achievements, chief among them likely being the creation of the first known system of writing (cuneiform), it is truly a monument to early human achievement (Backman 6-7). However, one oft-overlooked aspect of the Sumerian society that would also go on to impact many societies that would rise in its wake is its emphasis on religion, and the ubiquitous and organized nature of theology throughout the empire. Despite being polytheistic – a form of theism that has since largely fallen out of favor

– Mesopotamia’s religion embodied many aspects of theism that still exist today, from its heavy emphasis on divine reward and punishment to its tendency to seek solace and purpose from the divinity.
At its core, Mesopotamian theology, like the theologies of most other major civilizations, sought to explain as many of the mysteries posed by day-to-day life as possible and to find meaning and purpose behind them.

As a result, every facet of life throughout the society had its own patron deity, of sorts; according to Jean Bottelro’s Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, “the ancient Mesopotamians … were inclined to place many figures behind [a variety of earthly things], imaginary figures based on their own models … like an amplified projection of themselves” – figures “thought to be responsible for certain natural phenomena and for certain human concepts to explain the regular functioning and the hazards of this world” (44). This is to say that essentially all things under the sun were represented by some deity; even natural disasters like floods and plagues were explained as some divine punishment from the respective god that oversaw such things – in this example, Iškur was responsible for storms (Black et al. 110) and Nergal for plagues (Black et al.

136).
Ultimately, humans were no more than the gods’ servants.

In Bottelro’s words, “humans have been created precisely to provide indispensable services to the gods” (67). Like servants, mortals were disposable and easily replaced, hence the mercurial nature of the gods’ apparent actions. Seeking some semblance of control over the gods’ whimsical actions, priests would often participate familiar rituals, like animal sacrifice and dream interpretation. Today, these rituals are seen as fairly standard, if old-fashioned and regressive, but at the time these acts were largely revolutionary (Backman 19). Another common rite throughout the empire was “purification.” It was, as its name suggests, a ritual intended to make its participants “pure” and therefore able to participate in other religious activities and use “magic.” Purification usually entailed fairly mundane tasks, some even as mundane as sprinkling water on a shrine (Black et al. 153). The concept of a ritual bringing about spiritual purity is still in existence in many religious contexts today; perhaps the most obvious of these is baptism, which also incorporates water into its rites, albeit in a very different

manner.
The Mesopotamian creation myth was at times ill-defined, as were many of the nuances of the duality between the gods and the objects, places, or ideas they governed, and at other times they were outright contradictory. Per Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia:
The gods were also, in one way or another, all linked to the portion of the physical universe that they were believed to cause to function. The Moon was not the god Sîn, nor was the Sun the god Šamaš, but each of those divinities indeed had to have been in some way in contact with the Moon or the Sun to govern it, since this was his primary raison d’être. It was never, and for a very good reason, specified how these matters were perceived and understood. Nor was the rationale behind the placement of the gods in the universe specified. (Bottelro 68)
Evidently, the exact logistics of Mesopotamian theology were not as important as its actual teachings. However, this much is clear: that the world exists and continues to exist is solely due to the continued benevolence of the gods. The exact cosmogeny of the universe – that is, the universe’s precise origins or purpose – are not clear, and the canon rarely delves into this topic the way subsequent theologies would go on to, but what was clear was that the gods governed all, had always governed all, and collectively would decide whether to govern all in the future, or whether to allow the universe to crumble, and this decision could be changed at a moment’s notice. Little was explained in the canon beyond this, and this explanation was roundly declared sufficient by the Mesopotamian peoples (Bottelro 90-91).