World Civilizations - Mesopotamia, Part 2

This series of articles studies other ancient civilizations: their history, their achievements, their intellectual thought, their religions and their eventual takeover by either Christianity or Islam.

Last time we started our exploration of the Mesopotamian civilization by looking at their civilizational geography, political history and how bilinguality shaped their lexicographic bases for tradition and its consequences in their intellectual thinking and their worldview. This time we will explore the religious life of ancient Mesopotamia. Read the first installment, World Civilizations - Mesopotamia, Part 1 here.

Myths and Gods: What Do They “Really” Mean?

We need to get a few things very clear in our mind before we talk about gods and myths in general, especially when we study the ancient world. It is difficult to empathize with the ancients if we judge them by our current English-educated mindframes. Any attempt to fit ancient cogitations into the Western Weltanschauung (that word means an apprehension of the world from a specific standpoint - and yes, I love using fancy vocabulary now and then!) of the 20th century will lead to a disaster in comprehension and appreciation. In modern western influenced rational culture, we tend to make a clear distinction between exclusive binaries like:

• fact vs fiction
• history vs story
• real vs imaginary
• literal vs metaphorical

These binaries are useful to us now in our day-to-day life; especially in our modern scientifically exploitative lifestyle that we follow, wherein a clear cut distinction among these binaries enables us to predict and exploit nature, thereby furthering our material progress. We have glorified the clear cut distinction between these binaries as “rationalism”. The very first thing we tend to ask whenever we hear any story these days is “Is this true? Or is this fiction?”.

But this was not so in the ancient world. The ancient world was a place where traditional tales were the only available forms and means of explanation, analysis, and thinking about reality - or atleast, traditional tales were the predominant forms and means, if not the only ones. When storytelling is the integral part of defining the identity of all of the ancient peoples, and also served as a major tool in transmitting knowledge across generations, the ancients could not simply afford to question their truth values. This is because forsaking their traditional myths would mean loss and collapse of their entire identity and knowledge systems. Hence, these binaries can’t afford to be so clear cut in the ancient mind. The question as to “Is this myth actually true?” becomes epistemologically too costly to doubt.

Let me give a simple example to convey this fuzzification of such binaries listed above. Soon, we will start talking about the gods of Mesopotamia. We will encounter a Mesopotamian “entity” (for the lack of a better word) named Shamash. On the one hand, Shamash is a god. He is a male - he has volition, he gets angry, he speaks, he has desires, he has consorts, he mates, he produces children, and so on - he is an anthropomorphized, human-like figure. And yet shamash is also a word in the Akkadian language that simply means “sun”. Shamash is the sun - if you go outside and you feel hot, it is because of shamash. Many of my self proclaimed rationalist friends ask me, whenever they see me obsessed with myth studies - “Well which one is shamash? Is shamash, the god of the sun with arms, legs, mind and emotions etc… or is shamash, the sun itself - that hot ball of gas floating in outer space?” The answer fulminates them sometimes when I reply- yes, shamash is both the sun and the god behind it. The word agni in Sanskrit both means the fire and the god of the fire to the ancient Indian mind. Agni is both the fire that burns you and the devatā that accepts your sacrifices.

The difference that we make between the godly realm and their equivalent material realm is a difference that we assume to be true and that we take for granted in the modern Western-dominated culture.

Western-dominated culture has also made us believe that making these distinctions is a superior, evolved form of thinking: The material meaning is the actual scientific true reality, and the deific meaning is false and superstitious. Why so? Simply because the deific aspect is not useful to us for our scientific view of the world, which enables prediction and exploitation of nature. This is the essence of the so-called rationalists: Discard something, or a viewpoint, if it is not useful. But this was simply not at all the case in the ancient world in any civilization except the Abrahamic Hebrews.

The fact that the word shamash means both the sun and its god is reflected in the Bible - Genesis Chapter 1! The Jewish Hebrew civilization was the first to eventually strip its God completely away from the natural world and fully transcendentalize and situate him fully outside nature. A gentle reminder from the previous installment: Akkadian is a language in the Semitic family which also contains Hebrew- so Hebrew and Akkadian are related languages. The Hebrew word for the sun is shemesh - very close to its Akkadian equivalent. The broader Canaanite culture, among whom the Hebrew culture arose, was polytheistic with shemesh as the sun god but also a word that means sun. Shemesh was a very important god in the polytheistic Canaanite pantheon too. Quoting from the Bible, where the God of the Bible creates the sun and the moon:

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights— the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.

Genesis 1:14-16

Then, the text proceeds to describe creation of other entities. Notice for a moment how the sun and the moon are described in the underlined parts above. Now, a natural question would arise for any sane person. It is obvious from the description that the “greater light” is the sun and the “lesser light” is the moon. Why would the biblical author of this part use such convoluted phrases to describe the sun and the moon instead of using the direct words for them in Hebrew - shemesh and yeraḥ? And if you read further, for the stars, the direct word is used! Why is the Bible shy to refer to shemesh (sun) and yeraḥ (moon) by their actual names? It is conveying its theological point - in the wider Canaanite culture from which the Hebrews arose, shemesh and yeraḥ not only mere words for the sun and the moon, but also the words for the gods of the sun and the moon! The Bible wants its reader to understand very clearly that the sun and the moon it is referring to - are just the material sun and the moon, and not the gods! So, it goes by referring to them by indirect convolutions - “the greater light” and “the lesser light”! It wants you to know that the sun and the moon are just pure materials in the sky and are not divine gods. There is only one God but He is outside the world; He creates everything in this purely material world, including the sun and the moon. There were no gods for stars in the Canaanite culture and hence for stars, the Bible uses the direct name.

This reason is indeed commonly accepted among Jewish and Christian theologians.

It is true in Sanskrit also - the words sūryaḥ and candraḥ are grammatically masculine in Sanskrit and stand for the sun and the moon but they also stand for the male devatās representing the sun and the moon. Nakṣatram on the other hand just means star - it is both grammatically and theologically neuter in Sanskrit, and we are not reminded of any particular Hindu god of the stars in general.

The same held for the Canaanite culture as well, and the Bible is extremely careful in not using the direct words for the sun and the moon which have a deific association; but this is not so for the word for star, which did not have a god associated directly with that word.

So, even if you find it difficult to digest that the gods of the ancients can’t be separated from the things in nature that they embody- the Bible clearly understands it! The stripping away of the divine from the material is distinctively Biblical and Abrahamic - no other civilization did that. So, it is not the Mesopotamians or the Hindus who have to answer to the Abrahamics as to why they cannot distinguish between god and nature. But it is the Abrahamics who have to answer us on why and how they did this separation.

Now since many ancient civilizations and their worldviews have gone away - it is the people like us who appear abnormal, superstitious, and irrational!

I would like to share something personal at this moment. I saw Tamil Christians in social media who said they celebrate Pongal (Tamil regional celebration of Makara Saṅkrānti, a harvest festival), because according to them, it is a secular festival. A main ritual of traditional Pongal festivities is offering the pongal (rice dish) cooked from the first harvest to the sūryaḥ (sun god) as a token of honor. It was at that point that I felt this was the same biblical mindset from above, manifesting yet again in real time. The scripture that they revere would not even use the word for sun as it had a deific connotation.

Hence, they want to celebrate a festival dedicated to the sun god as a secular festival by removing the divine from the festivities in the same way their Bible removes any sense of divinity from nature. The separation between the sacred and the secular whether in theology, festivities or any other aspect of life is a distinctively Abrahamic worldview.

Yet, this blurring between nature and the divine does not mean that the ancients could not think rationally and could not make scientific achievements. Have you heard of Ramanujan, the brilliant mathematician, yet a devout Śrī Vaiṣṇava who credited all his knowledge to the goddess Nāmagiri? How about Pāṇini, the genius who wrote a computerized grammar of the Saṃskṛta language that awes linguists and computer scientists even to this day, and is unparalleled? And why did he write it? He wrote it as a vedāṅga supplement, to understand the language and purport of the Veda. Surely I think the West has a lot to learn from civilizational non-Abrahamic worldviews as well.

Also in this picture, atheism would not make sense. To deny the existence of shamash is not to just deny the existence of the god but also to deny the existence of the sun, which is just plain stupid and literally nonsensical!

One common feature of all myths is that they are almost always set in the distant and remote past in all cultures. In that remote past, the order of the world was not set in the way it is now. For example: in that remote past, gods talk to mankind more freely, men had extra powers, exotic beasts existed, etc. There is a separation between mythic time and historical time in all cultures (In Indian civilization, the start of the kaliyuga is the beginning of historical time). One reason why myths are set in the remote past may be that nobody should go about attempting to verify or prove/disprove them. They were just supposed to be believed. We may be missing the point when we try to historically justify every detail of myths and legends. Myths are indeed true, but they contain another kind of truth which is not always historically rooted. More on this in the concluding section of this article.

Having cleared off the deeply embedded Western sense of rationality from prejudicing our view of ancient civilizations, there are other practical issues that we should be aware about while studying dead religions, like that of Mesopotamia: Its religions are gone today without any followers. All that we have with us now are accounts of stories written down on tablets. There are several problems in assessing the mythography and religious life through just written remnants. Mesopotamian mythology originated and was sustained in an oral culture, but the only access that we have to these is written records. These factors can lead to making misleading assumptions about a culture, especially one that has no living representatives now. More specifically:

• Written myths are frozen: Once a myth is written down, it is fossilized and we assume that that written version is the only way in which the story was ever told, and that that was the only correct story. But this is not how traditional tales in a living culture work! What we have in writing is just one version of the myth that was told by one person at one point in time.
• Myths were ‘givens’ in their own society: Mesopotamian myths were the ‘givens’ in their own society. They were known by heart to the members of ancient Mesopotamia. The gods like shamash look foreign to us, but they were the same gods whom the Mesopotamians prayed to on a daily basis, and knew stories about instinctively. So, in literature, the author often just refers to his gods and recollects the stories of what they did (many times only briefly). Those authors typically skipped the background material, the context, and the traditional ways in which their myths were understood, felt, experienced, and interpreted.

Encyclopedia Britannica has a beautiful paragraph on this³:

The more completely a given culture is embraced, the more natural will its basic tenets seem to the people involved. The most fundamental of its presuppositions are not even likely to rise into awareness and be consciously held but are tacitly taken for granted. It takes a degree of cultural decline, of the loosening of the culture’s grip on thought and action, before its most basic structural lines can be recognized and, if need be, challenged. Since culture, the total pattern within which human beings live and act, is thus not likely to be conceived of consciously and as a whole until it begins to lose its obvious and natural character, it is understandable that those myths of a culture that may be termed existential—in the sense that they articulate human existence as a whole in terms of the culture and show its basic structure—are rarely encountered until comparatively late in the history of a culture. Before that occurs, it is, rather, the particular aspects and facets of existence that are apt to claim attention.

But we cannot attempt to fully immerse ourselves in any culture other than our own. We can only try our best. The exact feelings that the members of Mesoptoamian culture experienced; the standpoint from which they viewed, understood and interpreted the world; how it resonated with various walks of their lives, and the nuances it created in their society - all of these are simply gone and irrecoverable to us now.

To an outsider, another culture’s myths seem like ordinary, even amusing stories; whereas for an insider, the same myths are of profound meaning and invoke rich emotions. In fact I would go so far to say that the term ‘myth’ itself, as a category, exists only when someone outside the culture tries to view it. From inside the tradition, they are deep truths. The moment any culture recognizes its own myths as just “myths”, then its myths cease to exist as a living entity, and they become dead. This is why there is a humorous saying - “If it is yours, it is a myth; it is mine, it is true”!

So, we can never truly know how the ancient people themselves understood and interpreted the gods and the stories about them. All the emotional resonances they might have had while listening to the stories of their gods, or while praying - these are pretty much lost to us. Also, one has to be careful when discussing Mesopotamian religion, in the same way that one has to be careful while discussing Hinduism. Hinduism is not a single thing, like any other “ism”. It is an aggregate of a vast collection of cultures, philosophies, and traditions united by a subtle metaphysical worldview. The same has to be kept in mind when we discuss the polytheistic faith systems of the Mesopotamians, and other civilizations as well.

In this article, I will not try to be exhaustive in any sense regarding the religion and worldviews of the various Mesopotamian cultures; but I will just give a few samples and focus more on the important elements and common threads that unite these faith systems.

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

Akkadian cylinder seal (d. 2300 BCE), depicting the deities Inanna, Utu, Enki, & Isimud⁴

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.

Sacred Geography: Temples & Pilgrimages

One day, an adventurous man from Mesopotamia would have traveled across the mud all the way - and at the end, he would have found an unusual sight for a muddy flatland - the Zagros mountains which were the source of life (rivers) and death (storms & floods) - and he would have been awed! So, the Mesopotamians considered the mountains as abodes of gods; hence their temples were designed to serve as replicas of mountains. They adopted a style where the temple is a stepped pyramid resembling a stepped mountain; and the idol of the deity resides at the peak, which is the highest point of the temple. This style of architecture is called the Ziggurat. They look like stepped towers from a distance.

Ziggurats feature in the Bible in the book of Genesis, in the tower of Babel story - Babel is the Hebrew name for the city of Babylon. The following account is a portion from the same:.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. ² As people moved eastward,they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. ³ They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” ⁵ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. ⁶ The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” ⁸ So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ That is why it was called Babel- because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Genesis 11:1-9

So we see that the attempt to build a tower that reaches the heavens is a reference to the Ziggurats, and the worldview implied in building that means that the gods reside in the highest places of heaven. The Bible here is ridiculing the Babylonians’ temples; and it also ridicules the name of the city of Babylon as arising from babel, which sounds like something that people say when they blabber (like our blah blah blah). This Biblical account of putting down the Babylonian Ziggurats, along with the name of their city and language, is clearly a reaction to the Babylonian exile - when the Jews were conquered by the neo-Babylonian empire in 586 BCE, about which we will see in detail in the article on Jewish civilization.

Again, a brief digression on the word ‘temple’: Modern Jews worship in synagogues, Christians in churches, and Muslims in mosques. Synagogues are similar to churches and mosques but very different from temples. Throughout the ancient world, a temple was seen as the place where the god was housed - even in Judaism. Solomon’s temple, whose ruins are located in Jerusalem today, in the Jewish Hebrew Bible is also known by the phrase ‘the house of God’ or ‘the house of the Lord⁷. So, in all ancient religions, temples were the housing or dwellings of the god. Normally they housed the idol of the god (this was not the case in Judaism which prohibited having the image of the God). But a church or a mosque or a synagogue are not dwelling places of God. They are merely buildings for a congregation of believers to gather and pray. The word synagogue is derived from a Greek word that means place of gathering together⁸. The Greek word for church used in the New Testament is ekklesia⁹ which literally means assembly in ancient Greek and was used for all kinds of assemblies in the ancient Greek world - political assemblies, cultic assemblies, fan clubs, etc. The Arabic word masjid literally means place of prostration (to pray)¹⁰. So let us keep this very clearly in mind. Temples in the ancient world in all civilizations are functionally and conceptually very different from modern synagogues, churches and mosques. God does not dwell in a church or a mosque or a synagogue - they are simply places for people to come together for communal prayer. Whereas a temple is literally the dwelling place of the deity it houses. It was not just a mere gathering place for believers to pray.

How was the civilizational unity in Mesopotamia created and sustained while having so many cities spread out over a large expanse? How did the unifying force of civilization engulf all the cities in its fold? Of course, like in India and many other civilizations, pilgrimages played an important role. Various pilgrimage sites scattered throughout all parts of the civilizational geography which had people from all over visiting them was the glue that bound this civilization together irrespective of the political situation of the time. This appears to be a universal feature of all civilizations - consider Kashi, Rameswaram, Ayodhya, Mathura, Gokula, Vrindavana, the Jyotirlinga kshetras, the shakti peethas and the 108 Vaishnava Divya Desams scattered all over our country and holy rivers attracting far-away visitors by customs of pilgrimage not only gave a sense of unity to this civilization but also a sense of sacred geography to it. A very extensive account of pilgrimage in ancient Mesopotamia is given in the work by Ian Rutherford¹¹. Below is a classification of the pilgrimages into some recognizable types for taxonomical clarity. For more details, please refer to the paper.

1. Temple visits: This is the most common type of pilgrimage wherein people visit temples outside their city as a part of family custom or personal conviction or because some astrologer told them to.
2. Imitating divine journeys: This pilgrimage was undertaken to imitate journeys of gods and heroes. Like how people go for Rāma yatra here, tracing the journey of Śrī Rāma’s life from Ayodhya to Lanka. These pilgrimages are believed to have been led by gods themselves. These are best attested from many Sumerian narrative texts. Many such journeys were quite short, such as that of Ninlil from Nippur to Tummal during the Tummal festival, but some were longer, with Nippur and Eridu as the main destinations. Key examples of divine journeys emulated include: Inanna’s journey from Uruk to Eridu to obtain Enki’s powers, Nanna-Suen’s journey from Ur to Nippur and Nin-isina’s journey from Isin to Nippur. Typically, the journey is represented as joyous with way stations and it culminates in a celebration that also involves communal feasting at the destination.
3. Communal gatherings: These are the counterparts of Kumbh Mela or Thiruvannamalai Dipam or Sabarimala pilgrimage in our culture - a mass gathering of people in a sacred site at a particular time to have a communal experience of the divine. The best evidence for communal pilgrimage comes from Mari, where the great festival of the goddess Ištar is known to have drawn large numbers of vassals, diplomats, and other people as well.
4. Healing pilgrimages: These are pilgrimages taken by pilgrims for wanting a particular cure or for wanting a particular thing that is missing in their lives. In Mesopotamia, they are attested in some places like Isin and Mari.
5. Royal Pilgrimages: This is missing in modern secular India. Here, the state (the king in ancient Mesopotamia, which was monarchic) officially sponsors some festival in a temple or conducts a special religious ceremony and invites people from all over his empire to take part in it. Also, kings would sponsor a mass gathering of people for a religious celebration whenever he gained control over a region. Additionally, provincial governors could organize such events with attendees from all over the place.

To quote the conclusion of Ian Rutherford from his paper:

To sum up: first, pilgrimage is well attested in Mesopotamia, though the form it takes varies from place to place and period to period. The most common form attested is that made by kings and other members of the elite, sometimes with gods represented as leading the way. At Mari the evidence is particularly rich, with both royal pilgrimages, mass attendance at major festivals, and pilgrimage to common sanctuaries of Dagan in Tuttul and Terqa. It is worth repeating that surviving evidence most likely under-represents the true volume of pilgrimage, particularly since the texts are mostly written from the point of view of ruling elites [who were in charge of managing the law and order situation for crowd control]. Secondly, it is clear from many of the examples collected here that pilgrimage in Mesopotamia often involved a performance with an implied audience comprising both humans (including perhaps ancestors) and, potentially, gods. People in towns must have seen the processions as they passed by, even if they did not take part. Religious performances such as this can be thought of as elaborate forms of signaling, where the agents and organizers advertise their devotion to the gods as a way of demonstrating their status and power.

The Mother Goddess - The Śakti

Another theme that runs across all non-Abrahamic religions in the world so far is the presence of a supreme mother goddess; apart from other roles, she is responsible for creation and fertility even if there are other parallel attributes.

The Saundarya Lahari, attributed to Śaṅkarācārya, begins as

शिवश् शक्त्या युक्तो यदि भवति शक्तः प्रभवितुम्

It translates as:

Śiva becomes capable (शक्तः) to create (प्रभवितुम्) only by Śakti (शक्त्या).

Every civilisation had its own variety of Śakti, the supreme mother Goddess, a source of all creation. Of course the exact form of the goddess varied with place and time, and the exact details also did so; but at a given moment and at a given place, she could easily be spotted.

The supreme mother goddess of Mesopotamia was Ishtar(Akkadian name) / Inana(Sumerian name). In Mesopotamia, initially she was one of the many goddesses of the pantheon and incharge of sexual love; but very soon into the civilization, she acquired a new dimension by representing the force and energy of life - both benign and threatening. She was regarded as the Supreme Queen of heaven and earth, ruler of gods, sustainer of order, and creator of the universe - including material, cosmic and social. She became known by various epithets like “the mother of the gods”, “the great mother”, “the earth mother”, etc. She was responsible for fertility of the crops, livestock, and humans; this signifies the creative potency. Many local goddesses and lesser goddesses of similar character were merged with this divinity and took her name to swell up their reputation. Like in India, many local goddesses are associated with and seen as manifestations of Śakti. Inana became so powerful that eventually her name became a generic designation for “goddess”. Astrologically, she was identified with the planet Venus. In some cities, she was adopted as consort of the god of the city. For example, this was the case in the city of Ashur. Yet, even if she was viewed as a consort, she by no means became a mere reflection of the male divinity and maintained a distinct individuality of her own. Her worship in the Mesopotamian civilization became universal and at times displaced the worship of her male consorts.

The Afterlife

The overall cultural pessimism in the civilization of Mesopotamia, owing to its cruel and unpredictable flooding, leads to a grim view of the afterlife. There were many notions of afterlife floating around in the region, but none of them look particularly happy or satisfying. In the Mesopotamian civilization, after death, people were believed to go to a place below the earth, referred to as Arallû, Ganzer, or Irkalla where they would exist as ghostly, weakened, shadowy images of themselves. This overall gloomy fate was the same, irrespective of one’s social class, actions, or the morality exhibited when they were alive.

Everlasting life was believed to be possible only for the gods. For example, one text describes the dead as¹²:

…dust is their food and clay their nourishment, they see no light, where they dwell in darkness.

The dead are described to be drinking on the libations offered by their children and descendants; hence it was essential to have children, without which one would get nothing to drink in the already gloomy afterlife. So, we see that the afterlife was not something that the Mesopotamians looked forward to. They focused on the present life. In some instances, the dead are described to haunt the living, but there is no systematic doctrine regarding these.

There were gods and demons of the underworld too. Unlike in Egypt, there is no judgment of the dead of any kind - there was just a god who would pronounce them dead, and a scribe who would note down their names.

We will pick up from here in Part 3 of this series where we study the most important myths and the epic of Mesopotamian civilization.

References

1. Image 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamash#/media/File:Tabletof_Shamash(2).jpg
2. Image 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#/media/File:TheSun_by_the_Atmospheric_Imaging_Assembly_of_NASA’s_Solar_Dynamics_Observatory-_20100819.jpg
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mesopotamian-religion/The-Mesopotamian-worldview-as-expressed-in-myth
4. Image 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listof_Mesopotamian_deities#/media/File:Ea(Babilonian)-_EnKi(Sumerian).jpg
5. Image 4: https://www.iransafar.co/zagros-mountains/
6. Image 5: https://www.freepik.com/premium-ai-image/sumerian-temple-complex-with-ziggurat-its-center-illustration_75320557.htm
7. 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.”
8. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/synagogue?q=synagogue
9. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/ecclesiastic?q=ecclesiastic
10. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/masjid
11. 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
12. Image 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#/media/File:Ishtar_on_an_Akkadian_seal.jpg
13. Black, Jeremy; Green, Anthony (1992), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Austin: University of Texas Press, ISBN 0714117056