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Religion and cosmology in ancient Mesopotamia
From: Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Ancient World.
The religions of ancient Mesopotamia and Persia bound together their societies, creating a religious culture and
inspiring new patterns of thought. The sacred writings of the Mesopotamian religions are among the oldest and
greatest classics of world literature. Their interactions gave rise to Judaism and thereby also to the other two
modern monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam.
Prehistory
When religion began is not known, but archaeologists and historians
often speculate about it. Some point to early graves containing weapons,
flowers, pots, and jewelry as signs of a belief in an afterlife and therefore
signs of religion. Some anthropologists see religion as a part of culture
that developed through stages. For these researchers religious ideas
would have begun in Africa before modern humans left Africa to
colonize the world. Their religion would have been a form of animism, a
belief that almost everything had spiritual significance, including bodies
of water, large geological formations, and any living thing.
In general, religions have required rituals on the part of people. To get in touch with the supernatural may have
required waiting in a particular spot known to be a favored by traveling spirits
or speaking in certain ways to invoke spirits or gods. Clapping hands could be a
way to attract the attention of spirits. Kneeling could be a way to show a god
that one was sincere.
In ancient Egypt priestesses would bring food to statues of gods and then dance,
sing, and tumble to entertain the gods, who were present in their statues,
observing all. In ancient Mesopotamia statues of gods were paraded through
cities and taken to watch entertainments. Although the statues were stone, the
gods could inhabit them to observe and enjoy the spectacles.
Giving spiritual life to statues may seem primitive, but most ancient peoples
saw it as a sign of civilized behavior. For instance, many ancient cultures
substituted inanimate objects for living ones in the confidence that in the
otherworld of spirits or gods, the power of art and spoken word would make the
inanimate objects real. It is an uncomfortable fact that many ancient religions
practiced human sacrifice. If one studies ancient sculptures and paintings of
people being sacrificed, they look miserable and frightened. In fact, for some religions, the fear and suffering of
victims were important assurances of the effectiveness of the sacrifice, whether the victims were girls in the
Andes or children in Burma. The Druidic cults of Europe involved bloodily torturing people to death to foretell
the future or please a god. Wars sometimes were waged just to acquire prisoners for sacrifices, and those
prisoners knew only terror as they were killed. The substitution of statues for people as sacrifices was for some
ancient societies a sign that they had matured in their religions,
Mesopotamia
The first cities were founded in Mesopotamia. A place like Uruk was not just many times larger than a village but
also had a different social organization. The agricultural surplus created by farming the land watered by the great
rivers of Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates, allowed some people to stop working merely for their own food
and survival and become specialists: kings and nobles in government, soldiers in warfare, engineers in building,
and priests in religion.
Mesopotamians had no hope of any kind of reward of eternal life or paradise. It was generally believed that
after death the ghost of a person journeyed to a dark place under the earth, the Land of No Return, and continued
forever in a fitful slumber. There were no exceptions. Even the great king of Sumer, Gilgamesh (r. ca. 2600 BCE),
according to the mythological epic named after him,
spent much of life in quest of eternal life but
discovered that all of his hopes were vain and that
human beings received no reward other than the brief
pleasures of life on earth.
The afterlife was no paradise, but the deceased
needed to be provided with various grave goods to
ease the journey into the netherworld, and periodic
rituals had to be performed at the grave of the
deceased long after his death. The form of burial
mattered little—kings received large, elaborate tombs,
while commoners might be buried in a simple pit covered with a reed mat—but the proper funeral rituals were
necessary in all cases. If the rituals were neglected, the spirit of the dead might come back to haunt the living,
wandering restlessly for all eternity.
Animal sacrifice was a common way to win favors from the gods. The animals offered in sacrifice had to be pure
or perfect, meaning young and healthy. Typically, bulls, goats, or sheep were used, the same animals commonly
eaten by people. The animals would be decorated with ribbons and jewelry and led to the god's temple in a joyous
procession, with the people singing hymns and dancing. Some of the animal's hair would be cut off and burned.
Then the animal would be led outside to a place of sacrifice and slaughtered. The most divine organs in
Mesopotamian estimation, such as the liver and gallbladder, would be returned to the god wrapped in fat, sliced,
and served on bread like a human meal. These organs would be
completely burned for the enjoyment of the god.
The bulk of the meat would be served as a stew to the
participants in the sacrifice. Especially at a festival, when as
many as a thousand animals were sacrificed, this could amount
to quite an abundance of food, and its distribution would
become a type of charity to the poor, who might obtain meat in
no other way. In unusual circumstances, when there was a
special reason to solicit the god or for great thanksgiving, the
entire animal might be burned and in this way offered directly
to the god.
The Akkadian myth of Atrahasis, which dates to about 1750 BCE, describes the formation of humankind. At the
beginning of the myth the great gods are served by lesser gods, who give them food and drink and dress and
house them (doing for the great gods precisely what priests did for the cult statues of the gods in temples). But the
lesser gods come to resent their subservient role and refuse to continue. As a result, the gods actually suffer
hunger and thirst. Enki, the "wise man" among the gods, solves the problem. He produces human beings as a new
race to serve the gods. Humans are made from clay (as in the book of Genesis) and so can never hope to be
divine, and yet they have a divine intelligence, because Enki sacrifices one of the lesser gods and infuses his
blood into human beings.
In a Babylonian story closely echoed by the flood myth in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy books, the gods
descend to earth to found the Mesopotamian cities and to establish their own temples: to order human life by
teaching all the arts of civilization. This works for a time. But because humans are so long-lived, the world soon
becomes crowded with them, and their noise prevents Enlil, the king of the gods, from sleeping. So Enlil sends a
great flood intended to wipe out humankind. Enki sees that the gods would suffer if humanity's service to them
were ended and so instructs one, Atrahasis, to build a boat in which he and his family and pairs of all the animals
would be saved from the flood. Because the gods suffer during the flood, Enlil permits humanity to exist but
forces Enki to limit their numbers by creating demons to spread disease among them to shorten their lives and to
kill infants. (About half of all children born in ancient Mesopotamia died before their fifth birthday.)
The rule of the Mesopotamian gods over the world was by the power of a mythical book
called the Tablets of Destiny. Because the destinies had been written down (preordained)
by the gods all at once, it was possible to foretell events in the future. Signs and traces of
what the gods had written could be read in nature (through divination) by a priest wise in
the ways of the gods, called the baru or diviner. Everything in the natural world was
studied by the diviner, especially the stars and anything unusual that called attention to
itself (an omen): Gods communicated important matters to mortals through omens.
Sacrificial animals, typically sheep, were of special concern to the gods. The main art of
the baru was to examine the internal organs of sheep at the time of sacrifice, especially
the liver. Marks in any given area were interpreted as if they were a specific word with a
meaning relevant to the future. In particular, one could ask of the gods through sacrifice whether some
contemplated action was favorable or unfavorable and receive guidance about what you should or should not do.
This kind of divination, while it seems unlikely to modern thinking, was impressive enough that it was
enthusiastically taken up by the Greeks, Romans, and Persians.
Persia
The Persian religion was based on a text called the Avesta, written by the prophet Zoroaster (sometimes rendered
as Zarathustra) and his disciples. The date span of Zoroaster's lifetime is unknown; while some scholars believe
he lived around 1400 BCE, this remains speculative.
Zoroastrianism is a "dualistic" religion. The prophet Zoroaster taught that the world was the scene of warfare
between God (Ahura Mazda) and an evil power (Ahriman)
that wished to destroy the cosmic order. In the end god would
triumph, and all the people who had ever lived would be
resurrected (brought back to life) and judged with reward or
punishment according to whether they had followed god or his
enemy. Zoroaster also thought that the gods worshipped by
other peoples were the demonic agents of Ahriman. It was
believed that Zoroaster would be reborn at the end of time to
play a vital role in the final triumph of good over evil.
Ahura Mazda was symbolized by light, so the main form of
worship in Zoroastrianism was the maintenance of fire altars whose flames might be kept continuously burning
for centuries. The priests who tended these fires and carried out other religious functions were called magi. They
also kept Zoroastrian religious texts alive through memorization—these texts were written down only in later
times when the very existence of the religion was threatened by the Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh
century CE. The word magician comes from their name, because Greeks and Romans saw them as the
embodiment of everything foreign and improper in religious terms. A small portion of Zoroastrians refused to
convert to Islam, and their descendants continue to live in present-day Iran; others fled to India (particularly
Mumbai, formerly called Bombay). These groups (about 250,000 in number) are called Parsis.