Mesopotamian Religion

In addition to a common pantheon shared throughout Mesopotamia, each city had its own patron deity and legends (Lloyd, p 57). But not all gods were equal: there were primary gods, worshiped throughout; city gods who protected a particular city; and hundreds of other gods overseeing every aspect of human life. A city’s political power could translate into supremacy for its patron deity. From Mesopotamia’s earlier written history, the three male gods Anu, Enlil and Enki emerge as supreme.

Anu, with his temple at Uruk was originally the universe’s highest power; but he was replaced by Enlil, patron god of Nippur; and he was replaced by Marduk, patron of Babylon; who was in turn temporarily usurped by Ashur, patron of Assur, during the Neo-Assyrian era. Enki was in his own class as god of wisdom and learning.

The gods had the physical appearance as well as the qualities and defects of human beings. “In brief, they represented the best and the worst of human nature on a superhuman scale” (Roux).

Mesopotamia’s fatalistic, pessimistic and gloomy zeitgeist was nurtured by a terrifyingly unstable environment which eventually led to the downfall of the entire civilization. Mesopotamia’s lethal conditions predetermined its fatalistic, pessimistic and gloomy perspective. Mesopotamia was hostile and provided only the bare necessities for civilization. It lacked enough rainfall to support even primite dry farming, and temperatures often exceeded 110°F. The soil was arid and unuseable unless heavily irrigated. Although the Tigris and Euphrates rivers provided water, they also flooded unpredictably and resulted in violent and destructive rampages which wiped out the flat land. After such a rampage, the Tigris river oftentimes settled into a different course, leaving entire cities miles away from their sole water source.

In addition, Mesopotamia was unprotected; lacking no natural boundaries, it was easily accessible for raids due to the Tigris-Euphrates rivers and a nearby mountain range. This mountain range, inhabited by pre-civilized Gutians, would for 60 years plunge Mesopotamia into a murderous and draining chaos. The soil itself worked against the Mesopotamians: it lacked nutrients and easily became overcultivated and just a few hundred feet below were tremendous salt beds which would eventually leech and cause famine. However, there were several positive aspects of mesopotamia. The soil was laden with tremendous amounts of clay, and this allowed architecture, tools and art to fluourish. Also, the rivers provided fish and the plains proided gazelle and horses.

The characteristic Mesopotamian temple was a ziggurat, a stepped platform made out of mud-bricks, with a temple at the summit. Some have suggested that the ziggurat was contructed as a means to reconstruct the mountain “peak sanctuaries” that had been used when people lived in the mountains and hills around the valleys — notice that this is the creation of an artificial urban landscape. The ziggurat was not only a religious center but also an economic redistribution center–the temple base was a huge warehouse where grain and other valuable substances were stored. Mesopotamian religion was essentially fatalistic–the gods were removed from people, who were basically the slaves of the gods: the most humans could hope for was that the gods would ignore them! There was a slave-master relationship between humanity and the Gods.

Very early votive statues were very crude and depicted with huge, staring and harrowed eyes. Indeed, this is an extension of the morose outlook that is distinctively Mesopotamian. It also represents awe and respect, though, as these votive statues were placed in temples as part of religious rituals. Even the entity meant to word off evil, Pazuzu, was a daemon from the underworld. Mesopotamia’s polytheistic belief system, an elemental religion involving the belief that the natural forces such as storms and winds have spirit forces animating them (a vitalistic interpretation of the universe and experience; the (non-Semitic) Sumerians changed the elemental deities into astral deities) meant that if anything bad happened it was either because the population either displeased the Gods or did not worship them enough.