gence of a vibrant mythology that has not yet been discovered in cuneiform texts, and
may have been been transmitted solely through the oral performance of stories that
enacted explanations for the order and shape of the universe (Steinkeller 1992 ). For
example, one type of scene shows the battle of the gods. While we have no texts
contemporary or later to illuminate the specific meaning of this image, scholars have
associated it with the Enuma Elish story of the creation of the universe written down
centuries later. The only theme that has been convincingly linked to the later
Mesopotamian textual tradition are the so-called “Etana” seals that have consistent and
shared elements of a story that refer to the later myth of “Etana” the shepherd, who
became king of Kish and sought the plant of fertility for his wife by flying to heaven
on the back of an eagle.
Although we cannot penetrate every detail of these images, for the first time we can
begin to distinguish and identify the attributes of various deities (Finkel and Geller
1997 ). In the ED period, the goddess Inanna is represented by her symbol, the gate
post, and the goddess of fertility, Ninhursag, the mother of Ningirsu, is shown with
maces and plants rising from her shoulders. In the Akkadian period, Inanna merges
with the Semitic goddess Ishtar, and in addition to her association with fertility and
love, she becomes a paramount warrior goddess. The water god, Enki in Sumerian
and Ea in Akkadian, is seen for the first time surrounded by a house of water, and
is associated with his nude heroic acolytes. The Sun god Utu (Sumerian)/Shamash
(Akkadian) we can now recognize as the male god with the rays of the sun emerging
from his shoulders or surrounding his entire body. At last, the polytheism of the
Mesopotamian world, in which each city has its own resident god, and each feature of
nature was an embodiment of a supernatural spirit, comes alive in pictures. This is a
remarkable achievement which indicates that even without textual elaboration, the
world of the spirits had been tamed, rationalized, identified, and controlled. Through
images, man now could express his domination over both the known and the
unknown, the seen and the unseen.
There has been a long-standing debate about the meaning of these highly varied
scenes in which divine figures, and more rarely humans, engage in lively highly detailed
scenes whose meaning is encoded in the iconographic details. Henry Frankfort ( 1939 )
in his classic study of Mesopotamian seals insisted that all of the narratives of the
Akkadian period depended on textual sources, many of which are now lost to us. He
and others (Steinkeller 1992 ) have made the obvious connections with later texts, but
many of the scenes find no analog in texts. At about the same time, Anton Moortgat
( 1940 ) argued that all of the mythological imagery referred to the grand narrative of
Tammuz, the sacred marriage and the eternal cycle of the dying god reborn every
spring. Marie Therese Barrelet ( 1970 ) argued that the wealth of detail found in the
narrative seals of the Akkadian period could not have originated in the imaginations
of the seal cutters, but must have depended on large-scale tableaus rendered in paint
or textile that decorated the walls of the palaces and the temples. Pierre Amiet ( 1980 b)
argues the seal carvers themselves were allowed to exercise their own artistic freedom,
and could develop the visual formulas for these myths according to their own
inspiration. He does hold that all the mythological images in Akkadian seals refer to a
single large theme of the cycle of nature that was personified in the form of deities,
creatures, and features of nature, trees, mountains and the like. More recently, scholar-
ship has tended to focus on individual seals or groups related through iconography to
–– Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world ––