Mesopotamians had no hope of any kind of reward of
eternal life or paradise. During life each person was under the
protection of a kind of guardian angel (personal god). It was
generally believed that aft er death the ghost of a person jour-
neyed to a dark place under the earth, the Land of No Return,
and continued forever in a fi tful slumber. Th ere were no ex-
ceptions. Even the great king of Sumer, Gilgamesh (r. ca. 2600
b.c.e), according to the mythological epic named aft er 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. Th e
aft erlife was no paradise, but the deceased needed to be pro-
vided 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 aft er his death. Th e 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 funerary rites were necessary in all
cases. If the rites were neglected, the shade of the deceased
might come back to haunt the living, wandering restlessly for
all eternity.
A Mesopotamian temple or “house of a god” was oft en
grander than a royal palace. Th e images of the gods in the
temples were dressed in the fi nest clothes and adorned with
gold and jewels. Each day the gods went through the same
kind of schedule as the king, being dressed and undressed for
various activities, eating (sacrifi ces), enjoying entertainments
(hymns), and hearing petitions (prayers). Periodic festivals
saw the gods (in the form of their statues) moved around the
city or even between cities, attending entertainments such as
athletic competitions and festivals. One of the greatest ca-
lamities that could befall a conquered city was the removal
of the cult statue of the city’s chief deity. Numerous cases are
documented in ancient Near Eastern sources. Moreover, such
an occurrence carried a double penalty. Th e fact that a deity
had abandoned his or her city showed that the city and its
inhabitants had fallen out of favor with the god or goddess.
Th e absence of the deity brought ruination and desolation to
the populace. Th e return of the cult statue—examples include
the statue of Marduk, chief deity of Babylon, taken to Susa in
southwestern Iran by the Elamites—off ered the king respon-
sible for such an act the opportunity to proclaim his righ-
teousness, piety, and paternal pride in delivering is people
from such a scourge.
Animal sacrifi ce was common. Th e animals off ered
in sacrifi ce had to be pure or perfect, meaning young and
healthy. Typically, bulls, goats, or sheep were used, the same
animals commonly eaten by people. Th e animals would be
decorated with ribbons and ornaments and led to the god’s
temple in a joyous procession, with the people singing hymns
and dancing. A lock of the animal’s hair would be cut off and
burned. Th en the animal would be led outside to a place of
sacrifi ce and slaughtered. Th e most divine organs in Meso-
potamian 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. Th ese organs would be completely
burned for the enjoyment of the god. Th e bulk of the meat
would be served as a stew to the participants in the sacrifi ce.
Especially at a festival, when as many as a thousand animals
were sacrifi ced, 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. Th e hide of
the animal was given to the butcher and cooks who had per-
formed the sacrifi ce on behalf of the king and other priests.
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 off ered directly to the god.
Mesopotamians believed that nature was to be under-
stood on the model of language. Metaphor is a fi gure of speech
by which we say that one thing resembles another. One might
say that a thunderstorm is like the raging of an angry king or
that the feeling of love is like a beautiful woman. For ancient
people that kind of explanation seemed a reasonable way to
describe reality. So a thunderstorm is the raging of a storm
god like the Babylonian Marduk, and love is a goddess like
Ishtar (Semitic equivalent to the Sumerian goddess Innana).
Th e ancients saw divinity everywhere: in the statues of the
gods in the temples, in the planets in the night sky, in the
signs found by examining the livers of sheep sacrifi ced to the
gods, or wherever one sees majesty or love in the world. It did
not occur to them to think of the name of a thing as arbitrary;
rather they thought it was the thing itself. Hence the world
and its representation in language were equivalents, and ma-
nipulating one could manipulate the other. Th erefore, they
believed, prayers and spells could change the way things are
or what might happen in the future.
In this worldview, writing and language ought to be able
to control the world; it certainly did so for the tiny literate
elite who used writing to monopolize wealth and political
power through access to the law courts and government de-
nied the illiterate masses. But language, especially written
language, also controlled the world in another way in Meso-
potamian myth. Everything the gods accomplished was done
through spells. In myths their speech creates reality. When
the Israelite god creates the universe in the biblical book of
Genesis, he does so through the power of language, speaking
commands that become instantly real: “Let there be light!
And there was light.”
Mesopotamian myth both mirrored contemporary cul-
ture on a higher plane and explained the existence of that
culture. It had a tremendous impact on the beliefs of younger
civilizations such as Greece or Israel. Th e Enûma Elish, or
Epic of Creation, was sung at the New Year’s festival in Baby-
lon. It extols the Babylonian god Marduk at the highest level
of divinity. Its account of Creation as moving from an undif-
ferentiated primal cosmos to the fi nal order of the world we
see around us populated by human beings is thought by many
scholars to be the basis for the account of Creation in the fi rst
chapter of Genesis. Its description of the generations of gods
fi ghting among themselves and against monsters for cosmicreligion and cosmology: The Middle East 841