Mesopotamian Religion

8. Excerpts

Leo Oppenheim
1964 Portrait

Jonah Lynch – March 2021

Leo Oppenheim 1964 Portrait

Oppenheim 1964 Mesopotamia
Ancient Mesopotamia. Portrait of a Dead Civilization,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

ToC of Oppenheim 1964 Mesopotamia

Table of Contents

I. The Making of Mesopotamia
The Background
The Setting
The Actors
The World Around

II. Go to, let us build us a city and a tower!
The Social Texture
Economic Facts
"The Great Organizations"
The City
Urbanism

III. Regnum a gente in gentem transfertur
Historical Sources or Literature?
An Essay on Babylonian History
And Essay on Assyrian History

IV. Nah ist – und schwer zu fassen der Gott
Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should not be Written
The Care and Feeding of the Gods
Mesopotamian Psychology
The Arts of the Diviner

V. Laterculis coctilibus
The Meaning of Writing
The Scribes
The Creative Effort
Patterns in Non-Literary Texts

VI. There are many strange wonders, but nothing more wonderful than man
Medicine and Physicians
Mathematics and Astronomy
Craftsmen and Artists

General topic(s)
of the book

Oppenheim's classic is an important starting point for any study of Mesopotamia. In the current context, we cite passages especially from his famous chapter entitled "Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not be Written". Tongue in cheek as the title is, there are important reasons to consider our data gravely insufficient for drawing most conclusions. Oppenheim puts us on guard against hasty interpretations.

Excerpts from Oppenheim 1964 Mesopotamia

NOTE: The notes in square brackets and in smaller font are by mDP.

The birth of Assyriology

Topic	Page	Excerpt
The birth of Assyriology	Introduction: Assyriology – Why and How?	It so happened that both events – the rediscovery of the world of ancient Egypt and the appearance of intriguing Mesopotamian wedge-writing on bricks, clay cylinders, stone slabs, and inaccessible mountain rocks – occurred at a propitious time. It happened at the moment when Western man was eager to step out of that magic circle, the field of energy that protects, preserves, and confines every civilization. At the end of the eighteenth century, Europe, the last of the great civilizations of a span of more than five millennia, had reached a convenient plateau before the upswing of technological, economic, and political developments produced the changes that have altered the course of human history. In that precarious interlude of collection and relaxation, Western man could suddenly perceive himself, his own civilization, and the civilizations around him. (...) The salient characteristic of all the ancient collections is the predominance of scholarly over literary texts, and, within the scholarly texts, the predominance of texts which Assyriologists call “omen texts.” Such omen collections consist of endless, systematically arranged, one-line entries, each describing a specific act, a well-defined event, the behavior or feature of an animal, a specific part of its body, or that of a plant or of a human being, or the movements of the stars, the moon and the sun, atmospheric events, and other observable details, of unbelievable variety. Each case is provided with a prediction that refers to the welfare of the country or to that of the individual with respect to whom – such is the basic assumption – the event happened, if it was not purposefully provoked to obtain information about the future. The library of Assurbanipal contained more than three hundred tablets, each holding eighty to two hundred entries of the nature just described.

Decline of the temple

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Decline of the temple	Chapter II – Economic Facts	The steady decline of the influence of the temple from the middle of the second millennium, and the corresponding increase of land holdings in some kind of feudal tenure under royal charter, must likewise have brought about essential economic dislocations, just as did the increased role of capital in the last half of the first millennium in hands that seem to have been “private” within the customary limits of that term in the ancient Near East. Here the “banking house” of Murašû may furnish a case for such capital assuming the responsibilities held in the course of Mesopotamian history successively by village communities, the temples, and the palace, by investing in new land.

Unease about Idols

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Unease about Idols	Chapter IV – The Care and Feeding of the Gods	It is typical of the Assyriologist’s culture-conditioned approach to Mesopotamian religion that the role and the function of the divine image in that civilization have never been considered important enough to merit a systematic scholarly investigation. (...) In fact, pro- and anti-iconic tendencies have often been instrumental in shaping trends and releasing events in the history of our culture. And they are far from dead now. They still linger in the scholar’s ambivalent attitude toward “idols” and taint his approach to all alien religions. This influence manifests itself, mainly, by subtly shifting emphasis from less acceptable manifestations of a foreign religiosity to those which we can more readily comprehend, or, at least, consider more acceptable in Western terms. (...) All the same, the manufacture of images of the gods seems to create a certain malaise in all the religions in which they have a cultic or sacred function, as is indicated by the frequent legends and pious tales that stress a miraculous origin for the more famous of these representations. (...) The Old Testament concept is best expressed by the burning of the offered food, a practice which had the purpose of transforming it from one dimension – that of physical existence – into another, in which the food became assimilable by the deity through its scent. Another difference that separates the sacrificial rituals in the two cultures is the “blood consciousness” of the West, its awareness of the magic power of blood, which is not paralleled in Mesopotamia.

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Ignorance of data	Chapter II – The Social Texture	Of religious associations in Mesopotamia we know very little. The concerns which normally give rise to associations of this kind, namely the care for the souls of the dead by means of funerary offerings and rituals, and also the maintenance of specific cults in conflict with generally accepted forms of worship, are absent in Mesopotamian cities.

Relationship between man and god

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Relationship between man and god	Chapter IV – Mesopotamian "Psychology"	The relationship of the individual to the deity represents a crucial area of inquiry for any investigation of religious concepts. We have already seen that this relationship in Mesopotamia is conceived of, on a social level, as that between master and slave, or parent and child, although the latter is referred to rarely and only in certain contexts. (...) Since the avenues of approach pointed out so far either fail to yield clear insight or cannot offer us sufficient material to elucidate the relationship between man and deity, I would like to present a new approach based on a study of the phraseology of prayer literature. When one searches through the prayers to establish the topical range of the entreaties addressed to the deity, one discovers a substantial set of requests, each alluding to a specific and very personal experience. This experience is characterized by a feeling of strength and security that is taken to result from the immediate presence of a supernatural power. (...) All this can readily be characterized as the expression of a psychological experience in mythological terms. To the student of comparative religion or the cultural anthropologist, the several “protective spirits” (to use the term customary in Assyriological literature) represent but another example of the widespread concept of multiple and external souls.

Mesopotamian ‘Psychology’

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Good luck	Chapter IV – Mesopotamian "Psychology"	To experience a lucky stroke, to escape a danger, to have an easy and complete success, is expressed in Akkadian by saying that such a person has a “spirit,” i.e., an ilu, ištaru, lamassu, or šēdu. Most frequently mentioned in such assertions is ilu; one who has an ilu is what the Greeks term eudaimon (happy, lit. “having a good daimon”) and is called ilānû, literally, “one who has an ilu,” i.e., one who is lucky.

Myths

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Myths in Mesopotamia	Chapter IV – Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written	The second group of texts to be examined contains myths and mythologically embellished literary works. To state at the outset my objection to the direct and indiscriminate utilization of such texts, I submit that their contents have already unduly encroached upon our concept of Mesopotamian religion. (...) They form something like a fantastic screen, enticing as they are in their immediate appeal, seductive in their far-reaching likeness to stories told all over the ancient Near East and around the Mediterranean, but still a screen which one must penetrate to reach the hard core of evidence that bears directly on the forms of religious experience of Mesopotamian man.

Difference between polytheism and monotheism

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Difference between polytheism and monotheism	Chapter IV – Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written	This brings us to the conceptual difficulties of understanding a polytheistic religion as far removed in time and background as that of Mesopotamia. It may be stressed that neither the number of deities worshiped nor the absence or presence of definite (and carefully worded) answers to the eternal and unanswerable questions of man separate decisively a polytheistic from a monotheistic religion. Rather, it seems to be the criterion of a plurality of intellectual and spiritual dimensions that sets off most of the higher polytheistic religions from the narrowness, the one-dimensional pressure of revealed religions. Instead of the symbol of the path and the gate, which may be taken to be the “kenning” of monotheism, *a primeval, inevitable, and unchanging design or order (dharma, ṛta, šimtu) organizes the multifaceted structures of polytheistic religions*.

Prefatory note

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Why a "portrait"	Prefatory note	During the nearly twenty years in which this book has been in the making, a period of continuous rethinking and rewriting, the conviction grew in me that new ways had to be found to present Mesopotamian civilization. It became obvious to me that no amount of painstaking atomizing, no endless inventories under the pretense of objectivity, and no application of any of the accepted, over-all patterns were capable of presenting the data in a way that would convey the whole as well as its integral constituents. This could be done only by comprehending, reducing, and rendering in a more or less readable manner a characteristic selection of the staggering mass of diversified and very often unrelated facts which philologists and archeologists alike have extracted from the tablets and the sherds, the ruins and the images of Mesopotamia and have labeled and arranged in innumerable ways. Portraiture, a selective approach, seems to offer such a way of presentation. A portrait aims at presenting an individual, not completely but in his uniqueness, and not only at a fleeting moment of time but also at that juncture where past experience encounters future expectation.

Prayer in Mesopotamia

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Prayer in Mesopotamia	Chapter IV – Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written	Prayers in Mesopotamian religious practice are always linked to concomitant rituals. These rituals are carefully described in a section at the end of the prayer which addresses either the praying person or the officiating priest – rather, “technician” – in order to regulate his movements and gestures as well as the nature of the sacrifice and the time and place it should be undertaken. Ritual activities and accompanying prayers are of like importance and constitute the religious act; to interpret the prayers without regard to the rituals in order to obtain insight into the religious concepts they may reflect distorts the testimony. (...) The prayers contain no indication of an emotion-charged preference for a specific central topic such as, for example, the individual in relation to spiritual or moral contexts of universal reach, the problem of death and survival, the problem of immediate contact with the divine, to mention here some topoi that might be expected to leave an imprint on the religious literature of a civilization as complex as the Mesopotamian. One obtains the impression – confirmed by other indications – that the influence of religion on the individual, as well as on the community as a whole, was unimportant in Mesopotamia.

Rituals

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Ritual Texts	Chapter IV – Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written	The third group of texts are the numerous descriptions of specific rituals to be performed by priests and priestly technicians in the sanctuary. These texts prescribe, often in considerable detail, the individual acts of a ritual, the prayers and formulae to be recited (given either in full or cited by incipit), and the offerings and the sacrificial apparatus required; in short, they succeed in conveying something of the activities in a Mesopotamian temple. (...) Where then shall we search for source materials that hold the promise of shedding light on Mesopotamian religion? The rather substantial number of texts which describe exorcism and other magic rituals reveals not more than that the ubiquitous practices of sympathetic and analogic magic were well known and often applied in Mesopotamia.

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Social Stratification	Chapter IV – Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written	One principle might be singled out as a possible help in approaching Mesopotamian religious life and practice. This is its social stratification, which is more or less in evidence in the texts of all periods and regions. If one separates the royal religion from that of the common man, and both from that of the priest, one could possibly obtain something approaching an unobstructed vista. (...) The common man, lastly, remains an unknown, the most important unknown element in Mesopotamian religion. We have already pointed out that religion’s claims on the private individual were extremely limited in Mesopotamia; prayers, fasts, mortification, and taboos were apparently imposed only on the king.

The meaning of Šimtu

Topic	Page	Excerpt
The meaning of Šimtu	Chapter IV – Mesopotamian "Psychology"	*Šimtu* thus unites in one term the two dimensions of human existence: personality as an endowment and death as a fulfilment, in a way which the translations “fate” or “destiny” fail to render adequately. (...) “before the gods were given names and their respective šimtu [i.e., functions and assigned duties] were established.” (...) The šimtu, then, is the “nature” of these stones, and it is revealing that Latin natura renders Greek physis. (...) To die means to encounter fate, one’s own šimtu.

Is Tammuz a “type” of later gods?

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Is Tammuz a "type" of later gods?	Chapter IV – The Care and Feeding of the Gods	Among the lesser gods, Nergal and Tammuz (Dumuzi) should be mentioned as atypical. The former was not only the city god of Cutha in central Babylonia, but also considered, together with his spouse Ereškigal, “lady of the underworld,” as the ruler of the realm of the dead and source of plague. Tammuz represents a divine figure sui generis – a god whose death and disappearance it was customary to mourn in solemn lamentations in certain strata of the early Mesopotamian population. His fate is the topic of an important body of Sumerian religious texts, and it remains a moot though often discussed point in what respect he should or can be related to certain divinities of later Semitic religions.

Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Ignorance	Chapter IV – Why a Mesopotamian Religion Should Not Be Written	As a general statement covering the underlying problem, let me present some of the reasons that have convinced me that a systematic presentation of Mesopotamian religion cannot and should not be written. (...) The immense ruins of the temple towers of the large cities, especially of southern Mesopotamia, not only made Babylonia famous but, to a large extent, have helped to maintain the fame of its civilization. Yet even today – and this I offer as a warning – we do not know the purpose of these edifices. (...) Form, function, and creative elaboration, the three inevitable variables of each feature, have to be traced painstakingly in every instance. The most exacting examination of material remains of a civilization as dead and removed as that of Mesopotamia, with its written evidence so difficult of understanding, does not and cannot yield results that allow us better to understand the function and meaning of the buildings. And yet this effort is sometimes made, and a scholarly literature has evolved that derives conclusions from, for example, the emplacement [for the concept of "emplacement", see CAR and The Grammar] of the image with regard to the axis of the cella and the doors, from the orientation of the sanctuary, and from other features of the buildings.