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An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion
In An Introduction to Mesopotamian Religion Tammi J. Schneider offers readers a basic guide to the religion of the peoples living in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the beginning of the Bronze Age to the time of Alexander the Great and Darius III. Drawing from extant texts, artifacts, and architecture, Schneider reveals a complex, fluid, and highly ritualized polytheism and describes both its intriguing pantheon of deities and the religious experience of the people who spent their lives serving and appeasing them.
158 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2011
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93 people want to read
About the author
Tammi J. Schneider
7 booksTammi J. Schneider is a professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University. Her research draws together the varied fields of archaeology, Assyriology, and biblical studies in an effort to understand the ancient Near East, especially the interactions among various peoples. She teaches ancient Near Eastern History, literature, archaeology and religion, and women in the Hebrew Bible.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 1, 2019
Ancient Mesopotamia is a simplification of extremely complex and poorly understood cultures that more or less grew between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Tammi J. Schneider here offers a very brief introduction, acknowledging all the while that we still have very much to learn. Not all cities have been excavated, and not all clay tablets found have been translated. As I note on my blog post (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) we don’t have most of the pieces for this puzzle. What we do know is complex and few write for a general readership.
Schneider gives a brief history of Mesopotamia before offering chapters on myths, gods, temples, religious functionaries, religious texts, rituals, and how the king plays into all of this. Admirably free of jargon, this is an introduction that anyone can read. As the author notes, it doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. It is a lay introduction to a vast and complex world, but when you’ve finished you’ll have a good general idea of the layout.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much information on this world since there is almost constant unrest in Iraq and Syria. Artifacts aren’t always understood. Texts—of which there are thousands—are left unstudied because no jobs exist that allow scholars to translate them. We have not found all the texts by any stretch, and we can’t even read many of those we have. The ancient world is an endlessly fascinating place. It is where our culture originated. As Schneider points out, we can get a glimpse of their religion. In doing so we see ourselves in a mirror thickly caked with dust.
Schneider gives a brief history of Mesopotamia before offering chapters on myths, gods, temples, religious functionaries, religious texts, rituals, and how the king plays into all of this. Admirably free of jargon, this is an introduction that anyone can read. As the author notes, it doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. It is a lay introduction to a vast and complex world, but when you’ve finished you’ll have a good general idea of the layout.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much information on this world since there is almost constant unrest in Iraq and Syria. Artifacts aren’t always understood. Texts—of which there are thousands—are left unstudied because no jobs exist that allow scholars to translate them. We have not found all the texts by any stretch, and we can’t even read many of those we have. The ancient world is an endlessly fascinating place. It is where our culture originated. As Schneider points out, we can get a glimpse of their religion. In doing so we see ourselves in a mirror thickly caked with dust.
January 22, 2018
As the author herself discusses in the book, this really is an introduction to Mesopotamian religion. It is not intended to be comprehensive, and indeed I found the chapters to be spartan and easily readable. Schneider argues that the subject can be daunting to a non-specialist since there are very few introductory texts, and this was the objective of her book. I have to say that although I would describe the content as laying out the basics of the topic, I would also agree with Schneider that this is just what was needed. I studied ancient Mesopotamia as a secondary area of interest, and, until this point, I had yet to find a text which clearly and concisely laid out the basics in the way that this book does. I’ll admit, I was fuzzy on the subject, confused by a patchwork of information scattered across multiple texts and not to mention contradictions where, according to era and city, ancient Mesopotamian religion varied or altered previously established forms. Schneider’s work isn’t a detailed tome that will turn you into an expert, but for me at least it cleared away the muddle and made the fundamentals comprehensible. I think non-historians could read it equally as well as academics and find it a smooth read.
8 out of 10
December 1, 2023
With the religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, we are confronted with a phenomenon foreign to us moderns, whether one style oneself an atheist or a monotheist – both attitudes are equally removed from the pagan polytheistic mind-set. Indeed – a topic for another day – there obtains a genealogical relationship between Christianity and atheism which renders the two more kindred in spirit than is either to polytheism. Now, most of us having received a western humanistic education are familiar with paganism as exhibited by the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity. Yet, we must attempt a revolution in our perspective, when we consider that classical antiquity itself represents a late and mature stage of civilization, by then already thousands of years old.
Therefore, we have reason to thank the archaeologist and professor of religion Tammi J. Schneider for guiding us perplexed moderns into a lost world in her An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion (Eerdmans, 2011). There is, indeed, some question as to what one ought to mean by ‘religion’ in the first place, to counter anachronistic expectations on the part of those influenced by Christianity. For there is exiguous evidence in the way of doctrine or private devotion among Mesopotamians themselves and even their elaborate practice of discerning omens was conducted primarily in reference to the political fortunes of the king, not necessarily for any role they might play in individuals’ private lives. By and large, the gods figured as part the fixture of the world, who ran things and therefore whom one had to serve and do one’s best to placate, but for whom one conceived scarcely any heartfelt trust and covenantal love such as one finds expressed so profusely in the psalms of the Old Testament. So Schneider opts to adopt her scholarly definition from another historian, Gary Beckman, whom she quotes in the following passage:
Religion here is the totality of beliefs and practices within a particular society that structure the relationship of men and women to [one another and] to the unseen but ever-present beings and powers with whom they share their world. [p. 5]
The necessary historical background, from Sumer in the fourth millennium (in the southern part of modern-day Iraq) to the rise and fall of Assyria in the first millennium, is quickly reviewed in chapter three, only sixteen pages but sufficient to the purpose. The point is not to survey all that is known but to give the reader an impression of the mix of peoples that went into the formation of the principal city-states in the area of Mesopotamia and therefore contributed the basis of the religious system, which despite the diversity of cultures was uniform enough that one can speak of a Mesopotamian religion.
The ideological basis of the Mesopotamians’ religion was provided, of course, by its mythology. In chapter four Schneider summarizes the relevant myths, such as the Enuma Elish (or epic of creation), Atrahasis and Inanna’s descent into the underworld. As Schneider summarizes them,
These are not the only mythological texts with religious themes, nor is this the only genre of texts shedding light on Mesopotamian religion. As noted above, the myths are discussed separately here precisely because whether these texts contain any kind of religious doctrine, are for ritual purposes or are for pure entertainment is not clear. These are not the only issues raised by mythological texts. Other themes include the destiny of the order of civilization, human mortality and childlessness. What is important for the texts treated thus far is their focus on a main theological premise for Mesopotamians: the world was controlled by a series of deities who invented humans so that they did not have to work. [pp.49-50]
As to who the deities are, this question forms the subject of chapter five on the pantheon, as viewed by the Mesopotamians. In a manner reminiscent of Hesiod’s Theogony, a succession of gods held the position of chief deity, first An, then Enlil and Marduk. Schneider outlines the major deities’ characteristics and their evolution, and closes with a brief account of the personal deities worshipped, that is, by individuals but not so relevant to the king and the state (which occupy most of the attention of the literary sources).
The remainder of the book has to do with how these theological beliefs have an impact on religious practices in people’s lives: in chapter six, the institution of the temple and in chapter seven the religious personnel who staffed the temples. The subject is interesting since, contrary to models with which we are accustomed, in those days in the ancient near East, the cities were so organized around the temple that one could speak of a ‘temple-city’. A continual supply of provisions was required to sacrifice to the patron god, for which purpose the temple owned extensive holdings in land and regulated economic activities – cultivation of cereals, vegetables and fruit trees; irrigation; sheep, goats, cows and horses; fish; manufacture of textiles and leather; metalwork and woodwork; and international trade. The separation into profane and holy spheres familiar to us does not apply in this framework. Schneider describes all this secular administration as well as the architecture of the temple and the temple lists that were recorded.
But how all this functioned becomes clearer in chapter seven on religious personnel. These comprise not just priests and priestesses, but also various cultic personnel, temple officers, diviners and magicians. Schneider goes into a fair amount of detail on what the sources permit us to say about what the priests did and how divination or prophecy was actually carried out. The next two chapters, eight on religious texts and nine on rituals, offer an account of institutions such as the New Year’s festival, sacred marriage, purificatory rituals and magic.
The final topic, in view of its importance, Schneider reserves for a separate treatment in the last chapter, namely, kingship in its relation to the gods. For the king may be viewed as primarily a religious functionary having a special relationship to the deity (in the early period, the kings were sometimes divinized although later the relationship would become more one of patronage – Schneider suggests that our tendency to look for a sharp Aristotelian dichotomy between mortal and divine is anachronistic).
Advantages: up-to-date scholarship, copious references to the secondary literature in the footnotes and in the bibliography, written very much with the needs of the beginner in mind.
Drawbacks: one wishes the exposition could engage in a closer reading of the religious texts themselves, whether mythological or divinatory. For one take on which, see Jean Bottéro, Clarisse Herrenschmidt and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam and Greece (University of Chicago Press, 2000, our review here). Here, these authors display a degree of imaginativeness in relating the old religious culture with other historical phenomena, absent in the present text.
Also, Schneider declines to investigate how the Mesopotamian religious system could have emerged from the setting of the earlier proto-Hassuna/Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid and early Uruk cultures (circa 9,000 to 3,500 BC), when, on the basis of scant archaeological remains, one presumes a shamanistic type of religion must have prevailed. Mircea Eliade writes about prehistoric religion in the first two chapters of his A History of Religious Ideas, vol. I, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (University of Chicago Press, 1978) but does not himself trace its evolution towards the later urban civilization that was to arise in Mesopotamia, either.
Lastly, Schneider has little to say on another topic that must speak to current concerns, namely, the role of women in Mesopotamian religion – not only as goddesses! For it is striking that, as temple priestesses, they played a perhaps more prominent part in the religious culture than would be the case with the Greeks and Romans – although this statement, too, may be subject to a reappraisal, see our review here of Jennifer Connelly’s Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007). In any event, women in general were accorded a higher status and more freedom in Egypt and the rest of the ancient near East than they were to enjoy in the more paternalistic Greek and Roman societies, and Schneider’s failure to pursue this theme in greater depth constitutes a missed opportunity. Perhaps some forthcoming reviews of the current literature on this subject would be in order!
Remembering what the author herself stresses in her preface, that the present work constitutes only ‘an’ ‘introduction’ to the subject of religion in ancient Mesopotamia, one can find it serviceable and clear – by no means the last word on its subject, as we indicate above, but after all a reasonably good start. Schneider does express herself perhaps too tentatively in her conclusion; one could hope for more scholarly daring, to hazard an attempt at a synthetic evaluative statement, even at the risk of going wrong. But academic prose style nowadays disfavors any such energetic writing, it seems, preferring to restrict itself to anodyne and therefore indisputable, if also less intrinsically interesting commonplaces.
Therefore, we have reason to thank the archaeologist and professor of religion Tammi J. Schneider for guiding us perplexed moderns into a lost world in her An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion (Eerdmans, 2011). There is, indeed, some question as to what one ought to mean by ‘religion’ in the first place, to counter anachronistic expectations on the part of those influenced by Christianity. For there is exiguous evidence in the way of doctrine or private devotion among Mesopotamians themselves and even their elaborate practice of discerning omens was conducted primarily in reference to the political fortunes of the king, not necessarily for any role they might play in individuals’ private lives. By and large, the gods figured as part the fixture of the world, who ran things and therefore whom one had to serve and do one’s best to placate, but for whom one conceived scarcely any heartfelt trust and covenantal love such as one finds expressed so profusely in the psalms of the Old Testament. So Schneider opts to adopt her scholarly definition from another historian, Gary Beckman, whom she quotes in the following passage:
Religion here is the totality of beliefs and practices within a particular society that structure the relationship of men and women to [one another and] to the unseen but ever-present beings and powers with whom they share their world. [p. 5]
The necessary historical background, from Sumer in the fourth millennium (in the southern part of modern-day Iraq) to the rise and fall of Assyria in the first millennium, is quickly reviewed in chapter three, only sixteen pages but sufficient to the purpose. The point is not to survey all that is known but to give the reader an impression of the mix of peoples that went into the formation of the principal city-states in the area of Mesopotamia and therefore contributed the basis of the religious system, which despite the diversity of cultures was uniform enough that one can speak of a Mesopotamian religion.
The ideological basis of the Mesopotamians’ religion was provided, of course, by its mythology. In chapter four Schneider summarizes the relevant myths, such as the Enuma Elish (or epic of creation), Atrahasis and Inanna’s descent into the underworld. As Schneider summarizes them,
These are not the only mythological texts with religious themes, nor is this the only genre of texts shedding light on Mesopotamian religion. As noted above, the myths are discussed separately here precisely because whether these texts contain any kind of religious doctrine, are for ritual purposes or are for pure entertainment is not clear. These are not the only issues raised by mythological texts. Other themes include the destiny of the order of civilization, human mortality and childlessness. What is important for the texts treated thus far is their focus on a main theological premise for Mesopotamians: the world was controlled by a series of deities who invented humans so that they did not have to work. [pp.49-50]
As to who the deities are, this question forms the subject of chapter five on the pantheon, as viewed by the Mesopotamians. In a manner reminiscent of Hesiod’s Theogony, a succession of gods held the position of chief deity, first An, then Enlil and Marduk. Schneider outlines the major deities’ characteristics and their evolution, and closes with a brief account of the personal deities worshipped, that is, by individuals but not so relevant to the king and the state (which occupy most of the attention of the literary sources).
The remainder of the book has to do with how these theological beliefs have an impact on religious practices in people’s lives: in chapter six, the institution of the temple and in chapter seven the religious personnel who staffed the temples. The subject is interesting since, contrary to models with which we are accustomed, in those days in the ancient near East, the cities were so organized around the temple that one could speak of a ‘temple-city’. A continual supply of provisions was required to sacrifice to the patron god, for which purpose the temple owned extensive holdings in land and regulated economic activities – cultivation of cereals, vegetables and fruit trees; irrigation; sheep, goats, cows and horses; fish; manufacture of textiles and leather; metalwork and woodwork; and international trade. The separation into profane and holy spheres familiar to us does not apply in this framework. Schneider describes all this secular administration as well as the architecture of the temple and the temple lists that were recorded.
But how all this functioned becomes clearer in chapter seven on religious personnel. These comprise not just priests and priestesses, but also various cultic personnel, temple officers, diviners and magicians. Schneider goes into a fair amount of detail on what the sources permit us to say about what the priests did and how divination or prophecy was actually carried out. The next two chapters, eight on religious texts and nine on rituals, offer an account of institutions such as the New Year’s festival, sacred marriage, purificatory rituals and magic.
The final topic, in view of its importance, Schneider reserves for a separate treatment in the last chapter, namely, kingship in its relation to the gods. For the king may be viewed as primarily a religious functionary having a special relationship to the deity (in the early period, the kings were sometimes divinized although later the relationship would become more one of patronage – Schneider suggests that our tendency to look for a sharp Aristotelian dichotomy between mortal and divine is anachronistic).
Advantages: up-to-date scholarship, copious references to the secondary literature in the footnotes and in the bibliography, written very much with the needs of the beginner in mind.
Drawbacks: one wishes the exposition could engage in a closer reading of the religious texts themselves, whether mythological or divinatory. For one take on which, see Jean Bottéro, Clarisse Herrenschmidt and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam and Greece (University of Chicago Press, 2000, our review here). Here, these authors display a degree of imaginativeness in relating the old religious culture with other historical phenomena, absent in the present text.
Also, Schneider declines to investigate how the Mesopotamian religious system could have emerged from the setting of the earlier proto-Hassuna/Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid and early Uruk cultures (circa 9,000 to 3,500 BC), when, on the basis of scant archaeological remains, one presumes a shamanistic type of religion must have prevailed. Mircea Eliade writes about prehistoric religion in the first two chapters of his A History of Religious Ideas, vol. I, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (University of Chicago Press, 1978) but does not himself trace its evolution towards the later urban civilization that was to arise in Mesopotamia, either.
Lastly, Schneider has little to say on another topic that must speak to current concerns, namely, the role of women in Mesopotamian religion – not only as goddesses! For it is striking that, as temple priestesses, they played a perhaps more prominent part in the religious culture than would be the case with the Greeks and Romans – although this statement, too, may be subject to a reappraisal, see our review here of Jennifer Connelly’s Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007). In any event, women in general were accorded a higher status and more freedom in Egypt and the rest of the ancient near East than they were to enjoy in the more paternalistic Greek and Roman societies, and Schneider’s failure to pursue this theme in greater depth constitutes a missed opportunity. Perhaps some forthcoming reviews of the current literature on this subject would be in order!
Remembering what the author herself stresses in her preface, that the present work constitutes only ‘an’ ‘introduction’ to the subject of religion in ancient Mesopotamia, one can find it serviceable and clear – by no means the last word on its subject, as we indicate above, but after all a reasonably good start. Schneider does express herself perhaps too tentatively in her conclusion; one could hope for more scholarly daring, to hazard an attempt at a synthetic evaluative statement, even at the risk of going wrong. But academic prose style nowadays disfavors any such energetic writing, it seems, preferring to restrict itself to anodyne and therefore indisputable, if also less intrinsically interesting commonplaces.
January 27, 2019
This book is an introductory survey of Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian religion from roughly the beginning of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East to the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus. In this survey, Dr. Schneider describes the religious practices and beliefs of this time and place at a high level. Since scholars and archaeologists, whose knowledge base regarding ancient culture is limited to what was written down, preserved and discovered, she avoids discussing how the people felt about their religion and how it affected their daily lives. I respect her restraint.
I have been studying the Old Testament book of Daniel and read this book in an effort to better understand the cultural and religious environment in which Daniel and his three friends find themselves. This book has been very informative for that purpose and has even exposed and corrected at least one misconception I had. For example, 2 Kings 18 and Isaiah 36 both describe the same incident in which the representative of Assyrian king Sennacherib tried to intimidate Hezekiah, king of Judah, into surrendering. One of his points was that the gods of other kingdoms had not been able to protect them from Assyria and that he shouldn’t count on his God to protect him. Obviously, the Assyrians saw their gods as stronger than the gods of their neighbors, as evidenced by their ability to conquer them. I had assumed, wrongly, that the Babylonians had the same point of view regarding their own conquests. On at least one occasion in the long-standing rivalry between Assyria and Babylon, Assyria had captured Babylon and transported the statue of Babylon’s chief god, Marduk, the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, back to Assyria. In one of these instances, the Assyrians chose to claim their god Assur as the chief god and to demean Marduk as a usurper. In other words, they interpreted their military successes as a sign of the strength of their gods, consistent with the biblical accounts. On the other hand, Babylon interpreted the capure of the statue of Marduk as Marduk abandoning their city, not that Assyria’s gods were stronger at that time. This is what exposed my misconception, and I found it very intriguing. The message of the Old Testament prophets, especially Jeremiah and Ezekiel, was that the Jews had sinned greatly against God and that the consequence of this sin would be conquest by Babylon and exile. In other words, their defeat and exile did not demonstrate God’s weakness, but rather that God was temporarily abandoning them to their fate for disciplinary purposes. When God sent the people into exile, He did so with a promise to bring them back. He also sent them to exile in a nation whose own mythology would help to reinforce that message. My God never ceases to awe me.
I know that the last paragraph is an application of what I learned from this book and does not necessarily reflect how Dr. Schneider might interpret the same data. That said, I enjoyed reading this book of arcane historical information and found it quite enlightening.
I have been studying the Old Testament book of Daniel and read this book in an effort to better understand the cultural and religious environment in which Daniel and his three friends find themselves. This book has been very informative for that purpose and has even exposed and corrected at least one misconception I had. For example, 2 Kings 18 and Isaiah 36 both describe the same incident in which the representative of Assyrian king Sennacherib tried to intimidate Hezekiah, king of Judah, into surrendering. One of his points was that the gods of other kingdoms had not been able to protect them from Assyria and that he shouldn’t count on his God to protect him. Obviously, the Assyrians saw their gods as stronger than the gods of their neighbors, as evidenced by their ability to conquer them. I had assumed, wrongly, that the Babylonians had the same point of view regarding their own conquests. On at least one occasion in the long-standing rivalry between Assyria and Babylon, Assyria had captured Babylon and transported the statue of Babylon’s chief god, Marduk, the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, back to Assyria. In one of these instances, the Assyrians chose to claim their god Assur as the chief god and to demean Marduk as a usurper. In other words, they interpreted their military successes as a sign of the strength of their gods, consistent with the biblical accounts. On the other hand, Babylon interpreted the capure of the statue of Marduk as Marduk abandoning their city, not that Assyria’s gods were stronger at that time. This is what exposed my misconception, and I found it very intriguing. The message of the Old Testament prophets, especially Jeremiah and Ezekiel, was that the Jews had sinned greatly against God and that the consequence of this sin would be conquest by Babylon and exile. In other words, their defeat and exile did not demonstrate God’s weakness, but rather that God was temporarily abandoning them to their fate for disciplinary purposes. When God sent the people into exile, He did so with a promise to bring them back. He also sent them to exile in a nation whose own mythology would help to reinforce that message. My God never ceases to awe me.
I know that the last paragraph is an application of what I learned from this book and does not necessarily reflect how Dr. Schneider might interpret the same data. That said, I enjoyed reading this book of arcane historical information and found it quite enlightening.
October 13, 2019
This was an interesting, brief introduction to Mesopotamian religion and the author did a good job balancing brevity and objectivity (as far as one can in our modern context) when discussing various topics. Having been reading folks like Nongbri who make the case that “religion” in our modern sense is an anachronistic idea we impose on the ancient world, certain parts seemed myopic in light of this, but given the book title and its goal I can’t fault the author for the approach taken. I enjoyed the book.
December 7, 2022
A good introduction, although I found the prose a little clunky in places, as though this is a dissertation reprinted as a book.
January 26, 2015
The book delivers what it promised: A brief introduction, however the vast bibliography presented, surely is helpful for those who would like to keep reading about the topics in this book.
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