The deities of the Classical and Egyptian worlds are prominent in popular culture and the public’s imagination, but the gods, goddesses, and other divine personages of the Mesopotamian world rarely feature in the films, comics, TV series and documentaries. This course aims to provide an overview of the Mesopotamian belief system: its major myths and epics, ritual practices and cultic spaces, and relationship between the ‘state’ and the ‘divine’. With the help of archaeological evidence, private letters, and magical texts we will also gain a deeper look less public belief systems and discuss how ancient Mesopotamian interacted with the supernatural on an everyday basis.
Mesopotamia comprised multiple language, ethnic, and regional communities and the abundance of local cults, varied rituals, and different artistic traditions reflect this diversity. By exploring Mesopotamian religion over a geographic and diachronic range, we will also see the major threads that held together an overarching belief system and see how religious belief and praxis changed over time. This course will include lectures punctuated by discussions of the primary sources. The lectures aim to provide background information on the different topics addressed in class as well as illuminate religious beliefs and practices through art, artifact, and architecture. We will discuss the visual material and explore how it informs our understanding of the ‘divine’ as represented in the primary literature.
The major myths discussed in the course are part of the assigned reading, but we will also discuss shorter texts which will be presented in class. The goal is to always begin with the cosmic perspectives of the Mesopotamians themselves and then to explore how scholars of the ancient world have reconstructed their beliefs and practices from the evidence they left behind.
