Beliefs

Located in the Tigris-Euphrates valley was the land of Mesopotamia. It was here that the world’s first cities were founded between 4000 – 3500 BC by the Sumerian people. They developed their own belief system, with a variety of gods and goddesses.

Mesopotamian Religion, also known as Assyro-Babylonian religion, included a series of belief systems of the early civilizations of the Euphrates valley.

Mesopotamian religion - Mesopotamian religion - Stages of religious development: The religious development—as indeed that of the Mesopotamian culture generally—was not significantly influenced by the movements of the various peoples into and within the area—the Sumerians, Akkadians, Gutians, Kassites, Hurrians, Aramaeans, and Chaldeans. Rather it forms a uniform, consistent, and coherent Mesopotamian tradition changing in response to its own internal needs of insights and expression. It is possible to discern a basic substratum involving worship of the forces in nature—often visualized in nonhuman forms—especially those that were of immediate import to basic economic pursuits. Many of these figures belong to the type of the “dying god” (a fertility deity displaying

Religion was central to Mesopotamians as they believed the divine affected every aspect of human life. Mesopotamians were polytheistic; they worshipped several major gods and thousands of minor gods.

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul’s...