Sources, Volume I
The Cradle of Cities
How to weigh the evidence for this room, where to read the texts, and what survives for each of its four bays.
How to read the evidence
Evidence for the literate temple cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Bronze Age Levant should be read in a hierarchy: dated and provenanced primary objects first; critically edited literary or ritual texts second; ancient reception and interpretation third; modern synthesis last.
Read the texts online
- Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), University of Oxford
- Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC)
- Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI)
Further reading
- Black, Jeremy, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, and Gábor Zólyomi. The Literature of Ancient Sumer. Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Revised edition. Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Foster, Benjamin R. Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd edition. CDL Press, 2005.
- George, Andrew R. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Hallo, William W., and K. Lawson Younger Jr., eds. The Context of Scripture. 3 vols. Brill, 1997–2002.
- Hoffner, Harry A. Jr. Hittite Myths. 2nd edition, edited by Gary M. Beckman. Society of Biblical Literature, 1998.
- Pardee, Dennis. Ritual and Cult at Ugarit. Society of Biblical Literature, 2002.
- Smith, Mark S. The Ugaritic Baal Cycle. 2 vols. Brill, 1994–2009.
- Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. Oxford University Press, 2001.
- Van de Mieroop, Marc. A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC. 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
Sumer
What survives
- Cuneiform tablets and joins
- Read the physical tablet, duplicate manuscripts, joins, provenience, and colophon before treating a modern composite as one ancient copy.
- God lists and lexical series
- Use for names, equations, and learned classification; they do not by themselves prove a narrated relationship or uniform cult.
- Temple hymns, prayers, and royal inscriptions
- Use for cult titles, civic theology, and political patronage, while separating royal ideology from household practice.
- Mythological compositions
- Enūma eliš, Atrahasis, the Gilgamesh traditions, the Hittite-Hurrian cycles, and Ugaritic epics are literary witnesses with identifiable redactional settings.
- Ritual and omen corpora
- These reveal enacted religion and scholarly divination, often more securely than retrospective myth summaries.
- Digital research corpora
- ETCSL, ORACC, CDLI, and specialist Hittite and Ugaritic corpora should be used with their edition history and object identifiers intact.
- ETCSL literary corpus
- Use composition numbers and manuscript notes; the displayed text is often a modern composite of multiple tablets.
- Old Babylonian god lists
- An = Anum and related lists organize learned equations but are not narrative scriptures.
- City archives
- Lagash, Ur, Nippur, and other archives anchor divine names in institutions, offerings, and royal patronage.
Entry by entry (12)
- Anshar §1.1 Anshar appears principally in the Babylonian Enuma Elish (Tablets I–II), the great creation poem of the second millennium BCE.
- Tiamat §1.4 Tiamat's story, as told above, is the principal subject of the Enuma Elish — the Babylonian creation epic, composed in its surviving form probably during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I in the late twelfth century BCE, though it doubtless draws on older material.
- Enlil §1.7 Enlil's chief myths include Enlil and Ninlil, Enlil and Sud (in which his courtship is more decorous), and the various flood compositions.
- Dumuzi §1.10 Dumuzi (Akkadian Tammuz) is one of the central figures of Mesopotamian religion.
- Inanna §1.13 The principal compositions include Inanna and Enki (the seizure of the me); the Inanna and Dumuzi courtship cycle; The Descent of Inanna (preserved in some 415 lines); Inanna and Ebih; Inanna and Shukaletuda; and the long hymn Nin-me-šara, attributed (probably accurately) to Enheduanna, the Akkadian princess and high priestess of Ur, who flourished c. 2300 BCE and is the earliest author in human history known to us by name.
- Nergal §1.16 Nergal (Sumerian Erra in some traditions, though Erra is sometimes treated as a distinct figure) appears in numerous compositions, of which the most important are Nergal and Ereshkigal (in Middle and Standard Babylonian recensions) and the Erra Epic, a five-tablet Akkadian poem of the late second millennium BCE attributed to one Kabti-ilani-Marduk, in which Nergal/Erra rampages through Babylonia until he is at length pacified.
- Nisaba §1.20 The Hymn to Nisaba and the Examination Text A (a Sumerian school text describing scribal training) are the principal compositions devoted to her.
- Kingu §1.23 The motif of mankind made from divine blood mixed with clay is also found, with variations, in the Atrahasis Epic, where the slain god is named We-ila or Geshtu-e.
- Ninshubur §1.26 Ninshubur is one of the most consistently virtuous figures in the Sumerian pantheon.
- Ningal §1.29 Ningal — Akkadian Nikkal, Hurrian Nikkal-and-Ib — is known principally from Ur III through Old Babylonian sources, including votive inscriptions, hymns, and the great Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur.
- Asag §1.32 Asag (Akkadian Asakku) is the principal monster of the Sumerian poem Lugal-e, sometimes called Ninurta and Asag, a composition of perhaps three hundred lines preserved in Old Babylonian copies of an older Sumerian original.
- Enkidu §1.35 The grief of Gilgamesh for Enkidu, in Tablets VIII and following of the Standard Babylonian Epic, is the principal emotional center of the work.
Akkad, Babylon and Assyria
What survives
- Cuneiform tablets and joins
- Read the physical tablet, duplicate manuscripts, joins, provenience, and colophon before treating a modern composite as one ancient copy.
- God lists and lexical series
- Use for names, equations, and learned classification; they do not by themselves prove a narrated relationship or uniform cult.
- Temple hymns, prayers, and royal inscriptions
- Use for cult titles, civic theology, and political patronage, while separating royal ideology from household practice.
- Mythological compositions
- Enūma eliš, Atrahasis, the Gilgamesh traditions, the Hittite-Hurrian cycles, and Ugaritic epics are literary witnesses with identifiable redactional settings.
- Ritual and omen corpora
- These reveal enacted religion and scholarly divination, often more securely than retrospective myth summaries.
- Digital research corpora
- ETCSL, ORACC, CDLI, and specialist Hittite and Ugaritic corpora should be used with their edition history and object identifiers intact.
- Enūma eliš
- Primary for Marduk’s cosmic genealogy and kingship, not for all Mesopotamian creation traditions.
- Atrahasis and Gilgamesh
- Distinct flood and human-creation traditions must not be conflated into one sequence.
- State archives and royal inscriptions
- Reveal how Assyrian and Babylonian rulers used divine patronage in policy and conquest.
Entry by entry (12)
- Ashur §2.1 After the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE and the destruction of Assyria as a political entity, the cult of Ashur survived for some centuries in the city of Assur itself, where Parthian-period inscriptions still attest his worship.
- Adad §2.3 Adad/Hadad is one of the most widely worshipped gods of the ancient Near East, attested under cognate names from Mesopotamia to Anatolia (Hittite Tarhunt) to the Levant (Ugaritic Baal-Hadad) and into the Aramaean kingdoms.
- Gallu §2.6 The Gallu are the most prominent of the various classes of Mesopotamian underworld demons (others include the Sebitti, the Lilu, the Asakku).
- Lilitu §2.8 The Mesopotamian Lilitu is the demonological ancestor of the better-known Hebrew Lilith, who appears once in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 34:14) and elaborately in later Jewish folklore (the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the Zohar, etc.).
- Tishpak §2.10 Tishpak is among the more obscure city-gods of Mesopotamia, principally because Eshnunna's political importance was eclipsed at an early date.
- Nisroch §2.12 The biblical text is our only source; the murder is securely dated and corroborated by the Babylonian Chronicle and by Esarhaddon's own retrospective inscriptions, but the temple in question is not named in the Assyrian sources, and the god therefore floats unmoored.
- Atrahasis §2.15 The Atrahasis Epic, in its Old Babylonian recension (c. 1700 BCE), is preserved on three tablets and gives the most complete extant version of the Mesopotamian flood.
- Ishum §2.17 Ishum, in older Sumerian known as Hendursaga, is principally the companion-figure of Erra in the Erra Epic, but he had his own modest cult and his own hymns (which survive partially in Sumerian copies).
- Mušḫuššu §2.19 The Mušḫuššu's image is best preserved on the glazed-brick reliefs of the Ishtar Gate (c. 575 BCE), now in the Pergamon Museum, and on processional ways and palace decorations of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods.
- Humbaba §2.21 Humbaba is principally known from the Sumerian Gilgamesh and Huwawa and from Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic.
- Nanaya §2.24 Nanaya is well-attested in Sumerian and Akkadian love-poetry from the Ur III period onward, and in royal hymns of subsequent dynasties.
- Mullissu §2.26 Mullissu (Akkadian) corresponds to older Sumerian Ninlil and is, in much of Assyrian usage, simply the regional name for that goddess.
Anatolia
What survives
- Cuneiform tablets and joins
- Read the physical tablet, duplicate manuscripts, joins, provenience, and colophon before treating a modern composite as one ancient copy.
- God lists and lexical series
- Use for names, equations, and learned classification; they do not by themselves prove a narrated relationship or uniform cult.
- Temple hymns, prayers, and royal inscriptions
- Use for cult titles, civic theology, and political patronage, while separating royal ideology from household practice.
- Mythological compositions
- Enūma eliš, Atrahasis, the Gilgamesh traditions, the Hittite-Hurrian cycles, and Ugaritic epics are literary witnesses with identifiable redactional settings.
- Ritual and omen corpora
- These reveal enacted religion and scholarly divination, often more securely than retrospective myth summaries.
- Digital research corpora
- ETCSL, ORACC, CDLI, and specialist Hittite and Ugaritic corpora should be used with their edition history and object identifiers intact.
- Hattusa tablet archives
- Provenience and language identify Hittite, Hattian, Hurrian, and translated compositions.
- Kumarbi cycle
- A Hurrian succession tradition preserved in Hittite copies; fragmentary joins constrain narrative certainty.
- Yazılıkaya and sanctuary iconography
- Processional divine images provide a visual ordering that should be compared, not simply equated, with texts.
Entry by entry (12)
- Kumarbi §3.1 The succession-by-castration motif (Anu, then Kumarbi, then Tessub) stands behind the Greek succession myth recorded by Hesiod (Uranus, then Cronus, then Zeus), and the literary dependence — the Greek tale presumably mediated through Phoenician or other intermediaries during the Late Bronze Age or the early Iron Age — is now generally accepted by classical scholarship.
- Shaushka §3.4 Shaushka's identification with Ishtar is direct and was acknowledged in antiquity; the same theonym is sometimes written with Ishtar's logogram in cuneiform Hurrian texts.
- Tarhunza §3.8 Tarhunza is best known from the hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions of the Iron Age Neo-Hittite states, particularly the long bilingual inscription of Karatepe (c. 700 BCE), in which King Azatiwada of Adana boasts of his founding of the city Azatiwadaya "under the protection of Tarhunzas of the Vineyard." The cult of Tarhunza appears to have been the principal religious continuity between the Bronze Age Hittite world and the Iron Age Aramaean and Luwian successor kingdoms.
- Attis §3.11 The fullest narrative is in Pausanias 7.17.10–12 (2nd c. CE); a Greek version closer to the time of importation is in Catullus 63, where the protagonist Attis is a Greek youth driven to self-castration in Phrygia; Roman elaborations are in Ovid Fasti 4.221–246 and Arnobius Adversus Nationes 5.5–7.
- Inara §3.14 The Old Hittite text gives the basic outline; a later version substitutes a mortal son of Tarhunt who marries the dragon's daughter and recovers his father's stolen heart and eyes.
- Hedammu §3.17 The Song of Hedammu (CTH 348) is preserved only in fragments, and the conclusion of the story — presumably some form of Hedammu's destruction or binding — is not extant.
- Zababa §3.21 Zababa's name is borrowed from the Mesopotamian war-god of the same name, patron of Kish; his Hattic substrate-name Wurunkatte ("King of the Land") survives in older Hittite ritual texts, with the Mesopotamian name predominating in the cosmopolitan late Empire period.
- Tashmishu §3.24 Tashmishu (in older texts Shuwaliyat) is documented chiefly in the Kumarbi Cycle, with subsidiary appearances in royal-vow and treaty texts.
- Iyarri §3.27 Iyarri (or Yarri) is known from Hittite-Luwian ritual texts and from treaty-curses of the Empire period.
- Sandon §3.30 Sandon is documented in Greek and Roman sources from the Hellenistic period (Strabo, Apollodorus, Lucian) onward, and on numerous Tarsian coin-types of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, which preserve the iconography of the warrior on the horned lion above the pyre.
- Men §3.34 Men is documented in numerous Roman-period inscriptions and reliefs from central and southern Anatolia, particularly from Antioch in Pisidia (where his sanctuary at Karakuyu has been excavated), from Sardis, and from sites across Phrygia, Pisidia, and Lycaonia.
- Ma §3.37 Ma is documented in Strabo 12.2.3 and 12.3.32-37 (his most extensive descriptions of the two Comana temple-states), in Plutarch's Sulla 9 (the dream episode), in numerous Roman-period inscriptions, and in scattered references in Cicero, Tibullus, and other Roman writers.
Canaan and Phoenicia
What survives
- Cuneiform tablets and joins
- Read the physical tablet, duplicate manuscripts, joins, provenience, and colophon before treating a modern composite as one ancient copy.
- God lists and lexical series
- Use for names, equations, and learned classification; they do not by themselves prove a narrated relationship or uniform cult.
- Temple hymns, prayers, and royal inscriptions
- Use for cult titles, civic theology, and political patronage, while separating royal ideology from household practice.
- Mythological compositions
- Enūma eliš, Atrahasis, the Gilgamesh traditions, the Hittite-Hurrian cycles, and Ugaritic epics are literary witnesses with identifiable redactional settings.
- Ritual and omen corpora
- These reveal enacted religion and scholarly divination, often more securely than retrospective myth summaries.
- Digital research corpora
- ETCSL, ORACC, CDLI, and specialist Hittite and Ugaritic corpora should be used with their edition history and object identifiers intact.
- Ugaritic Baal Cycle
- The central narrative witness for Baal, Yamm, Mot, Anat, El, and Athirat; tablet gaps must remain visible.
- Phoenician and Punic inscriptions
- Primary for divine titles, vows, civic identities, and colonial distribution.
- Philo of Byblos via Eusebius
- A late, contested witness to Phoenician learned tradition; use as reception evidence with caution.
Entry by entry (12)
- El §4.1 None of this requires the modern reader to draw any particular theological conclusion; it is, however, a fact that the El who sat at the source of the rivers in Ugaritic poetry is the linguistic and typological ancestor of the El who walks in the cool of the day in Genesis 3.
- Baal §4.2 The text was discovered at Ras Shamra (Ugarit) in 1929 by Claude Schaeffer's excavations and edited by Charles Virolleaud.
- Asherah §4.4 Asherah is the consort of El at Ugarit; in the Hebrew Bible she is denounced repeatedly, and her cult-object — the asherah, a sacred wooden pole or stylized tree, set up beside altars — is the target of repeated reformist destruction (1 Kings 15, 2 Kings 21, 23).
- Astarte §4.5 Late Phoenician inscriptions (Eshmunazar of Sidon, 5th c. BCE) attest the office of "priestess of Astarte" as one of the highest religious dignities of the Sidonian state.
- Mot §4.7 Mot's mythography in the Baal Cycle is among the most theologically interesting in any ancient corpus: Death is a god, Death can be killed, Death rises again — but his rising is the rising of mortality itself, which cannot finally be abolished.
- Dagon §4.8 Dagon (Ugaritic Dagan) is attested from at least the third millennium BCE in upper Mesopotamia, where Tuttul was his cult-center.
- Melqart §4.10 Melqart is documented in Phoenician inscriptions from Tyre, Cyprus, Malta (the bilingual Phoenician-Greek Cippi of Melqart, instrumental in the early decipherment of Phoenician), Carthage, and Gades; in Greek sources from Herodotus 2.44 (who visited the temple at Tyre and remarked on its antiquity) onward; and in Latin authors including Pliny, Strabo, and Silius Italicus.
- Tanit §4.11 The Tophet sacrifice question is discussed in Diodorus Siculus 20.14, Plutarch De Superstitione 13, Tertullian Apologeticus 9, and elsewhere; the modern archaeological debate is best followed in the work of Lawrence Stager (who interprets the evidence as supporting child sacrifice) and his various interlocutors (who do not).
- Kothar-Wa-Khasis §4.13 Kothar-wa-Khasis is one of the most interesting figures of the Ugaritic pantheon for the comparative student.
- Resheph §4.14 Resheph is among the most internationally attested Levantine gods, with cult evidence from Ugarit, Ebla, Egypt (where he was prominent in the Ramesside period), Cyprus (Apollo Reshep), and Carthage.
- Adonis §4.16 The principal Greek narrative sources are Apollodorus 3.14.4, Ovid Metamorphoses 10.298-559, and (for the cult) Theocritus Idyll 15.
- Baalat Gebal §4.17 The Lady of Byblos is documented in Phoenician inscriptions from Byblos itself (most importantly the inscription of King Yehimilk, c. tenth century BCE, and that of King Yehawmilk, fifth century BCE, both invoking her), in Egyptian Bronze Age finds at Byblos identifying her with Hathor, and in Greek and Latin sources of the Roman period identifying her with Aphrodite.