Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 52:2 (NA 2001)
Article: Mesopotamian Religious Syncretism
Author: Simon J. Sherwin

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Mesopotamian Religious Syncretism1

Simon J. Sherwin

This thesis attempts to examine the question of syncretism, more particularly the merging of deities and their functions, in the light of the political and historical situation in Mesopotamia in the 3rd and 2nd millennia bc. This is a text-based project and both Sumerian and Akkadian sources have been used, including god lists, hymns and prayers, narrative texts and historical documents. These come from a variety of geographical locations, including Ugarit, Ebla, Emar and Mari as well as sites within Mesopotamia proper.

An introductory chapter sets out to define terms, in particular what is meant by the elusive word ‘syncretism’, along with other terms as ‘equation’ and ‘identification’, which are employed time and again throughout the investigation. This chapter also seeks to deal with general problems associated with the sources, namely the provenance, geographical spread and dating of texts, and to give an outline of Mesopotamian concepts of the divine, in particular the association of deities with certain cities, divine hierarchy and relationships, and the idea of individual portfolios.

The bulk of the thesis divides into two: the first part is a discussion of the sources, the second, case studies. The sources are treated in the order given above, each comprising a separate chapter (Chapters 2 to 5). Each source type is examined and the sub-categories of the source type analysed to determine the value to the investigation of information contained in different texts. A further objective is to ascertain whether certain genres are more applicable than others to a study of this nature.

To take hymns and prayers for example, there are a large number available both in Akkadian and Sumerian, only a minority of which are overtly syncretistic (i.e. expressly equate different deities, either in whole or in part). Of the remainder some can be immediately ruled out

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for the topic under consideration, namely those that do not mention any deity by name (self-praise of kings, or prayers to unnamed personal gods). Others which only mention deities incidentally are also of little value in this study. This still leaves a considerable body of texts which may or may not be of any use. I therefore examined the different genres of text to see whether some were more likely than others to yield relevant material. This served to limit the corpus still further. It may be noted that prayers with a hymnic element are likely to be conservative in content: they invoke deities on the basis of their existing portfolio and characteristics; their aim is not to invent a new theolog...