9/12/23, 7:37 AM Uruk and the origins of the sacred economy - Engelsberg ideas

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Uruk and the origins of the sacred economy

NOVEMBER 15, 2021 DANIEL T POTTS

Peering into the hearts and minds those living four thousand years ago is an
impossible task. However, when it comes to the worship of the Mesopotamian
goddess Inanna, it seems clear to be, quite literally, a labour of love and fear.

Steatite bowl with mythological scenes from the Khafalji tribe, possibly of Elamite origin. The figure could be the
goddess Inanna. Credit: Print Collector via Getty Images.

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In 1964, the noted American Assyriologist, A. Leo Oppenheim, published his

influential Ancient Mesopotamia: portrait of a dead civilisation. ‘Nah ist – und schwer
zu fassen der Gott’, the title of Chapter 4, was taken from the well-known verse
in Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn, Patmos, written in 1803. The first section of this
chapter was provocatively entitled, ‘Why a ‘Mesopotamian Religion’ should not be
written’ and, depending on one’s point of view, it is either extremely dreary
reading, 50 years after it was first published, or a call to arms to try to wrest some
semblance of meaning from an intractable body of evidence that Oppenheim
clearly found very frustrating.

Oppenheim began his defence of this very negative position by insisting upon the
impossibility of deriving insights into what people actually thought and felt from
the physical arrangements of walls, courtyards, passageways, gateways and rooms
‘built to display the power and wealth of the deity and to harbour and protect its
staff and its treasures’. As he noted, by way of comparison, ‘if the monuments of
Western Christianity were preserved for some distant and alien generation, or a
visitor from outer space, what could they possibly reveal of the essential tenets of
their faith?’ Oppenheim was equally dismissive of the utility of studying
iconography for, he felt, ‘Not even a perfectly preserved image could indicate to us
what it meant for the priest and the pious, how it functioned as the centre of the
cult, what its Sitz im Leben was for the community.’

Next Oppenheim turned to three types of cuneiform sources that he felt were
relevant: ‘prayers, mythological texts and ritual texts’. Prayers, Oppenheim felt,
could only be understood in connection with the rituals, during the performance
of which they were recited. Yet while he admitted that prayers ‘convey something
of the mood and the emotional climate of Mesopotamian religion’, they did ‘not
contain much information’ on important topics, such as ‘the individual in relation

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to spiritual or moral contexts of universal reach, the problem of death and

survival’, or ‘the problem of immediate contact with the divine’.

Oppenheim then turned to the subject of myth, which he characterised as ‘stories

about the gods and their doings, about this world of ours and how it came into
being, these moralising as well as entertaining stories geared to emotional
responses’. These sources were dismissed as little more than ‘a fantastic screen,
enticing as they are in their immediate appeal […] but still a screen which one
must penetrate to reach the hard core of evidence that bears directly on the forms
of religious experience of Mesopotamian man’. And he continued, ‘All these works
which we are wont to call mythological should be studied by the literary critic
rather than by the historian of religion.’

Finally Oppenheim turned to ritual texts, namely ‘descriptions of specific rituals to

be performed by priests and priestly technicians in the sanctuary’. Of the insights
to be gained from these sources, Oppenheim was unreservedly pessimistic.
‘Consider what kind of information the codifications of the church rituals […]
would impart two or more millennia from now to scholars from a completely
different culture, who would be able to understand them linguistically only in the
very imperfect way in which we understand cuneiform texts.’

Oppenheim’s views typify what I have often encountered when studying the work
of archaeologists concerned with the mental, ideological landscapes of antiquity,
rather than the physical ones. To them, I have often said, if not in so many words,
that archaeology can tell us many things, but there are entire domains on which it
simply cannot shed any light, no matter how earnest or enthusiastic its
practitioners and no matter how sophisticated the scientific techniques employed
by them may be. To borrow Wittgenstein’s phrase, ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,
darüber muss man schweigen.’ (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be

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silent.) In Oppenheim’s case, I would simply suggest that he was looking for the
sort of insights that the available evidence is incapable of providing. However,
rather than lamenting the opacity of our sources, I would rather focus on what the
documentation at our disposal does reveal.

By way of example, I have chosen to concentrate on the site known to the

Sumerians as Uruk (biblical Erech, Greek Orchoë, Arabic Warka), in what is today
southern Iraq. One of the first great cities in Mesopotamia and the locus of
writing’s invention around 3400 BC, Uruk at its height covered an area in excess
of four square kilometres. According to the Sumerian King List, Uruk’s nine-km-
long, mudbrick city wall, built around 2900 BC, was the work of Gilgamesh, the
fifth king of the so-called First Dynasty of Uruk. Following two exploratory
seasons of excavation at Uruk in 1850 and 1854 by the English geologist William
Kennett Loftus, German archaeologists conducted a further 39 campaigns between
1912 and 2003, concentrating on a large complex of monumental buildings
(including the so-called Limestone Temple, the Mosaic Court, the Square
Building, the Stone Cone Mosaic Temple, Temple C, Temple D, the
Riemchengebäude, the Pillard Hall and the Great Court) known as Eanna –
literally, the ‘house of heaven’ – to the exclusion of all but one other area (the
White Temple) of early 4th millennium BC occupation. Collectively, the buildings
of Eanna constituted the domain, or better yet, the demesne, of the city-goddess of
Uruk, Inanna.

In addition to yielding an enormous amount of information on early architecture,

the Eanna excavations resulted in the discovery of nearly 4,000 Archaic texts, the
earliest examples of proto-cuneiform known from Mesopotamia and the earliest
examples of writing found anywhere in the world. Even though these tablets were
recovered from trash deposits, dumped like archived tax documents we might
dispose of when it is no longer necessary to retain copies, their importance cannot

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be overstated. The Archaic texts were first studied by the great German
Sumerologist Adam Falkenstein, who published a preliminary sign-list in 1936.
Subsequently, work was resumed by Falkenstein’s student, Hans J. Nissen, in 1964
and a major research effort based at the Free University (Berlin), the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and, later, UCLA (Los Angeles),
involving Nissen, Margaret Green, Robert K. Eng- lund and the late Peter
Damerow, has made enormous progress in understanding these texts.

What was writing used for and why did it appear in the middle of the 4th
millennium BC, within the great architectural complex of Eanna, the goddess
Inanna’s household, at Uruk? The earliest texts from Uruk were purely numerical;
but they soon became more complex, combining nouns with numbers and
compound signs, such as a bowl and a stylised human head, meaning ‘ration’.
Complex systems of counting and metrology, as well as time-reckoning, were in
use throughout these texts, some of which chart the growth of herds, from sheep
and goat to swine and cattle. Many texts keep track of rations given out to
labourers for different kinds of services performed, while a sizeable number are
lexical texts. These are lists of words grouped by semantic category, such as names
of professions, trees (and things made of wood), birds, cattle, fish, metals,
containers and so forth. Although in no sense meant to serve as a dictionary or
thesaurus, such texts are important witnesses to the regime of scribal education
practised from the outset by the inventors of writing and the first generations of
Uruk’s scribes.

What do these texts tell us? First and foremost, the Archaic texts confirm that
writing was invented to facilitate accounting and record-keeping. It was an almost
inevitable outcome of an economic system that was becoming increasingly
complex as time wore on, one that involved far more variables than any scribe
could possibly keep track of. Writing was not simply helpful, it was indispensable.

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It rapidly became a tool that was vital for administrators seeking to track income,
expenditure, loss and productivity over the course of days, months and sometimes
years. This was the context in which writing was invented.

Some of the physical elements of Eanna’s economic system – sheep, goats, cattle,
barns, weaving scenes, construction, shrines marked by divine symbols, prisoners
of war and ‘rulers’ in action – are illustrated on numerous cylinder seals and, most
famously, on a 1.05m tall limestone vessel discovered at Uruk in 1929, which dates
to precisely the same period as our earliest texts. The exterior surface of the
Warka or Uruk Vase is sub-divided into registers, showing the agricultural and
pastoral products that were brought to Eanna and registered. Those involved were
paid, i.e. they received rations, in return for their labour and the produce
delivered, by the chief administrator of the entire operation, who was, in effect,
the steward of the estates of Inanna, goddess of Uruk. In other words, the
elaboration of the accounting procedures which we see in action on the Archaic
texts was the work of those administrators – some might call them priests – who
managed Inanna’s estates, Eanna and all of the associated farms, vineyards, cattle
yards, milking sheds, fisheries, etc., as well as the dependent labourers employed
there, from reed-cutters, fishermen, potters and cooks, to barbers, ploughmen,
stockmen and weavers.

The notion, therefore, that economy, society, religion and politics were somehow
discrete domains in antiquity is false. These divisions are artificial. The economic
effort attested in the Archaic texts from Uruk – the raw labour, the herding of
animals, the building of boats, the casting of metals, the fashioning of wood – was
dedicated in toto to Inanna and managed by her worldly overseers. It was this
activity that flipped the mental switch, so to speak, leading to the invention of
accounting and, very soon thereafter, to a precocious form of writing. The fiction
that the awe-inspiring, divine being Inanna was, in fact, the owner of all land and

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fruits of human toil in and around Uruk permitted the goddess’s stewards to devise
a system of resource management and compensation for human effort that
persisted, little altered, for the next 3,500 years. This is not to say that it excluded,
in later periods, either private or royal ownership of land and production, or that
early Mesopotamian society was purely theocratic, but there is no contravening
the evidence of Uruk’s Archaic texts in this phase of Mesopotamia’s social
development, evidence that is as overwhelming as it is unambiguous. This is an
essential, elemental truth about early Mesopotamian religion. It may not have
been the truth that Leo Oppenheim was seeking, but it is the truth imparted to us
by the sources that have survived from the 4th millennium BC.

In recent years much has been written on early religion in the Near East. The
striking animal imagery preserved on carved stone stelae and plastered wall reliefs
at sites like Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyük in Turkey, both of which predate
writing by many thousands of years, have, in part, been responsible for many
articles and entire books dedicated to the subject of Near Eastern religion 8,000–
11,000 years ago. If Oppenheim was pessimistic about our chances of
understanding Mesopotamian religion, even when faced with a wealth of detail
from the cuneiform record, what would he think if he were alive today and could
witness the often extravagant and hopelessly unverifiable speculations of writers
on pre-historic manifestations of religious behaviour in Turkey? How would we
ever be in a position to distinguish those religious rituals presumed to have taken
place at Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyuk, or the spiritual associations of the animals
depicted in low-relief on stone stelae and plastered walls and a host of other
possible explanations? Why should one believe that powerful zoomorphic symbols
necessarily have religious connotations? Who is to say they didn’t have a purely
social meaning, as totemic representations held dear by particular kinship groups,
or as specially charged images of hunted prey of special significance to groups of
hunters?

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Just like prehistoric belief systems in Turkey, Mesopotamian religion, I would

argue, cannot be reconstructed for the period prior to the invention of writing.
Any speculations on belief, the nature of divinity, or the scope of spiritual action,
let alone the character of the pantheon and its regional differences, are simply
beyond the realm of what archaeological sources can ever hope to provide for this
or any other preliterate or aliterate society, for which we lack either written or
oral traditions. And while one can agree with much if not all of what Leo
Oppenheim argued fifty years ago, I would suggest that he neglected to see what
the sources do tell us about early Mesopotamian religion. As noted above, the
Archaic texts show us that Inanna’s demesne, Eanna, was characterised by a
communal effort of labour with a very particular purpose. That purpose, simply
put, was the service of a deity. The labour required to satisfy the deity’s
requirements was managed by a bureaucracy of specialists, whom we would today
identify as a priesthood. This was a system that sustained its adherents. It was
probably less about doctrine and practice, prayer and philosophy, than it was about
sublimation to the overarching power of the deep-rooted, elemental forces that
supported and protected a community.

Divine protection, as we know from later sources, was all-important. Later, as we

know from literary sources dating to between the late 3rd and the late 1st
millennium BC, nothing was considered worse than the rejection of a people by its
chief god or goddess. Enemies might overrun a city, carrying off the cult statue of
the chief deity, but this had more to do with the abandonment of the victim
population by its erstwhile divine protector, than the military prowess of its
worldly adversary. A deity only abandoned a city or land when its people had
sinned. The fault lay not in their stars but in themselves. Inanna was Uruk, its
people were fed and housed in her care, through her benevolence, under her
watchful eye and through the prudential care of her stewards.

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The fact that no ritual texts, hymns, prayers, creation myths or anything that could
be associated with the later manifestations of liturgical literature were to be
codified or written down until over 1000 years after the invention of writing is
surely telling. Religion in early Mesopotamia, so far as the Archaic texts are
concerned, was not an amalgam of mythology, ritual and spiritual belief. It was not
an abstract set of ideals about life as it should be lived, or divine injunctions.
Rather, it was a system of ordered existence, one that was eminently successful in
this phase of human existence, at least as manifested in Mesopotamia. Supremely
polytheistic, even though each city had its chief god or goddess, early
Mesopotamian religion was more about the tending of a deity’s estates, than it was
about being tended for by a god’s love. Death was final and in no way to be
yearned for. There was no concept of resurrection but, while alive, all who worked
for a particular god or goddess were enmeshed in a system of support that
sustained thousands and merged those domains we, in the 21st century, are apt to
fragment under rubrics like society, economy, politics and religion. This was the
essence of early Mesopotamian religion. We cannot account for the first steps that
led to this point, though we can trace the superimposed plans of structures,
eventually identifiable as ‘temples’ in the 3rd millennium BC, one on top of the
other, through the preceding two or three millennia at sites like Eridu, to the
south of Uruk. If the later associations of such buildings with individual deities can
be used to infer earlier patterns of behaviour, then devotion to a specific deity had
a pedigree extending back thousands of years before it first appeared, in
crystallised form, in the Eanna precinct. But as Oppenheim would be quick to
point out, if he were alive today, this tells us little about belief. What it does tell us,
however, is that early Mesopotamian religion was grounded in the earth, in
human toil, in the fiction of divine sovereignty and in an all-encompassing system
of material production and redistribution.

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Early Mesopotamian religion resembles less Chartres, Lourdes, or the Vatican

than it does an integrated system of social, economic and religious effort strong
enough to withstand the harsh environment and fickle climate of the Tigris-
Euphrates river basin and resilient enough to sustain its adherents throughout
many millennia of military and political upheaval. Ironically, as Iraq begins to
fracture, this seems to be exactly what is missing at the present time.

This essay originally appeared in ‘Knowledge and Information – Perspectives from

Engelsberg Seminar, 2018’, Bokörlaget Stolpe, in collaboration with the Axel and Margaret
Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

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Daniel T Potts
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