Mesopotamian Religion Essay

Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is one of the world's ancient civilization centers that was located in Euphrates valley. In this area initial cities were established gathering the vast number of people under the same or identical ideologies. In this sense, religious beliefs of those people have been one of the deciding factors that mattered to keep them together. Generally speaking religion has always been a component of life and psychology which created a way of living since then. Therefore, analyzing this particular component in very first states of Mesopotamian region is important to study the history and culture of the mankind. Another specialty of Mesopotamian religion is that it

According to them, communities believed that everything was created by different gods and ruled by them. At first there was only fresh (Apsu) and salt (Tiamat) water. Later, outgrew of these gods created everything else, for instance, components of nature such as mountains, forests, and features of humans such as wisdom, intelligence, anger and so on. Another most mentioned god was the Marduk, which was served many main temples. It was believed that Marduk was one of the gods who created the new world by winning the battles among the other gods (Heidel, 1952, p. 153). Based on the myths, Marduk was the one who won the battle against Tiamat. The strongest gods had their homes in the main city temples, while the others had shrines and smaller temples. Winning the battle was not the only criterion to be the strongest, however, the community believed that there was a court somewhere in the cosmos where the "Utu", the god of the Sun, is the judge. Utu was also the god of justice and righteousness (Encyclopedia Britannica). All these factors show how powerful and vitally important the religion had been for the societies of Mesopotamia. It affected every part of their daily life more than being a political tool to rule and establish states. People were learning and teaching many things by creating and following the myths. We can confidently state that as a polytheistic belief, Mesopotamian religion was the initiative of so many beliefs afterwards. Because, even today, most worshipped religions had the same or similar basis. Moreover, they have the very identical directions, perspectives, and purposes. The values of life that Mesopotamian religion supported has been the same for thousands of