Assyrian Religion
Originalveröffentlichung in: Eckart Frahm (Hrsg.), A Campanion to Assyria (Blackwell Companions to the ancient world), Hoboken NJ 2017, S. 336-358 CHAPTER 18 Assyrian Religion Stefan M. Maul What is actually Assyrian about “Assyrian religion?”1 This question immediately arises in any study of the Assyrians’ religious beliefs, their divine cults, their piety, their prayers, and their rituals. After all, most of the great gods venerated in Assyria bear the names of the very same deities that were venerated in the ancient civilization of southern Mesopotamia, and in Assyria too were these gods bound to the mythological narratives that had taken their literary form in the south. Many hymns to the gods, prayers, and descriptions of rituals that circulated in Assyria were inspired by Babylonian and Sumerian models, or were copies of texts that origi nated in Babylonia. Assyrian temple architecture and art are likewise indebted to Babylonian traditions in a fundamental way. To what degree the south influenced Assyrian culture and religion is clear from the fact that, both in the divine cult and in the official proclamations of Middle and Neo-Assyrian kings, the prevailing idiom used was not the native Assyrian lan guage, but rather the languages of the south - primarily Babylonian, which was closely related to Assyrian, but also Sumerian, which was already extinct by the early second millennium bce. During the late Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian periods, these Babylonianizing ten dencies were strengthened considerably as Assyrian rulers consciously attempted to give, at least outwardly, a Babylonian appearance to their systems of government, their institutions, their ceremonies, and their piousness, whether it was in order to make Assyria appear more familiar to the kingdoms and principalities of the Near East that were strongly influenced by Babylonian culture or meant to dissociate from Babylon the symbols of Babylonian culture that were connected to its claim to power and to transfer them to Assyria.
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