Notes

1. Formative Tendencies in Sumerian Religion

1. On religion and the study of religion generally, see Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London, 1943); G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (New York, 1938); Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen II: Das mythische Denken (Berlin, 1925). 2. For general orientation, see, e.g., E. Dhorme, Les Religions de Babylonie et d'Assyrie (Paris, 1945). 3. C£JNES 12 (1953), p. 167, note 27 [see below, Chap. VJ. 4. The credit for first recognizing the true nature of the Mesopotamian cult drama belongs to Sv. Aa. Pallis, The Babylonian Akitu Festival (Copenhagen, 1926). On the nature of the identity involved, see the work of Cassirer cited above in note 1.

3. Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns

1. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902); Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, ninth impression, 1943); G. van der Leeuw, La Religion dans son essence et ses manifestations (Paris, 1948), §110. 2. It is, of course, in no way our intention to try to reduce religion to fear, or to fear and its counterpart hope; merely to distinguish and try to trace these important components of the human religious response for ancient Mesopotamia. A more comprehensive statement we have tried to give in "Formative Tendencies in Sumerian Religion," The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (New York, 1961), pp. 267-278 [see above, chap. i]. See also our article," Assyria and Babylonia. Religion," in the 1963 printing of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica [see above, chap. ii]. As particularly characteristic of the ancient Meso• potamian response we tend to see its unreflected apprehending of the numinous as will and power in and for the specific situation in which it was experienced to come into being and be. The numinous was thus experienced not as one but as many different poyvers, form was attributed to these different powers in terms of the different situations in which they were thought to be encountered, and human values in the situation, whether good or evil, tended to condition the response as 319 320 Notes to pages 39-40 one of allegiance or one of avoidance and defense. It was particularly in this evalua• tion of situations that the human urge to seek security and salvation became guiding for selective attention and directed primary allegiance toward powers in situations and phenomena recognized as basic for human survival, powers in the basic economies. General presentations of ancient Mesopotamian religion may be found, e.g., in E. Dhorme, La Religion assyro-babylonienne (Paris, 1910}, whicn in many respects is not superseded by the same author's Les Religions de Babylonie et d'Assyrie (Paris, 1949). See also J. Bottero, La Religion de Babylonie et d'Assyrie (Paris, 1952}, and cf. H. Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure ofAncient Man (Chicago, 1946; also in Penguin edition as Before Philosophy, 1949), and D. 0. Edzard in Worterbuch der Mythologie, ed. H. W. Haussig, section I. 1. 3. I.e., Ubaid, Warka, Protoliterate, and Early Dynastic I incl. Generally we may say that in attempting to organize the varied materials for ancient Mesopotamian religion within a meaningful temporal framework we have been guided by the following considerations: (1) The sources available for the earliest periods down to the later parts of Early Dynastic are almost exclusively archaeological in nature, written sources of some substance begin late in Early Dynastic but flow freely only at two points in time, in the Old Babylonian period and in the Neo-Assyrian and later periods. We are thus rather unevenly informed and must often have recourse from the less well documented to the relatively fully documented periods for understanding. Such recourse, however, very obviously presents problems of method. (2) Most striking, perhaps, is the case of the earliest periods. Interesting and suggestive as are the materials directly datable to these periods it is quite clear that they do not in fact constitute an autonomous body of evidence interpretable in and of itself; rather, dependence on later evidence is so essential for understanding that if the early materials were left to stand by themselves they would be largely meaning• less and incoherent. (3) While recourse to later evidence is thus necessary for understanding of the earlier materials such recourse must not be had uncritically, for the later materials cannot be considered of a piece but represent a stage of a developing tradition comprising elements directly surviving, elements surviving more or less altered and reinterpreted, and elements that are new developments altogether. Before they can be confidently used they must be carefully analyzed and evaluated, observable differences in basic religious attitude and form must be discerned, internal criteria of relative age considered, and the various strata of tradition distinguished as far as possible. Only thus can they be utilized for the interpretation of older data without obvious danger of anachronism. (4) As an important criterion in the evaluation of the later materials we consider the observable difference between "intransitive" and "transitive active" view of the gods. All ancient Mesopotamian gods appear to be the power in and for some phenomenon, they are gods, e.g., of heaven, of the storm, of the sweet waters, of the moon, of the sun, of birth, of fertility and yield, of reeds, of barley, of beer• making, etc., etc. However, whereas some of them such as, e.g., the god Dumuzid,