This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Mobile People, Mobile God: Mobile Societies, Monotheism, and the Effects of Ecological Landscapes on the Development of Ancient Religions

Mesopotamian Temple Sites by Dedication

This page has annotations:

Contents of this annotation:

This page is referenced by:

The Case of An/Anu
It seems clear from this case that the development of Zoroastrianism was inextricable from its roots in the religion of the ancient Iranians, a religion, itself, partly derived from the religion of the Indo-Iranians. It seems unreasonable to assume, given this narrow lineage, that an established polytheistic worldview could have been thrown out in favor of an unfamiliar monotheistic one. It is much more plausible that the worldview which characterized the religion of the ancient Iranians was monotheistic in nature. To scholars like E. O. James this conclusion is too strong because the characteristics of supreme deities among polytheistic religions so closely resemble monotheistic conceptions of the divine that, in the words of Egyptologist Erik Hornung, “[f]rom a modern, strictly logical point of view, it would take only one small step to turn this unique god, this god of all gods, into a single one who tolerated no other deity besides himself.”¹ It is cogent to our discussion to consider the case of a well-established polytheistic “god of all gods” to understand the inextricable relationship between the conception of a deity and its context within a particular religion. Thus, in order to understand the significance of a specifically mono- or polytheistic worldview to conceptions of a supreme deity we next must turn to a brief examination of the Mesopotamian deity An/Anu.²
In his glossary of Sumerian names in The Literature of Ancient Sumer, Assyriologist Jeremy A. Black describes An as “the supreme deity, very distant from the affairs of humans.”³ In a very concise way, this statement sums up the treatment and functions of An/Anu in Mesopotamian religion. It is important to consider whether or not there is a natural path of evolution or development from supreme deity of a polytheistic religion to singular god of a monotheistic one. The characterization of An (known as Anu in Akkadian texts) resembles that of monotheistic deities in a number of ways: he is universally recognizable, ever-present, and impossibly distant. It is the functions of the An/Anu character within a variety of literary and archaeological sources that we must briefly examine in order to understand how he exhibits these characteristics and exemplifies the reality of ultimate power in his removal from the daily concerns of life in both the heavens and earth.
Mesopotamian texts reveal the character and position of An/Anu to be consistently presented as passive, powerful, and transcendentally present. Within the mythological literature there are the three forms in which An/Anu is made present in the various myths: as a source of power, as distant bystander, or as a discussing, delegating superior. The name of An/Anu appears in a large number of myths in extant Sumerian and Akkadian available corpora, though this is frequently in the abstract as he is referenced by other characters present in the narrative. When he appears directly he is either observing action from afar or interacting primarily to delegate actions to a subordinate deity. There are few ways in which An/Anu functions within the mythological texts but each of these remind the reader of his position of power: so great he need not be subject to the struggles of life. We can see a similar trend in An/Anu's appearance and treatment in iconography. Just as the deity's Sumerian written name serves as a generic marker for the divine, the other symbols associated with An/Anu are so often used as markers of divinity that they cannot be assumed to indicate the visual presence of An/Anu in Mesopotamian art and architecture. Finally, it is important to note the presence of An/Anu in temple-site dedications, for it is within these (or lack thereof) we find data suggesting that Mesopotamians, in practice, did not consider the ritual worship of this deity an integral part of religious life. In a sample of 37 temple sites listed by Seton Lloyd in The Archaeology of Mesopotamia and Anton Moortgat in The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia, the meager number of temples dedicated to An/Anu supports the characterization of the 'supreme deity' as distant and unapproachable.⁴ Out of these 37 identifiable sites (nearly half of which are dated to the Sumerian period), there are only two temples dedicated to the deity, and one of those is shared with a dedication to Adad, the storm/rain god. It is clear that despite his position as supreme deity of Sumerian civilization, the sky god was regarded as less actively involved in earthly functions that other deities.
To some, such passive authority, distance, and transcendent power might appear sufficient to describe a monotheistic deity, however, E. O. James suggests: “To be effective, gods, whatever their rank and status, must be ritually accessible and efficacious, immanent as well as transcendent.”⁵ This is important to contextualizing a deity like An/Anu, whose distant authority and passive functionality provide the ultimate example of power which can only exist in a highly populated (and hierarchically vertical) religious system in which the various needs of all levels of human society can be addressed by any number of other deities. This point is emphasized by James:
Everywhere it would seem there is always a small minority to whom the purely transcendental aspects of religion make a ready appeal, but for the majority it is only, or at least chiefly, at certain times and seasons, such as birth, marriage and death, the solstices, sowing and harvest, that the religious emotion is aroused to any very appreciable extent.⁶
In a context such as Mesopotamian religion, which understood the purpose of human life as primarily working on behalf of the deities, it is not surprisingly that, within the hierarchy of life-forms, there would be a natural inverse correlation between power and work. An/Anu exemplifies the extreme opposite to the average human, on such a scale: whereas the latter must work constantly and live 'at-effect' in the world, the 'supreme deity' is so removed from the concerns of work that his presence is best understood as theoretical rather than concrete. It is within this context that the construction of An/Anu as a supreme deity make sense and it is within this system that he is able to 'function' as a passive, powerful, and transcendent being. If we are to consider a theoretical path which might lead a “god of all gods” from a native polytheism to the position as sole deity of some monotheism then we must imagine a revolution so drastic that the treatment and characterization of a deity such as An/Anu would be fundamentally changed – so much as to hardly be recognizable. While such radical innovation is not impossible (as we shall see in the case of Egypt), it is reasonable to consider it improbable. Recalling our examination of the religion of the ancient Iranians, from its influence on the Zoroastrian religion, it seems implausible that the development of the latter (with its expression of monotheism) was the result of such a drastic revolution. In order to look beyond this one example, we must next examine the case of the Israelites.

¹ Erik. Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 21.
² Sumerian: An; Akkadian: Anu
³ Jeremy A. Black, The Literature of Ancient Sumer (Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2004), 360.
⁴ Seton. Lloyd, The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest, The World of Archaeology; World of Archaeology. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); Anton Moortgat, The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia; the Classical Art of the Near East. (London,: Phaidon, 1969).
⁵ James, The Worship of the Sky-God., 9.
⁶ Ibid., 8.