A brief survey of the scholarly literature regarding Mesopotamian temples reveals, among others, one consistent fact about the nature of these buildings: they were considered the 'house' of the deity.¹ Tammi Schneider describes the extent of this conception:

The temple was literally the 'house' of the god and contained the deity's cult image. It was where the god lived with family and servants, ate, drank, slept, was entertained, and worked. In order to thoroughly service the gods, the temple was equipped like a household with essential provisions for the god's meals (kitchens and vessels for making, storing, and serving), sleeping rooms with beds, side rooms for the deity's family, a courtyard with a basin and water for cleansing visitors, and stables for the god's chariot and draft animals.²

This is vital to comprehending the association of temple-building culture with settlement in the extreme case of Mesopotamia. Even without understanding the situation of temple sites in the archaeological record as we have established, it isn't difficult to perceive a logical overlap between societies that build buildings/cities and societies that build temples. In a Mesopotamian context, Van de Mieroop explains, temple-building culture is wholly situated within settled society: “We can thus say that the institutionalized cult in Mesopotamia was entirely an urban phenomenon. Even if gods had powers over elements outside the cities, they could only be venerated in an urban setting.”³ He goes on to postulate a source for the evolution of temple-based worship in Mesopotamia: “This seemingly contradictory situation derived, in my opinion, from the original role that temples played in Mesopotamian society. They were not primarily centres of cult, but centres of administration.”⁴ Van de Mieroop's comments point directly to the correlation revealed by figures 1 and 2, suggesting that religious temple-building culture was concomitantly developed with the civic settlement-building phenomena.

The interconnection between religious and civic/political systems, as Van de Mieroop and Assmann have observed, would have been integral and natural to Mesopotamian society. Tammi Schneider explains that the temple was integral to a sense of belonging and self of Mesopotamians⁵; this connection can best be seen at the level of the city: “The fortune of the Mesopotamian city was connected to its specific deities, whose divine powers in turn rose and fell with the political status of the deity's city. This is evidenced in the Enuma Elish, which reflected the political and cosmic rise of Babylon.”⁶ This localization of a deity is not exclusive to Mesopotamia, but is significant to understanding the extent to which religion in settled societies developed in response to and along with settled culture. Van de Mieroop points out that this interconnection created a specific religiously-shaded perspective on what might otherwise be considered 'non-religious' events concerning a city:

The connection between god and city was thought to have been so close that the decline of a city was usually blamed on its abandonment by the patron deity. Thus, when the Sumerian cities were overrun by invaders from the east in the last years of the third millennium, the literary compositions described their fall in terms of the gods' departure, not as a military disaster.⁷

Van de Mieroop's description paints a picture which might seem familiar to many religious cultures throughout global human history and recalling Herodotus' curiosity at a lack of temples, points to the overwhelming association of religions developed in settled society with urban culture.

Although the connection appears clear, with regard to the case of Mesopotamian temple-building culture, it is worth noting the extent to which the worldview of this particular civilization, and thus religion, was dominated by urban settlement. Schneider and Van de Mieroop agree that the only information available in the archaeological record is of temples built within cities.⁸ This clarifies the context of Mesopotamian sites located within the dataset of the project which has been introduced within this paper and emphasizes the significance of the correlation presented. Van de Mieroop goes further:

...it is remarkable that there is no trace at all of an awareness or recognition of culture outside the cities. Non-urban people had a culture; oral tradition, religion, and art are found universally among villagers and nomads. In Mesopotamian tradition there is no acknowledgement of the fact that they had or could have influenced the urban culture. This is especially true with regard to religion and literacy, where the urban bias is absolute.⁹

This last comment, that “urban bias is absolute” is strikingly appropriate to describe the connection between temple-building culture and the religions of settled societies. The question which cannot be answered by Mesopotamia, by virtue of such bias, is what effect might a lack of such building culture, temple or settlement, have on the development of other religions? In order to consider this question, we must identify such religions as do lack such a culture. Thus we next turn to the temple sites that have been controversially associated with ancient Iranian and Israelite religious cultures.