Mythological Contexts for Ritual Killing in Mesopotamia
During the last centuries of the third millennium bce the Sumerian and Akkadian societies of Mesopotamia developed into highly literate cultures, and our knowledge of their respective religious thoughts and ideology is much clearer than it is for the Early Dynastic period.
Incredibly important was the Old Babylonian period (c. 2004-1595 bce), which saw the rise to prominence of Babylonian cities in the south of Mesopotamia; a development accompanied by a burst of cultural expression, particularly in terms of literary production. Indeed, the new myths and epics of this period established themselves as the foundational knowledge of Babylonian and Assyrian societies down to the first millennium bce. What is of importance for us is that there are key episodes in these myths and legends that make it clear that life was expendable in Mesopotamian religious thought. Broadly speaking, conflict, and ritual killing and sacrifice, were often the vehicles of cosmological change with transformative consequences. A well-known example is the murder of Tiamat, which resulted in the formation of the material substance for building the cosmos, that appears in the creation epic Enuma elis.13 Since our focus is on human sacrifice, we will concentrate on two episodes that affect humans: the creation of the human species and the great flood.The tale of the creation of humans in the Babylonian tradition has murder at its heart. According to the myth, Atram-hasls, humans are created after a rebellion of the lower gods against the upper gods over the burden of their toil. To end the dispute, it is decided by the upper gods that humans should be created to bear the burden of the lower gods. The plan as to how to create humans is revealed in a speech by the god Enki to the divine assembly:
On the first, seventh, and fifteenth of the month,
I will establish a purification, a bath.
Let one god be slaughtered,
Then let the gods be purified in it.
Let (the goddess) Nintu mix clay with his flesh and blood, Let that same god and man be thoroughly mixed in the clay. Let us hear the drumbeat for the rest of time, From the flesh of the god let a spirit remain,
Let it make the living know its sign,
Lest he be forgotten, let the spirit remain.14
It is decided that the ringleader We-ila is to be the god murdered for the rebellion, and it is his blood and flesh that are mixed with clay to fashion humans. There are other myths about the creation of humans that have a similar story line. In Enul ma elis, Ea creates humanity from the blood of a slaughtered god, Qingu (another rebel), at the hands of Marduk.15 Similarly in the Unilingual/Bilingual Account of Creation, humans are said to be created from the blood of the slaughtered Alla deities.16 On the one hand, the rebel gods in these myths are killed to absolve their crimes as part of a purification ritual and to re-establish cosmological order over the chaos they have caused, while on the other hand sacrificial murder is a key element in creation.17
13 Beate Pongratz-Leisten, ‘Ritual Killing and Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East', in K. Finsterbusch, A. Lange and K. F. Diethard Romheld (eds.), Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 14.
14 Atram-hasls, OBV, 206-17, in Foster, Before the Muses, pp. 235-6.
15 Enuma-elis, VI, 1-38, in Foster, Before the Muses, pp. 469-70.
16 See W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths, Mesopotamian Civilizations 16 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), p. 355.
17 Pongratz-Leisten, ‘Ritual Killing', pp. 18-19.
Humans of course are not killed in this ritual, but ‘living' divine beings are. In this way, the closing lines ofEnki's plan as revealed in Atram-hasls is poignant: the drumbeat of the human pulse is said to be a reminder for all of the sacrificial killing of a god and, in turn, mortality.
The greatest act in Sumero-Babylonian traditions of divine brutality is the great flood that is sent to wipe all living creatures from the earth. Of the Sumerian and Babylonian myths that provide accounts of the great flood, the most detailed are found in Atram-hasls and The Epic of Gilgamesh, with the former providing far greater insight into the causes of the deluge. Despite the vital role newly created humans play in the cosmic division of labour, they are considered noisy neighbours - too noisy in fact for Enlil and the other great gods. After a period of sleep deprivation, Enlil, with the support of the other great gods, rather capriciously decides to reduce the human population first through pestilence, then by disease, and later famine. When humans prove too resilient for these attacks, Enlil decides to wash humanity away once and for all with a flood. The human species is saved by the god Enki, who reveals the gods' plan and instructs a man of Shuruppak, named Ziusudra in Sumerian and either Atram-hasls or Ut-napistim in Akkadian, to spurn material possessions and build a boat to save his family and a wide variety of animal species. Similarities with the Noah myth in Genesis 6-9 are clear. However, it has often been noted that there is a key difference between the Hebrew and the Mesopotamian traditions with regards to the reasons for sending the flood. In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh sends the flood in response to humanity's evil behaviour, and thus it is an act of punishment meted out in accordance with a moral ethic. The decision of Enlil and the Mesopotamian gods, however, appears impulsive and a reflection of their capricious nature.[932] [933] The idea that the end of all life is within the prerogative of the gods is also stated in the Epic of Erra and Isum, where it is said that one of the chief purposes of the god Erra, who embodies the brutality of war, is to clear out the overpopulating humans and animals who no longer fear armed conflict and Erra himself.19 Hence, there is a consistency to be observed across these myths, including the Hebrew Bible, despite its ethical context of the flood: humanity is an irritant that the deities purge to restore order. This is a concept that is also present in medicine and the rituals discussed below.
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