2020_On the beginnings of Mesopotamian “theology”_announcement

Des Polythéismes aux Monothéismes, 2020

This study deals with the development of the Mesopotamian religions with great analytical clarity. Dr. Bott analyses this development from the point of view of its conditionality by political power structures and its manifold transformations through the millennia. Unfortunately, both aspects are not self-evident in academic religious studies. Firstly, religion is too often reduced to the level of spiritual ideas in an euphemistic way, overlooking the extent to which these ideas are conditioned by concrete political interests. Secondly, it is notoriously overlooked or suppressed that and in what way male deities achieved their dominance in the various theologies, namely by only gradually and by no means effortlessly overcoming the dominance of female deities in the prehistoric and early historical theologies.

“Ancient Mesopotamian Scholars, Ritual Speech, and Theorizing Religion without ‘Theory’ or ‘Religion’.” Pages 153–175 in Theorizing ‘Religion’ in Antiquity: From Eusebeia to Impietas. Edited by Nickolas P. Roubekas. Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture. London: Equinox: 2019.

Tyndale bulletin, 2001

This thesis attempts to examine the question of syncretism, more particularly the merging of deities and their functions, in the light of the political and historical situation in Mesopotamia in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. This is a text-based project and both Sumerian and Akkadian sources have been used, including god lists, hymns and prayers, narrative texts and historical documents. These come from a variety of geographical locations, including Ugarit, Ebla, Emar and Mari as well as sites within Mesopotamia proper. An introductory chapter sets out to define terms, in particular what is meant by the elusive word 'syncretism', along with other terms as 'equation' and 'identification', which are employed time and again throughout the investigation. This chapter also seeks to deal with general problems associated with the sources, namely the provenance, geographical spread and dating of texts, and to give an outline of Mesopotamian concepts of the divine, in particular the association of deities with certain cities, divine hierarchy and relationships, and the idea of individual portfolios. The bulk of the thesis divides into two: the first part is a discussion ofthe sources, the second, case studies. The sources are treated in the order given above, each comprising a separate chapter (Chapters 2 to 5). Each source type is examined and the subcategories of the source type analysed to determine the value to the investigation of information contained in different texts. A further objective is to ascertain whether certain genres are more applicable than others to a study of this nature. To take hymns and prayers for example, there are a large number available both in Akkadian and Sumerian, only a minority of which are overtly syncretistic (i.e. expressly equate different deities, either in whole or in part). Of the remainder some can be immediately ruled 1