Tag: Ancient Mesopotamia

Articles

Astral Divination in the Context of Mesopotamian Divination, Medicine, Religion, Magic, Society, and Scholarship

The fundamental premise lying behind celestial and other forms of divination in Mesopotamia was that the gods would, on occasions, impart information to humans through signs, that could bode both well and ill, providing a positive or negative answer to a query, or more specific (unfalsifiable) information on what will happen in the future.

Articles

The Concept of God/the Gods as King in the Ancient Near East and the Bible

The first section of this paper will survey some of the texts which archeologists have found in the ancient Near Eastern world to see how men describe their gods. Because the ancient world had so many gods, because of the large number of texts and because of the complexity of trying to reproduce an accurate conceptualization of a term like “god,” there will be no attempt to present a total picture of each god, during each period, as it was seen by each different class group within the society.

Articles

Virginity in Ancient Mesopotamia

‘A virgin body has the freshness of secret springs, the morning sheen of an unopened flower, the orient luster of a pearl on which the sun has never shone. Grotto, temple, sanctuary, secret garden – man, like the child, is fascinated by enclosed and shadowy places not yet animated by any consciousness, which wait to be given a soul: what he alone is to take and to penetrate seems to be in truth created by him.’