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The god Marduk and his dragon Mušḫuššu. Ancient Mesopotamian religion encompasses the religious beliefs (concerning the gods, creation and the cosmos, the origin of man, and so forth) and practices of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia between circa 6000 BC [1] and 400 AD.
The ancient Mesopotamians regarded the sky as a series of domes (usually three, but sometimes seven) covering the flat earth [16]: 180 and a place where holy stars resided. [17] Each dome was made of a different kind of precious stone. [16]: 203 The lowest dome of heaven was made of jasper and was the home of the stars. [18]
Ancient Sumerian cylinder seal impression showing the god Dumuzid being tortured in the underworld by galla demons. The ancient Mesopotamian underworld (known in Sumerian as Kur, Irkalla, Kukku, Arali, or Kigal, and in Akkadian as Erṣetu), was the lowermost part of the ancient near eastern cosmos, roughly parallel to the region known as Tartarus from early Greek cosmology.
The dominant religious rituals and beliefs of ancient Egypt merged and developed over time. As an example, during the New Kingdom, the gods Ra and Amun were syncretized into a single god, Amun-Ra. [5] Such syncretism should be distinguished from mere groupings, also referred to as "families" such as Amun, Mut, and Khonsu.
Map showing the extent of Mesopotamia. The Civilization of Mesopotamia ranges from the earliest human occupation in the Paleolithic period up to Late antiquity.This history is pieced together from evidence retrieved from archaeological excavations and, after the introduction of writing in the late 4th millennium BC, an increasing amount of historical sources.
The ancient Mesopotamians regarded the sky as a series of domes, usually three, but sometimes seven, covering the flat Earth. [6]: 180 Each dome was made of a different kind of precious stone. [6]: 203 The lowest dome of the heavens was made of jasper and was the home of the stars. [7]
Mesopotamia's image of the world, following the path Gilgamesh takes in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cosmology refers to the plurality of cosmological beliefs in the Ancient Near East, covering the period from the 4th millennium BC to the formation of the Macedonian Empire by Alexander the Great in the second half of the 1st millennium BC.
[251] They represented "eternal time as a prime force in creation," [241] and it is likely they developed as a personified form of a preexisting cosmological belief. [242] A single text identifies them as ancestors of Enlil instead. [251] They appear for the first time in an incantation from the reign of Samsu-iluna (Old Babylonian period). [242]