Civilization History Lesson

Question: Sumer. Akkadia. Babylon. Who came first, who came last, and who stole from who when it came to religion?

Well, some of that question's easy to answer, at least! We tend to talk about Mesopotamian civilization as a whole, but "Mesopotamia" is really a geographical label for the fertile crescent area in what is modern-day Iraq, and it covered several successive civilizations.

Sumer came first. The Sumerian civilization is the oldest in history, probably beginning at least six thousand years ago, and it consequently boasts the oldest religion ever recorded, with evidence of cults and shrines starting about five thousand years ago. Though their gods are more well-known in their later Babylonian forms, it is in Sumer that they first became venerated as the patrons of various city-states and areas within the empire; An (who becomes Anu), Enlil (Ellil), Enki (Ea), Inanna (Ishtar), Nanna (Sin), Utu (Shamash) and Ningirsu (Ninurta) all have their roots here. Sumer lasted as the ascendant power in Mesopotamia for almost three thousand years, finally being conquered and largely ending around 1800 B.C.E.

The Akkadian empire definitely rose later than Sumer, but it was also a contemporary of theirs, reaching its peak a good half millennium before Sumer went into decline. The two cultures shared a great deal of language and religious material between them; they basically became "sister empires" that boasted cities that spoke both languages and did as much cultural borrowing from one another as they found necessary. They worshiped mostly the same gods (though they also borrowed from other nearby cultures, particularly the Canaanites), but contributed to their transformation more than a little bit - not only in beginning the transformation of their names thanks to Akkadian taking over linguistically from Sumerian, but also in changing their character. Inanna, who is more of a classic gentle goddess of love and fertility in ancient Sumeria, is a good example; it was during the Akkadian synthesis that she began to gain more elemental characteristics and warlike demeanor.

Akkad lasted an appallingly short time for a Mesopotamian civilization, not quite two centuries old when it collapsed (which means it was both younger than Sumer and didn't last as long - ouch). Its collapse led to the remnants of the empire splitting in two directions, giving birth to the other two great empires of the area: Assyria (which you didn't mention, but they're hella important when talking about Mesopotamian religion!) and Babylon.

Assyria rose in the northern part of Mesopotamia, running from a century or two before Akkad's collapse until about 625 B.C.E., give or take a few years. Like Akkad, they continued the trend of using the original Sumerian gods and adding their own personal touches to them, and again they shaped some of the gods' personalities more toward the way we now know them, including enhancing Inanna's connotations as a goddess of sexuality, emphasizing Ninurta's uncontrollable strength and beginning to venerate Nergal more highly than he had been in earlier religions. The Assyrians also borrowed even more Canaanite religion since they often waged military campaigns in Canaanite lands, with the results being that Baal, Astarte and Dagon might sometimes be seen rubbing temple-elbows with the Mesopotamian gods. Their most unique contribution to the area's mythology was the elevation of the patron god of Assyria, Ashur (a much later, now sun-associated version of the old Sumerian god Anshar), to be the head of the pantheon, which sometimes meant he was considered the same as Enlil and other times meant he was considered to have eclipsed the older king of the gods. They're so all about Ashur, in fact, that they wrote a separate version of the Enuma Elish epic in which it's him that conquers Tiamat, saves the world and becomes the due ruler of the gods.

And finally, the most famous to all of us thanks to the influence of the Bible, there's Babylon. It's the youngest of the Mesopotamian cultures but arguably the most memorably powerful, thanks to its vast influence over other kingdoms (to be fair, some of the earlier kingdoms didn't really have a lot of other peoples to interact with yet) and world-renowned strides in law and culture. Babylon was founded a few centuries later than Assyria, and it remained mostly unremarkable (even being conquered by Assyria a time or two) until the time of that historical rogue Hammurabi, who united its floundering provinces and turned it into one of the military powerhouses of the ancient world. The names of the Mesopotamian gods we're most familiar with come from Bablyon, where Inanna became Ishtar, Utu became Shamash and so forth. We remember Babylon for a lot of things, not least the famous Hanging Gardens that were one of the original Wonders of the World or the Code of Hammurabi, possibly the oldest complete set of laws known to man, but their most major religious contribution is, of course, the indomitable Marduk.

Marduk was around in previous Mesopotamian religions, but he wasn't very important; at best, he was a minor son of Enki or Utu, associated with ran and plant life but mostly eclipsed by the more powerful gods who performed the same functions. But Marduk was the patron god of the city of Babylon - and, more importantly, the special patron god of its famous king Hammurabi, and Hammurabi decided he was just going to go ahead and make that the case for everybody. By royal decree, he had the Enuma Elish written to tell everyone about how great Marduk was and all the awesome stuffhe did, declared him the official king of the gods (which, it was hastily said, was totally cool with Enlil and Enki who were completely happy to step aside for him), and practically overnight transformed him from a minor-league rain-god into the big-brass-balls king of the universe we now know and love. And there he stayed; nobody ever tried to argue with Marduk's reign again (except the Assyrians with Ashur, but look where they ended up), and he rode the wave of Babylonian religion unchallenged until the empire finally collapsed after being repeatedly conquered by the Persians and Greeks in the first few centuries C.E.

It's not really accurate to say that anyone "stole" from anyone else here, because all of these civilizations are really just splinters that split off from one another; they're from the same area with largely the same language and culture, so the difference between them is only as pronounced as, say, the difference between Alaska and the Yukon. They shared common roots and a common religion, which each successive kingdom kept the core of but remade details around to help make it their own. That's the major reason we always have to talk about Mesopotamian religion instead of specifically Sumerian or Babylonian, because, like the centuries of change and growth from the various kingdoms of Egypt, it's not a bunch of different pantheons but rather one pantheon changing over the vast period of time that it was worshiped. Talking about just Sumerian religion would be like talking about only the Old Kingdom in Egypt, when everybody was zoomorphic and the wars between the different divine factions hadn't yet happened; it would leave out too much awesome stuff.

So embrace all of Mesopotamia - Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon alike. They're different time periods with different rulership, but they're united by a single growing religion that survived for literally thousands of years longer than most others, and mythology from any one of them is fair game for use with the Anunna in games. The politics of the successive kings (Enlil, Enki, Ashur and now Marduk) alone is a place ripe for intrigue and plot stuff, and with this many thousands of years of cult practice and mythology to fall back on, you almost can't help but come up with something awesome for your games.

I don't know if you guys wanted to know that much about time period and kingdom in ancient Mesopotamia, but y'all should know by now that asking me about ancient religions in historical terms is like poking a tiger with a stick.