Reviews

In his classic Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (1964), the eminent American Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim devoted a brilliant chapter to religion, in which he explained “Why a ‘Mesopotamian Religion’ Should Not Be Written.” Oppenheim deeply lamented the meager and disjointed archaeological, iconographic and literary remains, and he concluded that the conceptual chasm separating us from the ancients would never allow for a coherent, meaningful understanding of Mesopotamian religious beliefs. Fortunately, Oppenheim’s pessimism has not deterred other major scholars, who are hardly fools rushing in where he feared to tread. Two particularly important works are Thorkild Jacobsen’s […]