World of Gilgamesh
Mesopotamian mythology is the collective name given to Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian mythologies from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. The Sumerians practiced a polytheistic religion, with anthropomorphic gods or goddesses representing forces or presences in the world, in much the same way as later Greek mythology. According to said mythology, the gods originally created humans as servants for themselves but freed them when they became too much to handle.
Many stories in Sumerian religion appear similar to stories in other Middle-Eastern religions. For example, the Biblical accounts of the creation of man as well as Noah’s flood resemble the Sumerian tales very closely, though the Sumerian myths were written many centuries earlier than the Tanakh. Gods and Goddesses from Sumer have distinctly similar representations in the religions of the Akkadians, Caananites, and others.
A number of stories and deities have Greek parallels as well; for example, it has been argued by some that Inanna’s descent into the underworld strikingly recalls (and predates) the story of Persephone. The name Gilgamesh appears once in Greek, as “Gilgamos” (Γιλγαμος). The story is a variant of the Perseus myth: The King of Babylon determines by oracle that his grandson Gilgamos will kill him, and throws him out of a high tower. An eagle breaks his fall, and the infant is found and raised by a gardener.
Each walled city of Mesopotamian civilization in early times was centred upon a temple complex, including the state granary. Archaeology has shown that these temples grew from modest shrines that were associated with the earliest unwalled levels of settlement about 6500 years ago. As the villages and towns where these shrines were built grew so did the shrines. As the towns grew into City-states, the shrines were destroyed, the site flattened, and a larger temple was built upon it. This gradually raised the temples above the level of the surrounding buildings, so that eventually a temple platform (ziggurat or later zikkorath’) was constructed, raising the temple towards the heavens - possibly the origin of the biblical story the Tower of Babel.
The ziggurats were elevated stair-towers, somewhat like the shape of a pyramid stretched upwards, with each level being devoted to one of the known stars of that time, to the sun or moon or to some gods, with the main part of the shrine on the roof, which was a flat surface on which ceremonies were conducted. The ziggurats were considered a place closer to the heavens, a gateway and shrine to the gods and a place for the ruler god of the sky (An in Sumer, Marduk in Babylon and Ashur in Assyria) to lay his feet upon. Literacy seems to have emerged as a requirement of the complexities of temple book-keeping.
As it was believed that the sacred realm mirrored the profane, wars between cities on Earth were seen as paralleling struggles between the divinities in heaven. Each shrine was named after a single god, and with the development of the wide ranging Sumerian civilisation these gods became part of a Pantheon or single family of divinities, known as the Annunaki (Anu = Heaven, Na = And, Ki = Earth). Rather than Anu being seen as “the god” of the heavens, he was the heavens. In this way to the earliest Sumerians, humankind lived inside a living divine realm. Divinities then proliferated, with there being specific gods of tooth-ache, or aching limbs, goddesses for “Greenery” and “Pasture”. Every aspect of life thus came to be surrounded with its own minor divinity that required gifts or placation, as magic spells multiplied, trying to give people certainty in very uncertain times.