The First Dynasty of the Sealand in Mesopotamia by Odette Boivin

Author:Odette Boivin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2018-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

6.4Deities in the palace-sponsored cult

The delivery records of animals identified for sacrifice to a specific deity or temple and the expenditure records for cultic offerings do not present the hierarchical structure found in offering or god lists. However, taken together, the over sixty records make it possible to infer the relative importance of some deities in the palace-sponsored cult because the number of sacrificial animals tends to remain constant for some of them. Of course, the representativity of the information retrieved depends heavily on the accident of discovery as well as on archival operations which the group of texts underwent in antiquity. Therefore, although we can infer some principles of palace-sponsored cultic practice from this corpus, other aspects of it certainly remain hidden to us. In particular, deities with temples whose economy was fairly independent from the palace may falsely appear of lesser importance in the palatial archive, in particular this may have been the case for Šamaš (see Section 6.4.4).

The apparent hierarchical importance of the gods and goddesses as well as the cultic activities surrounding them are discussed in detail below. The deities are presented in order of their importance in the archive, namely, in terms of frequency and importance of the offerings. Ištar, Ninurta, and Nazi stand out, followed by Šamaš and Sîn; cults of lesser importance but presenting specific features of interest are also outlined in the following sub-sections.

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