Mesopotamian gods got drunk, and scholars have counted about 2,400 of them
The gods of Sumer and Babylon ate, drank and suffered hangovers like people, yet glowed with a terrifying radiance called melammu. A 1938 survey tallied some 2,400 known deities, most with Sumerian names. Their worship lasted from before writing until Christianity spread through the region in the first centuries AD.
Religious ideas in Mesopotamia probably took shape in the 6th millennium BC, when better irrigation let people settle permanently, though nothing can be known of them before writing arrived around 3500 BC. The earliest recorded worship treated natural forces as sources of food. A mother goddess, Ninhursag, was venerated as early as the Ubaid period. In the 3rd millennium those forces became a large cast of personal gods with specific jobs, and later stages ranked them like a royal court, with each state's national god at the top.
Two peoples shaped the tradition: Sumerians, whose language has no known relatives, and Akkadian speakers, who arrived between 4000 and 3000 BC. After Sargon of Akkad unified the region around 2335 BC, their pantheons blended, with Akkadians tending to worship fewer gods but raise them higher. Every city had its patron: Enki at Eridu, Enlil at Nippur, Marduk at Babylon, Ashur at Assur. A Sumerian list of around 560 deities, dated to about 2600 BC, already ranked five as especially important.
In Assyria, religion and power fused. Early rulers did not even take the word for king, reserving it for the god Ashur and calling themselves his steward. Later Neo-Assyrian kings, though not divine, ruled as Ashur's chief servant, and as the empire spread from the Caucasus to Egypt, Ashur rose from local deity to overlord, locked in rivalry with Babylon's Marduk. Historian Jean Bottéro saw these gods as masters to be feared and obeyed rather than loved.
Only one text lays out the cosmos systematically: the Enuma Elish, from around the 12th century BC, in which Marduk slays Tiamat, mother of the gods, and builds heaven and earth from the two halves of her body. The tradition outlived political independence. Cyrus the Great conquered Mesopotamia in 539 BC without suppressing its cults, and under Parthian rule temples to Ashur, Shamash and Ishtar revived until Christianity took hold between the 1st and 5th centuries AD.
Source: Ancient Mesopotamian religion
