benefits from religion

With Francis Joannés seventh chapter in The Age of Empires we are finally able to get the fine details of the religious structure that had powerful influence within the societies of ancient Mesopotamia. And the details become quite intricate; from the different organized levels within the organization of the system to what parts of the sacrificed sheep goes to whom it is clear that religion was what heavily formed Mesopotamian culture. What continues to appear is the accepted power the temples had by the people, so much that it seems that maintaining the temples was one of the more important priorities than even the well being of part of the population outside of the temples. This was evident by me from how much food was given to the temples. As Joannés states “Every day throughout the entire year they were served four meals, divided into a main (naptânu rabû) and secondary meal (naptânu tardênu) in the morining, and a main and secondary meal in the evening”(182). It even goes to the point where under one rulers realm the offering for one god reached “the equivalent of the basic food ration for 100 people” (183).

Yet the question of the gods and their relationship to humankind seemed to also be in the minds of some people in Mesopotamia, as is shown in the extract from the Epic of Erra. The story follows the god of “epidemics and massacres” and follows how the god affected Babylon reversing the natural order of things (200). Joannés nicely defines the aim of the author of the story by stating that it was “not only to give a legitimate and sensible explanation for the unhappy events in the history of his town. He was posing the problem of the relations between humans and gods and the justification for evil when it was divine origin” (201). Most of the people used their myths to justify what happened around their lives, but it seemed that the higher elite that controlled the temples and king happened to fall in the lucky position that allowed them reap the benefits of their beliefs.