Representation of the Human Body

The human body is presented as something sacred and significant throughout Chapter 3. The Mesopotamians believed that the body was covered in signs and symbols that could be read and interpreted for mysticism. The interesting thing is that every single person's body was covered in symbolism and could be analyzed for signs. “The total organic body was seen as a text” that could be read (76). Mysticism as a whole was huge for the Mesopotamian people, and there were a lot of prophecies that revolved around the body and dreams etc. For example, there is a prophecy that said if a man dreams about a friend eating his face, he will “enjoy a large share” (93). There were many more about dreaming of eating flesh belonging to different acquaintances etc, which begs the question: did people dream about eating each other a lot? Did they actually eat each other? It seems quite strange to have so many predictions revolving around that if it wasn’t even significant to them.

To read about how important the physical body was to the Mesopotamians makes it seem like everyone had value in the culture. This including the servants and the peasants in addition to the royalty and wealthy people. However, in Chapter 6 the book discusses the practices of war. Battle and conflict revolved mainly on trying to capture and steal another region’s god in order to defeat them. This tactic made sense because of the value and life that the statues and images were believed to have. However, when a region was defeated and a god was stolen, the people were deported by the Assyrians and counted in the “booty”. They were counted as inanimate objects and treated as if they were just things. Compared to the view of the times in regards to the significance of the human body, this surprised me. They weren’t treated as significant human beings and bodies that were important for divination, but were treated as cattle or coin. Therefore, it is surprising that they were treated this way as it does not respect the traditions and divinatory beliefs.