The Temple in Babylonia and Uruk

Chapter 7 of Francis Joannes’ book The Age of Empires, described Babylonia’s religious and cultural scene. What I found most intriguing about this chapter was the role of the temple in Babylonia, especially in comparison to the role of the temple in Mario Liverani’s depiction of Uruk. Ideology appears to be strongly interwoven with economy in Babylonia, to a greater extent than it was in Uruk.

The importance of the temple in Babylonia’s economy is shown by the existence of a class of citizens known as prebendaries. Prebendaries were ordinary citizens with typical jobs whose services were employed by the temple. For example, a baker might be called upon by the temple to furnish offerings of bread for the gods. In exchange, prebendaries would receive some form of consignment from the temple. Notably, the status of “prebendary” was transferred from generation to generation; thus the title was perpetuated.

In this sense, the temple acted as a source of employment for many Babylonians. Not only was the temple exerting power over the citizens solely through ideological power, as in the city of Uruk, it was using also economic power to achieve its goals. By combining ideological and economic power through its encroachment into the economy, the temple seems to have expanded its power vastly since Uruk. The inheritance of the status of “prebendary” further serves to emphasize the centrality of the temple and to drive home the point that a large number of citizens depended on it for survival.

The role of the temple in Uruk was less economically-driven. Based on Liverani’s descriptions, it seems like the temple acquired goods and crops from the people strictly through monopolization of a claim to ultimate meaning, in contrast to the temple in Babylonia, which used both ideological and economic inducements. Perhaps Babylon was a better example of Liverani’s description of Uruk as a “temple-city”.