I understand ‘‘religion’’ here as the totality of beliefs and practices within a particular society that structure the relationship of men and women to the unseen but everpresent beings and powers with whom they share their world. These para-human elements might include deities, demons, the dead, and impersonal forces such as fate or cosmic harmony.
In regard to the Ancient Near East, the quantity and quality of source material available for the study of religion vary greatly across the different eras and cultures. For most of the third millennium bce we have little beyond artistic representations of worship on seals (Winter 1986) and stelae, stone slabs, or pillars (Canby 2001), and records of disbursements for cultic purposes extracted from economic archives (Sallaberger 1993: 305-14). In addition, we can draw inferences concerning religious ceremonies from building inscriptions deposited in temples such as the cylinders of Gudea (Edzard 1997) and hymns composed for the gods on behalf of the rulers of the Ur III kingdom (Klein 1989).
In contrast, for the first millennium we can avail ourselves of voluminous instructions for the performance of the state cult in both Assyria (Van Driel 1969: 139-69; Menzel 1981; Pongratz-Leisten 1994) and Babylonia (Thureau-Dangin 1921; Beaulieu 2003b). Furthermore, we have numerous texts describing magical rites (Abusch and Van Der Toorn 1999). This is not to mention the extensive discussion of procedures and requirements for worship presented in the Hebrew Bible, particularly in the book of Leviticus (De Vaux 1961; Miller et al. 1987).
Second millennium sources currently known include a few rituals from the Mesopotamian world (Thureau-Dangin 1939; Westenholz 1994), many texts pertinent to the cult and pantheon of the Middle Euphrates region (Fleming 1992, 2000; Beckman 2002a, in press a), and the tablets discovered at the ancient Syrian port city of Ugarit (Del Olmo Lete 1999; Pardee 2002). But above all we may consult the extensive archives compiled by the Hittite scribes to assist the kings of Hatti, in what is now central Turkey, in fulfilling their obligations toward the gods. Since the topic of Hittite worship is so vast and the cult of Hatti is in many ways representative of that of the Ancient Near East in general, I will limit myself in this chapter to a sketch of how religion was realized in action among the Hittites.
World History
