Between personal and institutional devotion in Mesopotamia : the divine feminine in the Diyala’s glyptic (3rd millennium BC)

Abstract

The traditional view that goddesses were associated mainly with the fertility domain in a personal sphere of Mesopotamian religiosity, based on their maternal/ sexual assets, continues to prevail in the scrutiny of particular sources. Indeed, even if the feminine arouses ideas of prosperity in a broad sense, the tendency to typify their roles, as well as to relegate their agency(ies) to a secondary level, still endures.

In the 1960s Leo Oppenheim critically recalled the methodological and theoretical challenges for the examination of the Mesopotamian religious system, especially concerning the nature of the sources and the current beliefs of the modern analyst. More recently, Goodison and Mooris (1998) brought attention to the religious, social, political and cultural factors that are used, until this day, to perpetuate the standardized roles allocated to feminine divine figures, especially those embodied by Inanna/Ištar. The difficulties are also prominent in the (re) construction of the role of goddesses in the context of personal piety since most of the available sources were a product of the institutionalized sphere.