Mesopotamian religion — Sumerian Babylonian Assyrian

The religion of ancient Mesopotamia — the spiritual world of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria — is among the oldest known organized religious traditions in the world, producing in the Epic of Gilgamesh one of the earliest literary explorations of mortality, friendship, and the longing for immortality. Its pantheon of Anu, Enlil, Enki, Inanna, and the host of divine and semi-divine beings who governed every dimension of cosmic and human life was not a fixed system but a living tradition that evolved over three millennia and profoundly influenced the Hebrew Bible, Greek mythology, and early Christian theology. To read the Descent of Inanna or the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish is to encounter not primitive mythology but a sophisticated civilization's answer to the deepest questions about the nature of reality and the human place within it.