What Sorts of Rituals Really Went on Inside Late Babylonian Temples?

By Rocío Da Riva

The Late Babylonian period (late 1st millennium BCE) is one of the most familiar to historians and philologists of ancient Mesopotamia because of the vast number of cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian that have come down to us.

A large number of tablets, roughly 3,500 to 4,000, were unearthed in the 19th century during excavations of Babylon, specifically in the vicinity of the Esagil temple, dedicated to worship of Babylonia’s patron god Marduk. The tablets, many of which now reside in the British Museum, contain texts addressing the entire curriculum of sciences and arts that ancient scribes could master. Scholars assume that all the documents once belonged to the Esagil temple library, which operated between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE as a veritable repository of “scientific excellence” on a par with the celebrated library of Alexandria. The texts include a very important group on rituals relating to the other temples of Babylon, which provide in-depth descriptions of the procedures and actions that must be performed in worship.

The Persian conquest of Babylonia (539 BCE) brought radical transformation to Mesopotamia. It marked the end of the last independent state in Babylonia and the progressive decline of a centuries-old official culture passed down through the Akkadian and Sumerian languages in cuneiform script on clay tablets. This elitist, urban culture revolved around political power (the crown) and religious power (the temples), while the bulk of the population expressed itself in Aramaic, whose language and writing system (generally on perishable materials) had been replacing Akkadian throughout the first half of the 1st millennium BCE.

Much more consequential was the incorporation of the huge territory into the empire of Alexander the Great (331 BCE). The Seleucids, Alexander’s successors in Syria and Mesopotamia, changed Babylonia’s cultural and social configuration. With political power in foreign hands and the region’s capital shifted to Seleucia-on-Tigris at the end of the 4th century BCE, Babylon would never again be the great metropolis from which, as in the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, the destinies of much of the Near East had been decided.

While it was undermined by centuries of foreign cultural influence and reduced to priestly settings, Sumerian-Akkadian culture was not to disappear for some time. Indeed, the period’s intellectual activity and scientific and literary production single it out as one of the crowning moments in Babylonian history. This activity and dynamism in science and research, in the cultivation of knowledge of all sorts, and in literary and scientific output took place in the temples, which played a key role in Babylonian social and intellectual life and in the preservation of its ancient cultural and literary heritage.

The Esagil temple library contained a wide selection of technical texts (astronomy, mathematics, medicine, religion, exorcism, divination), along with a collection of literary and historical texts. Scholars working in the Esagil not only preserved and safeguarded this knowledge, but also researched and produced new reference works. The sociocultural conditions of the Hellenistic period stimulated creativity, research, and science.

Among these texts we find tablets and fragments, mostly unpublished, relating to aspects of the rituals, ceremonies, and topography of Babylonian temples. The texts depict the worship of deities in the temples of the capital city Babylon, particularly in the Esagil temple dedicated to the Babylonian patron god Marduk, but also in sanctuaries in nearby cities, such as Borsippa, Dilbat, Marad, or Sippar. In addition to the famous New Year’s festival (Akitu), the texts describe other festivals and occasions of worship, and myriad liturgies and events relating to temple worship, whether periodic in nature (daily, weekly, monthly, and annual events) or extraordinary (eclipses of the Sun or moon, coronation ceremonies, etc.).

It is not clear whether the ritual texts actually provide information on ceremonies and rites that were being performed during this period, because it cannot be ruled out that they may be copies of older compositions that recorded rituals in the past. In any event, the texts have extraordinary significance for the study of religion in Babylonia, regardless of the date of their creation. As they contain rituals that amount to a kind of highly elaborate handbook of ritual procedure, we have at our disposal a major corpus in which we can find descriptions of every type of worship activity, such as offerings and libations to the gods, along with the prayers and songs to be recited during liturgies. The rituals deal with various topics of public worship, such as the New Year’s festival, the evening vigil, the evil consequences of a lunar eclipse, etc.

The ritual texts provide a whole host of information on the activities of public worship in the sanctuaries of Babylonian cities. The study of the ritual texts is also essential to complete the picture of the Esagil temple both as a library (where the ritual texts were written down and preserved) and as a temple (in which the rituals prescribed in the texts were presumably carried out).

Another important aspect is to identify the participants in the ceremonies in order to better understand the structure and operation of the temples and their personnel. By studying the people who performed the rituals (e.g., priests, exorcists, musicians, and singers), we can better grasp the functions of those working in the temples, not only in the enactment of the rituals, but also in other operational areas, such as in their economic, cultural and social spheres.

The rituals also provide highly valuable topographical information on the temples and their chapels, the altars and the pedestals where the deities were placed. As the instructions for the rituals always refer to specific gods and particular spaces, they are useful in reconstructing the topography of the temples (their size, structure, architectural features, and furnishings) and of the cities where the rituals took place (their street plans, bridges, and urban chapels). The texts provide information that we cannot study from the archaeological record.

Lastly, the rituals illustrate the deities that were the focus of the liturgical services as well as the spatial and hierarchical relations that existed between the different gods and goddesses. Information of this sort is rarely found in canonical texts, making it highly valuable for studying the Babylonian pantheon.

Official worship was practiced in temples and sanctuaries. During the Hellenistic and Parthian periods, the primary (but not the only) sanctuary in Babylon was the Esagil, dedicated to Marduk, the patron god of Babylonia. The archaeological and documentary sources show that the Esagil consisted of several buildings. It was a temple complex that contained other minor temples, chapels, administrative buildings, libraries ,and so forth. Based on the textual and iconographic evidence, the Babylonian pantheon did not change after the conquest of Alexander the Great and the temples endured in the city’s topography in spite of political change.

Attending to worship and organising rituals and ceremonies were the tasks of temple personnel whose posts and duties varied widely. The documents provide information on the preparation and serving of meals and offerings to the gods, the recitation of prayers, the singing of hymns of praise and ritual lament, the care given to the statues of gods, the organization of the daily temple cult, the performance of exorcisms, the purification of the premises or of the gods, and so forth. The chief official was the high priest (aḫu rabû) and most of the high-ranking personnel (šangû, āšipu, barû) were men. Many of these individuals belonged to a category known as ērib-bīti, literally “(person) who can enter the temple”. These persons were authorized to enter the temple and carry out tasks as artisans (goldsmiths, silversmiths, carpenters), as staff in charge of preparing and serving offerings of food and drink (cooks, bakers, brewers, etc.), or as officiants of rituals or ceremonies.

The ritual texts dedicated to goddesses also refer to a large number of female staff: priestesses, singers and other officiants of the worship. These documents, particularly the ones relating to the goddesses Ištar and Nanaya, also feature participants in worship and rituals that belong to categories that would today be described as third gender, e.g., the assinnu and the kurgarrû.

The documents also contain new information on the king’s participation in public worship. Indeed, the texts describe the monarch’s close involvement in the celebration of the New Year’s festival, when he intoned chants or recited prayers, made or received offerings, or took part in a variety of festivals and ceremonies (rituals for temple building or for the lunar eclipse). As noted, nothing suggests a break between the worship of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods and the Hellenistic and Arsacid periods, but it is unclear whether the Macedonian kings took part in worship as actively as their predecessors. The image of the Seleucid king that emerges is that of a monarch who was highly “proactive” in worship. Perhaps the Hellenistic monarchy’s involvement in worship and the king’s apparent participation in line with ancestral traditions and rites indicate a political desire to be linked to Babylonia’s legitimate dynastic past.

In the Mesopotamian religion, the gods were represented with an anthropomorphic statue that functioned as a divine image, but also represented the personality of the particular deity, which appeared with an almost human aspect. The gods (i.e., their statues) had to be given food and drink, clothed and unclothed, washed and put to rest, combed, adorned in jewels and applied with makeup. Among other things, they also had to be prepared for festivals and special occasions and carried aloft in procession to visit other gods in other temples and cities.

Religious ceremonies, rituals, and festivals were fundamental to worship of the gods and served as elements of cohesion between the divine and human realms. In addition, the ceremonies functioned as milestones in the year’s worship calendar, each with its own purpose and function. The ultimate function shared by all ceremonies was the protection of the community and the care and safeguarding of relations with the divine.

There were basic rituals to perform daily and others to perform on a monthly or yearly basis, and so on. In addition, some ceremonies were performed on special occasions, such as the building of a temple or during eclipses of the Sun or moon. The periodicity of the ceremonies was clearly marked out on the Babylonian calendar in line with astronomical observations.

The day began and ended at sunset, but from the viewpoint of worship, the day started in the morning, slightly before sunrise, with the ceremony known as “waking of the temple”, which was followed by the ritual of “opening of the gate”. Depending on whether or not the day involved special festivals, a particular series of ceremonies followed, such as the two morning meals and the two afternoon meals. The cultural day ended after the clearing away of the two afternoon meals with the “closing of the temple gate”.

A key element of worship is the offering of food and drink, organised into a fixed sequence, an offering table, purification with water, perfuming the air with aromatic substances, and consecration. All types of food and drink were offered, particularly fruits, meats, and dairy products. The divine meals were enlivened with music and recitations of prayers. Curtains placed in front of the divine figures or in their chapels played an important role in giving the meals a spatial structure, setting apart the locations of the offerings, and a temporal one as the opening and closing of the curtains punctuated acts of worship.

These ritual texts provide clear evidence of the continuity of Babylonian culture in the Hellenistic and Parthian periods. This culture survived in the temples of the major cities, whose vitality can be studied not only through the thousands of documents on their economic and administrative activities, but on rites and ceremonies relating to worship. All these sources point toward the continuity of Babylonia’s traditional religious practices into later periods.