The Ancient Deities People Called Upon

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with Assyriologist and public educator, Megan Lewis. I met Megan when I was a postdoc, and in addition to being a brilliant scholar, she was my go-to person when I was considering starting my YouTube channel, given her successful education platform, Digital Hammurabi.

While Digital Hammurabi covers a lot of areas, Megan really loves Mesopotamian religion. Recently, she even started a short form video series about it.

In this episode, we explore the deities people called upon in the past when they needed help with something and what types of requests they made, as well as how we know all of this.We also talk about that series she created called Dial a Deity, in which she acts as an operator directing people’s prayers and requests.

In fact, we’re gonna start our conversation by playing a clip from one of her episodes.

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5XTv_ZaXddw

Megan: You’ve reached Dial A Deity. This is Megan speaking. How may I direct your prayer?

Oh. Hair regrowth. You know, I don’t think there’s someone assigned to that in particular. We have hairdressers. That’s not, it’s kind of the opposite problem, though. You can try Lahmu and Lahamu. Yes. Their names literally mean “hairy” servants of the god Enki. I’ll put you through. If they can’t help, just give me a call back and I’ll see if I can find someone else for you.

Smiti: So, I really love that video about ancient hair regrowth, and all your videos really play to the range of things people maybe need help with or might call upon deities for.

And I was wondering how do we know which deities people really called upon and what kind of sources help us understand those relationships?

Megan: There’s quite a lot of different sources that you can look at, if you’re looking at the elites. And unfortunately, most of our written records are elite based. We’ve got royal inscriptions, which will tell you what kings were concerned with, maybe what they needed help with, mostly what they wanted to be remembered for.

But the deities that they reference in combination with specific like building projects or military conquests can be quite telling. So unsurprisingly, you get the goddess Ishtar tied a lot to military conquests, building projects. You tend to get, if they’re restoring a temple, it will be the god of the temple that they’re restoring, that they, they dedicate their inscriptions to.

We have a lot of things like incantations, which don’t always call on specific deities, but will show you what kinds of things people were interested in, what they wanted to prevent, what like natural phenomena they wanted to encourage.

So there’s, my personal favorite is an incantation against excess gas in the human body, which doesn’t have a deity linked to it. I wish it did. It’s hilarious. There’s one about toothache, which involves like the, taking, like the incantation kind of takes you back to prime ordeal times and there’s this worm that burrows into someone’s tooth and kills it. So you, that’s a whole thing.

But a lot of those incantations do have specific deities called upon. And interestingly, sometimes they are the, the one we might expect and sometimes they’re just deities that were really powerful. And like, Shamash is the god of justice. He’s the like literal sun and he gets called on a bunch, not just for issues of law and that kind of thing, but because he’s a really, really powerful figure. And if you need help, you can go to a specific deity, see if there is one for that problem, or you can just call on the most powerful thing that you can think of, which is the sun.

We also have letter prayers. Which sometimes are thanking deities for intervening in someone’s life. If we’re very lucky, we’ll get specifics about what happened. If we’re not, we’ll just get like the name of the deity or we’ll know like where it was excavated and what temple it was found in.

There are oracle questions, so people writing out what questions they need the gods to answer. They tend to be very deity specific because there are, there are gods who are specifically associated with oracular matters. Again, Shamash is a huge one for that.

And then we’ve also got a large body of mythology and literature, and that is, that can be a little tricky because we don’t really know how much that was kind of integrated into the lives of non-elite people. I would assume that if these stories were important enough to be written down, they were probably quite widespread and, and quite common. So if you see a story about like Enki. Enki, big trickster deity that turns up in several different places, it’s probably likely that that was a facet of his personality that was very widely accepted, not just an elite thing. So you can, you can look at the, the mythologies as well and work that kind of thing out.

And my last one that I really enjoy is personal names, because personal names in the ancient world were quite often whole sentences. And they usually had a theophoric element, so they had a divine name contained within that, that sentence, that name sentence. And it’ll tell you something like “Nabu gave an heir.” So the god Nabu, the scribal god is responsible for the birth of this, this child, this son. And I, I really like that ’cause it gives you a nice insight into how people kind of thought about the very personal impact that gods had on their daily lives.

Smiti: Gotcha. That’s really fascinating. And, and just to clarify, when we’re speaking of the ancient world in the work you’re doing, what parts of the ancient world are you drawing from?

Megan: So it’s very broadly the ancient Near East. I tend to stick to Mesopotamia and occasionally venture into the Levant. So Canaanite, Ugaritic territory. I have had some Egyptian history classes as a grad student, but I am absolutely not qualified to talk about that, so I don’t. But no, Mesopotamia, so Babylon and Assyria, primarily.

Smiti: Gotcha. So when you’re looking at these sources, you see people are turning to deities for various reasons, and you mentioned some funny and delightful examples before, but I’m wondering, was there a request or a moment in your research that felt especially surprising or intriguing to you?

Megan: Sure, about surprising. There was a a really, there’s an incantation that, it just feels really poignant. It’s a parent essentially trying to get a child to, to sleep, a young child, to stop crying and to go to sleep, and they’re telling the baby like, you have to stop crying. You’re going to wake out up like this, this mythical creature, this like house bison, which was one of the guardian spirits of, of domestic space. It’s like you, you have to stop crying. You’re going to wake it up. As someone who has spent an awfully long time with screaming children in the middle of the night, it just, it felt very real.

Smiti: I could totally relate to that. And I guess in the case of a screaming child, if the child stopped screaming, maybe you had attributed to, okay, the deity got my call and answered that prayer.

But I’m wondering how did people, you know, expect their requests to be heard. How did they expect to hear back?

Megan: Couple of different ways. If you are looking at things like oracular petitions, then they are questions asked before, with Mesopotamia, a lot of the time they’re asked before extispicy readings. So before the diviner sacrifices, sheep, goat, whatever it is you’re using and looks at the entrails are usually the liver. And because you ask the question ahead of time and then you, you do the reading that gives you very, very specific answers. So then, you know, and you kind of go away and, and live your life.

Um, there are omens that are, they’re called unprovoked omens. So they’re omens that just happen like solar eclipses, or lunar eclipses, or a massive storm, or something along those lines. And, you don’t have a question beforehand, so then you have to go to divinatory texts and specialists to try and work out, okay, what is this omen telling us? What message is this bringing from the gods?

If you are calling on a God to help you with something you might not expect like a direct answer in that way, your answer will be either the thing you need help with is resolved or it’s not. And one thing that we do see is if people are having a really, really hard time with health, with like just life in general, things keep going wrong for them, that is very often seen as the consequence of some kind of supernatural force. So either there’s some kind of messing with you and you can call upon a deity for protection to stop that, or you’ve offended a god. And if you’ve done that, you are in trouble. And then the procedure is to try and work out which god it is you’ve offended. So you can then try and fix that rift and, and then you know that you’re successful when, when your luck begins to turn.

Smiti: Gotcha. That’s really fascinating, and it’s made me think a bit more about just the role of gods, especially in, I guess what we would term like polytheistic religions. I grew up Hindu personally, so I’m very familiar with having multiple gods and you know, ones with vibrant personalities as well.

So, I was wondering, could you introduce us to a deity that might not be very well known, but maybe has a particularly memorable or vibrant aspect of their personality?

Megan: I think my favorite, who is less known as the goddess Nisaba, and she is a very early Sumerian deity and she starts out as the goddess of grain.

And then somewhere along the way acquires, like, dominion over the scribal arts as well, which seems like a bit of a, a bizarre jump. And then when you go back and look at how writing developed in Mesopotamia, it actually makes a lot of sense because writing comes to be because people were using it for things like inventory, um, and tax records. They needed to have some way of, of writing down of recording, keeping track of what they had given to the temple in taxes, how much grain they’d taken in or from the fields so they knew how much to ration out for their family or for their workers.

So the goddess of grain becoming also the goddess of scribal arts actually makes quite a lot of sense because that’s, that’s how writing started and she keeps, she keeps on like that for quite some time. You get a lot of literary texts will finish with praise be to Nisaba, with scribes kind of giving thanks for their ability to write, their ability to read, and and dedicating whatever it is they’ve written to that goddess.

Unfortunately, when we get to the Old Babylonian period in the reign of Hammurabi, uh, he elevates the city god of Babylon, Marduk and Marduk’s son is the god Nabu. Uh, and then as Marduk is elevated, Nabu is also elevated, and he is kind of given Nisaba’s, like, role as patron of scribes, I guess. Uh, and Nisaba is his, seen as being his wife, and she, she’s still, you know, important and she still does the writing thing, but Nabu is now the god of scribes. And I’m like, that’s just some shit. Don’t like that.

Smiti: Absolutely. We definitely need justice for Nisaba. But it’s also a good example of how deities aren’t static and, you know, they change, whether it’s in domain and personality, or even responsibility.

And I’m wondering if you could give us another example of a deity who underwent a change that you find particularly interesting.

Megan: The goddess Inanna is a early Sumerian goddess. She turns up a lot in erotic literature. She’s the goddess of sexual love and desire. She’s an absolute princess and does a lot of like foot stomping and, and complaining to her daddy when things don’t go quite her way.

And as time goes by and kind of the, the politics of the region change and the… so Sumerians generally lived in, in the south of Mesopotamia, we’ve got the Assyrians or Arcadians in the north. As the Assyrians kind of rise in their power, they have a goddess called Ishtar, who is goddess of sexual love, but also goddess of warfare.

And the two deities kind of get merged together, which is a really common thing in the ancient world. It’s called syncretization. With polytheistic societies, you have a goddess of love. I have a goddess of love. They share some characteristics. They’re probably the same deity. So then the, they, the two get, get merged and they will share names and, and share domains quite lots.

So you get this morphing of Inanna, who actually was also very early on a grain goddess, lots of grain goddesses. Um, this kind of young goddess of love in the Sumerian literature, she’s usually speaking as someone right before her wedding. She’s in love with her, her, her bride groom. She’s kind of on that like cusp of maturity. And then she kind of morphs into Isht- or morphs into, joins with Ishtar, who is still like young, they’re not old deities, but Ishtar’s role is much more. Demuzi, her husband, is much less important in the Ishtar literature than he is in Inanna’s kind of love songs, I guess.

Smiti: You have such an artful way of describing these deities. I could totally imagine Inanna just stomping around. And with your Dial a Deity series, even though these are relatively short videos, you are able to give us a good feeling of what the deity might have been like.

And I’m wondering, when you’re creating these episodes, how do you balance that playful tone with the complexity of the ancient sources?

Megan: I think. I think by accepting that given the length of the videos, I’m very constricted with how much information I can share. So picking one or two key elements for people who maybe haven’t heard of this deity before.

I get a lot of people who are just coming to this for the first time. I don’t want to overwhelm them with like 12 different facts about the god Nabu. No, no one wants, wants that. So picking like one or two things and I try and find maybe a, a less known fact. ’cause I, I do have a good amount of people who have been with me for a while or who have more of a background in the ancient world. So I, I want to give them something extra that maybe they weren’t aware of as well.

So I, I guess trying to keep it simple, but I do have a lot of fun coming up with different scenarios. Um, people submit stuff to me, which is, I really, really enjoy. It takes me usually a while to get back to those because I want to make sure I do them justice. But occasionally I’ll just be driving to pick up my kids from daycare and an idea will pop into my head and I think, ah, that’s an interesting one. I bet I could find a God to fit to that. Yeah, I really enjoy it.

Smiti: That’s great. And we’re enjoying it too. And it’s a series that’s clearly resonating with folks and you know, I know as online archeology or just online public educators, it can feel like a grind sometimes the changing platforms, or platform needs and changing algorithms, and it’s sometimes hard to figure out what will actually resonate, but also that fills our cup.

So with Dial a Deity, it’s clearly resonated with people, but what has it meant to you personally?

Megan: It’s been a really refreshing way for me to do this work because before I started Dial a Deity, most of what I have done has been long form interviews, which I, I can’t tell you how much I enjoy them. It’s so much fun. Well, you know, so much fun to sit down with an expert and ask them all of your questions. And people are so enthusiastic and so passionate and they want to share what they know. And I, I love doing it so much, but I don’t have time at the moment for putting in the effort that’s required. I mean, interviewing, the actual process will take an hour. Sitting down and researching them and coming up with the questions and making sure that like the flow is right and that they’re questions that my guests can answer. It’s really time intensive and I love it and I miss it quite a lot, but I just, I’m not at a point in my life at the moment where I have the time for it.

So finding something that lets me share my enthusiasm as someone who’s been in love with Mesopotamian religion and mythology for like nearly two decades now, but allows me to share it in a way that is sustainable. Because I can sit down and I can record four Dial a Deity shorts, and depending on how quickly I release, then that’s me, like I’m done for a couple of weeks. And then if I have a spare 15 minutes and I’ve got a bunch of ideas rattling around in my head or I’ve written them down on my phone, I can sit down and record a bunch more.

So it’s, it’s been really liberating to have a format that I can keep up with and that people enjoy so much. I was definitely not expecting people to enjoy it as much as they have.

Smiti: Well, I think your enthusiasm translates on screen too. And that’s my, you know, non-expert opinion on why this series has definitely captivated people. And I’m so appreciative that we got a chance to talk a bit more about the scholarship that goes behind creating the series.

And to close this out, what do you hope listeners here take away from our conversation about, how people in the past called upon their deities?

Megan: I think that, and I think this is something that comes across in the video series as well, that people in the ancient past had almost identical concerns and worries to what we are currently dealing with, right? You have people worried about their health, you have people worried about their children, people worried about their jobs. They’re starting a new project, and they just want a bit of divine assurance that it’s going to be okay.

And the fact that we’re separated by what, three, four, 5,000 years and in many cases, a half a country, half a country, half a globe, we’d all still, like, people and we just, all of us, I think, well, the vast majority of us just want to live the best lives we can and bring something good into the world.

Smiti: One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that both humans and deities were dynamic, complex, and in certain instances, when they were in need, they sought the assistance of someone they thought could help.

If you’d like to follow Megan’s work, you can check out her website, digitalhammurabi.com, and that website has links to her YouTube channel, socials, and so much more. And of course, the Dial a Deity series. You’ll find those links in the show notes along with the link to a full transcript of this episode.

And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn more about the educational content on Digital Hammurabi, as well as which ancient language Megan recommends to beginner learners, she shares that and more in a Patreon exclusive video.

Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our extra content. If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Megan Lewis: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Brooke Norton: Production Support

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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