Religion and Humanity in Mesopotamian Myth and Epic

Religion and Humanity in Mesopotamian Myth and Epic
Page 
21
of 
23
Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Religion. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a 
single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
date: 22 December 2022
30. Tzvi Abusch, “Sacrifice in Sacrifice in Mesopotamia,” in Sacrifice in Religious Experience, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten 
(Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002), 44.
31. Gwendolyn Leick, “Sexuality and Religion in Mesopotamia,” Religion Compass 2.2 (2008): 119–133.
32. Jean Bottéro, Au commencement étaient les dieux (Paris: Tallander, 2004), 95.
33. Louise M. Pryke, Ishtar (London: Routledge, 2017).
34. Sexual violence in Enki and Ninhursaga has been considered in detail by Alhena Gadotti, “Why It Was Rape: The 
Conceptualization of Rape in Sumerian Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129.1 (2009): 73–82. 
Gadotti sees Enki’s first three sexual encounters as rape, but the experience with Uttu as a “failed sexual encounter,” 
76.
35. The complicated nature of Uttu’s parental involvement with the plants that result from her encounter with Enki is 
considered by Dickson, and considered to be not “really” pregnancy. Keith Dickson, “Enki and Ninhursag: The 
Trickster in Paradise,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 66.1 (2007): 20–21.
36. Dina Katz, “Enki and Ninhursaga, Part 2: The Story of Enki and Ninhursaga,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 65 (2008): 331– 
332.
37. JoAnn Scurlock, “But Was She Raped? A Verdict through Comparison,” NIN 4 (2003): 103.
38. Gadotti, “Why it was Rape.”
39. Sasson, “Comparative Observations, 220.
40. Caitlin Barrett, “Was Dust Their Food and Clay Their Bread? Grave Goods, the Mesopotamian Afterlife, and the 
Liminal Role of Inana/Ishtar,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 7 (2007): 54.
41. Dina Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2003), 235.
42. Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the nether world,
ETCSL 1.8.1.4
.
43. JoAnn Scurlock, “Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Mesopotamian Thought,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near 
East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), vol. 1, 1892.
44. Cristiano Grottanelli and Pietro Mander, “Kingship: Kingship in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” in Encyclopedia 
of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones (2d ed.; Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 5163.
45. Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13–16.
46. Scott Noegel, “Mesopotamian Epic,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 
2005), 242.
47. Noegel, “Mesopotamian Epic,” 238.
48. Sasson has noted that ancient Near Eastern myths and epics share this tendency to blend historical (or ahistorical) 
features with fantastical or supernatural elements. See Sasson, “Comparative Observations,” 220.
49. Herman L. J. Vanstiphout, “Enmerkar’s Invention of Writing Revisited,” in DUMU-E -DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of 
Åke W. Sjöberg
2
, ed. Hermann Behrens, Darlene M. Loding and Martha T. Roth (Philadelphia: Samuel Noah Kramer 
Fund, University Museum, 1989), 522–524.
50. Sagburu is noted by Gadotti as one of very few women mentioned by name in the Old Babylonian Sumerian 
literary corpus. Alhena Gadotti, “Portraits of the Feminine in Sumerian Literature,” Journal of American Oriental 
Society 131.2 (2011): 196.
2

---