Religious Discourse in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract The modern representation of cuneiform literature as a creation depending on a religious discourse leads us to think that myths and rites have structured not only the institution of kingship, but also all Mesopotamian knowledge, as well as social life. If political ideology needed a religious support to explain the king’s authority and privileges, later textual traditions show that the same intellectuals working for the royal court and urban elites developed at the same time, beyond religion, an alternative conception of their own power as knowledge and control of history, through narration, and nature through “magic”, in order to change reality and the gods’ will.