i.2.1 Sumerian Mythology

The origins of ancient cosmology date back to the beginning of the fourth millennium BC, with various civilizations such as the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians, who lived in Mesopotamia and developed many sophisticated techniques and calculations in agriculture, astronomy and advanced mathematics, based on the sexagesimal system, that is still being used today in reporting time and dividing the circle into 360 degrees.

Sumer is one of the earliest known civilizations, along with Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley. The Sumerians invented writing around 3000 BC, but their myths were also passed down through their oral traditions. According to their various creation stories, the Universe was a series of seven closed domes surrounded by a primordial saltwater sea, named Tiamat, and the terrestrial earth formed the base of the dome, and underneath it existed an ocean of freshwater, called the Apsu. The deity of the dome-shaped firmament was named An, and that of the earth was named Ki.

The creation started when the watery chaos of Tiamat mingled with the sweet waters of Apsu, and from their mixed waters the gods were born, and then the Heavens and Earths, conceived as two juxtaposed flat disks. Some narrations also stress that the creation of the actual Cosmos is from the original form which originates from water. The gods are viewed as dynamic creatures, in contrast with Apsu and Tiamat who stand for inertia and rest. This contrast leads to a series of conflicts between these gods, eventually killing each other, and arousing again for retaliation. The Universe is created as a result of these conflicts, where one hero god created the extant Universe out of the body of Tiamat, by cutting her in two, making one-half of her into Heaven, and appointing there the Sun, Moon, and stars to execute their prescribed motions, and the other half into the Earth.

Beside An, the god of the heavens, the major deities in the Sumerian pantheon also include Enlil, the god of wind and storm, Enki, the god of water and human culture, Ninhursag, the goddess of fertility and the earth, Utu, the god of the sun and justice, and his father Nanna, the god of the moon. During the Akkadian Period and afterward, Inanna, the goddess of mating, beauty, and warfare, was widely venerated across Sumer and appeared in many myths, including the famous story of her descent into the Underworld.

The Sumerian religion had considerable influence on the religious beliefs of later mythologies and religions of the Hurrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Middle Eastern culture groups. Therefore, there are many parallels between the stories of the ancient Sumerians and those found in the early parts of the Hebrew Bible.