The Pantheons of Adab

Doctoral research on the gods of a Sumerian city across the third millennium BCE, read as markers of power, institutions and social identity.

  • Thesis: Gods of the City, Gods of the People: The Pantheons of Adab in the Third Millennium B.C., University of Toronto, 2024. Read it in the Toronto repository.
  • Advisor: Paul-Alain Beaulieu
  • Funding: SSHRC Doctoral Award; Jackman Humanities Institute Junior Fellowship; University of Toronto fellowships

Adab (Tell Bismaya), between Umma and Nippur, has left thousands of third-millennium texts but no temple archive. The thesis treats its gods not as agents but as markers of social organisation and identity, and reconstructs three pantheons from three kinds of source: the gods of the city in royal and votive inscriptions, year names and festivals; the official pantheon in the palace’s offering lists, temples and cultic personnel; and the popular pantheon in the theophoric names of the city’s inhabitants. Traditional philology is combined with corpus and network analysis, including community detection on networks of people who appear together in the texts.

Findings

  • Regional rulers and local rulers chose different gods for their inscriptions. The kings of Akkad dedicated to pan-Mesopotamian deities, the governors of Adab to the city’s own gods, Dingirmaḫ above all. The choice served to legitimise power.
  • The gods ranked by palace offerings do not match the gods of the elite inscriptions. The official hierarchy stayed stable, with Dingirmaḫ first, then Ašgi, Inanna and Iškur, while cultic personnel were named more and more often in the records, a sign of the palace tightening its hold on the temples.
  • Personal names carry more than piety. God names and other elements mark gender, cultural belonging and social group: children of parents with Semitic names bear Semitic names, and people with Semitic names who were not agents of the central authority worked together.
  • The label “mother goddess” is shown to cover several distinct roles, and the architectural temple and the institutional temple are argued to be different things that the sources rarely let us equate.

Data

Lemmatisation, parts of speech and named-entity tags for every administrative text in the corpus, prepared for release through the CDLI in CDLI-CoNLL format, together with corrected metadata for the Adab texts. The converter written for the analysis, conll2graphml, turns such annotations into network graphs for any CDLI corpus.