Julia Krul, M. A.

Institute for Philology of the Ancient Orient and Ancient History of Western Asia

Résumé

PHD Project

The Anu cult of hellenistic Uruk: a structural and historical analysis of the rituals and cult practice
One of the most remarkable cultural changes that took place in southern Babylonia after its annexation by the Persian empire in 539 B.C. was the decline of the cult of the goddess Ištar and the rise of the cult of the god Anu in Uruk. These changes set in after Darius I with the gradual cessation of cultic activity in Ištar's temple, the Eanna, and culminated in the building of the Bīt Rēš, the new temple complex for Anu and his wife Antu, during the reigns of the hellenistic rulers Seleucus I and Antiochus I. The textual finds from hellenistic Uruk, which include several descriptions of temple rituals and numerous administrative texts concerning prebendal offices, demonstrate that under the Seleucids the city of Uruk still enjoyed an active religious life, albeit in an altered form. The cult of Ištar did not disappear entirely, but was transferred from the Eanna to a different sanctuary, the Ešgal.

This intriguing late development in the history of Mesopotamian religion raises several important, interrelated questions: what were the socio-political circumstances that may have contributed to such a shift in cultic practice, why was the god Anu in particular chosen to replace Ištar and how did the new religion of Uruk take shape, both in theological reflection and in the practical organization of the daily cult?

These topics have been addressed by various scholars in the last decades. In 2004 K. Kessler used onomastic material from the ruling periods of Darius I and Xerxes I to argue that Xerxes must have discharged all Northbabylonian families in Uruk – and possibly other Mesopotamian cities – from their religious offices, giving the traditional Urukean families the opportunity to rearrange cultic affairs according to their own preferences. P.-A. Beaulieu has published extensively about the literary and theological texts produced by the new Urukuean priesthood and has reconstructed the ways in which the city's intellectual elite transformed the local pantheon, while taking the utmost care to make the changes appear to be rediscoveries of millennia-old Mesopotamian religious traditions.

These studies offer valuable answers to our questions, using distinct perspectives: Kessler points primarily to the external impact of the Achaemenid king, Beaulieu focuses on the internally developed re-use of ancient religious material. Both scholars, however, emphasize that the cultural transformation of late Babylonia was the outcome of the interaction between external and internal factors. Moreover, they call attention to the fact that a historical understanding of this transformation needs a more extensive coverage. In my PhD project I should like to contribute to this debate by studying the new forms that the cult of Anu and the transformed cult of Ištar ultimately took in their social context.

My analysis will address three aspects of this transformation. Firstly, I will investigate the features of several of the Uruk rituals, mapping which elements can be traced back to older Mesopotamian religious practice and which other elements are possibly a product of the cultural and political changes that were taking place in Babylonia. Secondly, I shall apply the same questions to the architectural structure of the Bīt Rēš and the Ešgal. Thus I hope to uncover more aspects of the "invention of tradition" undertaken by the Uruk intellectual elite. Finally, using the administrative texts from the temple and family archives, I want to try to reconstruct the practical organization of the Bīt Rēš and the Ešgal, in particular the different prebendal offices and which members of which of the city's elite families held these positions. Combining the ritual, spatial-architectural and socio-economic aspects of these cults, my project aims to contribute to our understanding of the way late Babylonian culture reacted, resisted and adapted to the influence of their new neighbours and conquerors.

Research interests:

• history of Mesopotamian religion
• magical and ritual texts
• cultural exchange in hellenistic Mesopotamia
• religious forms of constructing social identity

Function within the Cluster/Membership in Projects and Groups:

• Mid-level faculty member of the Board of Directors of the Cluster of Excellence and of the Assembly of Principal Investigators
• Member of the study group Mixing Religions - Religious Multiple Identities
• Member of the study group Charting the Boundaries of the Religious Field
• Member of the study group Emic and etic perspectives on Religion and Politics

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