The Pathos of the divine existence in Mesopotamia: Reconstruction of a cycle through text and image

Abstract

According to the Epic of Gilgameš, the Anunnakki reserved eternal life for themselves, bestowing mortality to Humankind, at the moment of its creation. This distinguished unequivocally the superiority of the first over the latter.
However, Mesopotamian deities showed feelings, sensibilities and behaviors similar to those experienced by their worshippers. Numerous narratives present evidences for this humanity, allowing the possibility to analyze the questions deities had to deal with on different stages of their existence. The mirrored effect between the divine and human actors can even be identified in the possibility of divine death, which obviously, was never definite.
Based on the analysis of mythopoetic and iconographic sources, we aim to reconstruct a narrative which displays the Mesopotamian divine pathos, exploring the several levels of deities’ existential cycle.