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The God's House as a Business

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The God's House as a Business

The Sumerian word e, house, applied equally to an ordinary family dwelling and to a god's temple, and Mesopotamian temples were organized very much along the lines that comparison suggests: as households, complete with land to work, livestock to tend, stores to manage and a large staff to run it all. Beyond the relatively small number of priests who performed the actual cult rituals, a temple household employed scribes to keep its extensive records, overseers to manage its fields and herds, brewers and bakers to produce the food and beer its offerings and its staff both required, and weavers to produce textiles, some of which clothed cult statues in garments such as the kaunakes documented elsewhere on this religion's page.

Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary of Mesopotamian religion and Nicole Brisch's edited volume on the region's gods both treat this economic dimension as inseparable from the temple's religious identity rather than as a secular add-on, since supporting the god's daily material needs, feeding, clothing and housing the divine image, was itself understood as a central act of piety, not a bureaucratic afterthought to worship proper.

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