Temple Household (E)

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.

Three temple households anchor most modern scholarly understanding of how the institution worked in practice, each attached to one of Mesopotamia's most important cult centers. The Eanna, house of heaven, was the temple household of the goddess Inanna at Uruk, and its administrative archives, spanning a remarkable stretch of Mesopotamian history, remain among the richest surviving sources for how a major temple economy actually operated day to day. The Ekur, mountain house, belonged to Enlil at Nippur, the religious center whose authority other Mesopotamian cities looked to for validation of kingship, while the Esagila, house whose top is high, was Marduk's temple household at Babylon, closely bound up with the Akitu New Year festival and the political theology of Babylonian kingship.

Each of these households functioned, at its city, as an economic institution substantial enough to rival or actively partner with the royal palace for control of land, labor and surplus, a dynamic scholars see repeated across Mesopotamian history in different forms, from the well documented palace-temple tensions of Old Babylonian Ur to comparable frictions many centuries later around the temple estates of New Kingdom Egypt.