| Author: | Tallay Ornan |
| Origin: | Fribourg Switzerland, Gottingen Sweden |
| Publisher: | Academic Press Fribourg, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Gottingen, Israel Exploration Society |
| ISBN: | 3-525-53007-2 |
| Publication year: | 2005 |
| Dimensions: | 16.5x23.5 |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Location: | 12Z |
| Volume: | 213 |
| Series: | Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis |
This book analyzes the history of Mesopotamian imagery form the mid-second to mid-first millennium BCE. It demonstrates that in spite of rich textual evidence, which grants the Mesopotamian gods and goddesses an anthropmorphic form, there was a clear abstention in various media from visualizing the gods in such a form. True, divine human-shaped cultic images existed in Mesopotamian temples. But as a rule, non-anthropomorphic visual agents such as inanimate objects, animals or fantastic hybrids replaced these figures when they were portrayed outside of their sacred enclosures. This tendency reached its peak in first-millennium Babylonia and Assyria. The removal of the Mesopotamian human-shaped deity from pictorial renderings resembles the Biblical agenda not only in its avoidance of displaying a divine image but also in the implied dual perception of the divine: according to the Bible and the Assyro-Babylonian concept the divine was conceived as having a human form; yet in both cases anthropomorphism was also concealed or rejected, though to a different degree.