Concepts of Life in Ancient Mesopotamian Textual Sources

This article presents an overview of Mesopotamian conceptions of life as grasped in Akkadian words denoting »life« and »living being« found in cuneiform texts from the second and first millennium bce. The contribution discusses the semantic spectrum of these words and their relations to a field of associated concepts involving binary terms (such as life/wellbeing vs. death/sickness), and analyzes the characteristics ascribed to different categories of (living) beings or »life forms.« The discussion ends on the question whether Mesopotamian cultures developed clear notions differentiating between animate and inanimate beings, concluding that beside a hierarchy of life forms, textual sources also tend to blur the distinction between animate beings and inanimate things. Various entities and processes in the environment or lifeworld were regarded as part of a divinely ordained cosmic order of existence, erected upon a primordial cosmos based on the eternal principles of gender, procreation and descent, representing the principles from which all life forms originate.