The Instruments of the gods

In ancient Mesopotamia, the ideology of the king as divine, or at least divinely appointed instrument for ruling over the people, supported the theology of the gods as supreme yet deeply bound to the physical. Another corollary supporting this view of their gods is seen in the way they thought about weapons. Like the king, weapons are more than the instruments of physical might and military power, and they carry symbolic importance in representing this power. This fits into their concept of the divine and the mundane; everyday things could be transformed into ordained instruments of justice or peace if sanctioned or blessed by the gods. Bahrani claims that this was the case for the instruments of war; weapons "were sometimes deified and named" and "made divine through ritual incantations" (Bahrani 189). Just as every king of the time claimed to be the chosen representative and tool of the gods, the very weapons and technologies they used to carry out the will of the gods were divine and ordained.

It is interesting that though the 'holiness' of gods would seem to be diluted by applying the label of "sacred" to numerous ordinary objects, the supremacy of the gods is maintained because it is through these ordinary objects that they exercise their sovereign control over all aspects of life. The gods may appear to be limited in that they may only act through these physical instruments and omens, but to the Mesopotamian mind this was not a limitation; they believed the gods were working through many aspects of the world and only part of it was revealed through the omens and revelations. As a result, they named their weapons and said powerful rituals over them so that weapons, "carry a power that is both associated with a particular god of the pantheon and is divine in its own right, as a separate entity" (Bahrani 192). Bahrani claims that, "[a]s a result, the weapon's name carried potential strengths and capabilities that were then considered inherent in the weapon itself (192). In essence, "[t]he gods mediated the decisions of war by means of the omens, and they provided the vehicles and the weapons" with which to carry out their divine will (197). Thus, the gods' sovereignty wasn't theologically achieved through a transcendence of physical bounds, rather they were strongly attached to the physical in that the very method their sovereignty was achieved was through the use of the mundane physical world Mesopotamians experienced everyday.