Eanna

The Eanna is suggested to have been a temple compound dedicated to Inanna, goddess of love and war. There seems to have been at least two temples in the Eanna district, the Stone Mosaic Temple and the Limestone Temple. The Stone Mosaic Temple was lavishly decorated with stone cones in red, white and black and it lay slightly north-west of the main terrace. The terraces were an important part of the city’s layout and a predecessor of sorts to the ziggurats that were to be built in later centuries. Upon the main terrace of the Eanna complex lay the Limestone Temple, also decorated with stone cone mosaic but above all huge in size. It measured approx. 76 x 30 m. Both temples were made of mainly limestone and bitumen, something which appears to have been quite unusual at a time when the most common building material was sun-dried brick.

In later periods it appears that the temples were levelled and then rebuilt. It is also suggested that the heavenly god An was the patron deity in the earliest times, being replaced by his daughter Inanna during the glory days of Uruk, only to come back at a later time when women’s rights and possibilities had begun to deteriorate. This according to Kramer was true, not only for the women of Sumer but also for the goddesses. Slowly but surely the goddesses began to lose importance in the Sumerian pantheon even though Inanna managed to hold a secure place as one of the most important deities throughout Mesopotamian history.

In times past, Mesopotamians worshipped in open-air sanctuaries, private chapels located in domestic homes, or small and separate chapels in the residential quarters of a town. The main vein of all religious life, however, was the temple.

In Sumeria, as in most Mesopotamian cultures, the temple (e in Sumeria and bitu “house” in Akkadian) was no less than the earthly home of the gods. Each perspective deity lived in his or her abode in the form of a cult statue. This statue was not the actual god, but was imbued with the divine presence.

There were different classes of priests and priestesses at the temples. These classes ranged from “high priest/priestess”, all the way down to courtyard sweepers. There seem to have been two main types; the administrative priest and the religious specialists who dealt with particular areas of the temple. While it is unclear if there were fixed distinctions between the sacerdotal clergy and the administrative clergy, there is a group called the “anointed” and others called “enterers of the temple”. This seems to suggest that certain areas of the shrines had restricted access. Generally, priestesses were in service of female deities, with the notable exception of the en, a chaste high priestess of some of the Sumerian gods.

Sources: Sumer and the Sumerians by Harriet Crawford.
The cults of Uruk and Babylon, the temple ritual texts as evidence for Hellenistic cult practice by Marc J. H. Linssen.
Poets and psalmists: Goddesses and theologians by Samuel Noah Kramer in The legacy of Sumer, edited by Denise Schmandt-Besserat.
The Sumerians, their history, culture and character by Samuel Noah Kramer.
Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotmia by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green.