Tuesday, January 09, 2024
Are they anthropomorphic? Or not?
The ancient scribes’ persistent use of the DINGIR determinative to label both the great gods and all these other [nonanthropomorphic] entities suggests instead that the Mesopotamians themselves did not make such a distinction between gods envisioned in anthropomorphic form and gods envisioned as planets, demons, mountains or illnesses, instead including them all in the single category of DINGIR and ilu. Despite the reservations of scholars such as Stol and Bottéro, all of these DINGIRs and ilus appear to have been part of the varied group of entities that constituted, for ancient Mesopotamians, “the gods themselves.”—Barbara N. Porter in What Is a God?, 159
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