ABSTRACT
Pioneering studies of Mesopotamian religion organized the evidence around pantheon, cult, and mythology, in which pantheon was the ordering and hierarchy of the gods, cult was religious practice, such as offerings and rituals, and mythology was stories about the gods (survey in Jacobsen 1987b: 466–469; B. Foster 2007). The concept and content of Sumerian mythology were defined by Samuel Noah Kramer’s Sumerian Mythology (1944, rev. edn 1961), which stands as the foundation for all subsequent work on the subject. Kramer pieced together and presented in narrative form mythological stories previously known in fragments or not at all (comprehensive list of texts in Heimpel 1993–1997). He and his students took the lead for the next forty years in carrying forward the reconstruction and understanding of these stories, culminating with a revision and expansion of Sumerian Mythology in French (Bottéro and Kramer 1989). Kramer’s gift for popularization, backed up by his unflagging dedication to the task, created a new discipline in the study of mythology, and Kramer further undertook to put Sumerian myths in a larger context of other mythologies of the ancient Near East (Kramer 1961).
