A great deal has been learned about early Sumerians from these excavations, yet we still lack adequate knowledge for an understanding of many aspects of Sumerian culture. We are aided somewhat by comprehensible textual materials dating to the last quarter of the third millennium, but these scarcely provide us with enough information to fathom the real nature of Sumerian lore and concerns we see reflected in the world of their visual arts. Based on these approaches and speaking in very general terms, its it possible to posit that during the third millennium in Sumer much of life was focused on the temples of the gods. Individual deities owned their own cites and territories. For example, Inanna, a complex goddess of many aspects including both love and war owned Uruk; Nanna, the moon god, possessed Ur. The Temple in which the gods were worshiped, called e, or house, was more than a single building that contained the main shrine. It was actually composed of a number of buildings that served various cultic functions and included orchards and agricultural fields as well as herds of animals that provided sustenance for the gods and for the personnel needed to maintain the huge divine estates or
A great deal has been learned about early Sumerians from these excavations, yet we still lack adequate knowledge for an understanding of many aspects of Sumerian culture. We are aided somewhat by comprehensible textual materials dating to the last quarter of the third millennium, but these scarcely provide us with enough information to fathom the real nature of Sumerian lore and concerns we see reflected in the world of their visual arts. Based on these approaches and speaking in very general terms, its it possible to posit that during the third millennium in Sumer much of life was focused on the temples of the gods. Individual deities owned their own cites and territories. For example, Inanna, a complex goddess of many aspects including both love and war owned Uruk; Nanna, the moon god, possessed Ur. The Temple in which the gods were worshiped, called e, or house, was more than a single building that contained the main shrine. It was actually composed of a number of buildings that served various cultic functions and included orchards and agricultural fields as well as herds of animals that provided sustenance for the gods and for the personnel needed to maintain the huge divine estates or