Absence of the Common Man

While reading Oppenhiem’s essay on Mesopotamian religion, I found that the evidence that formed the strongest argument to support his thesis was the lack of literature based around the common man’s purposes in daily life and religious activities. Oppenhiem argues that “a large part of what we assume to be Mesopotamian religion has meaning only in relation to royal personages” (page 181), or in other words, texts that depict rituals or relay instructions are centered around the priestly and royal duties without the inclusion of the lower class. I found this to be quite understated in its importance. The common populace creates a huge majority of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia–certainly over 80 percent–and to not have any evidence as to their habits and lifestyles leaves a huge gap in our knowledge of their entire culture. We can create theories from what we can find in archeological digs, but it is literature that truly can explain exactly what they are used for and their cultural value in the community. If there is nothing to be explained, then the best we can come to is a educated guess with no fair degree of certainty. We cannot know about important habits, morals, and relations of the majority of the populace’s daily life, nor even what role they play in religious institutions. In our minds, the hierarchy of their culture is strictly defined by what is written and what is not written, which may cause us to misunderstand the true values of the common man in their time, whether we perceive them to play more or less of a role then they truly do. Indeed, the ancient mythological texts such as The Epic of Creation depict nothing more than the creation of the common man to feed and serve the gods, and yet we find nothing in newer literature about the common man. Instead it is the priesthood and royal lineage that is held enough prestige to be accounted for in cuneiform.