The Religion of Ancient Mesopotamia in the Works of St. Petersburg Orientalists and Folklorists of the Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries

This article reviews publications by St. Petersburg orientalists and folklorists on various aspects of Mesopotamian religion. In each case, it determines the place of the work in modern scholarship. Based on this research, it then distinguishes several stages and methods in the field: 1) the study of Babylonian religion according to Syriac and Arabic sources as a particular method of biblical criticism; 2) the study of the religion of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians as a part of social and literary history of the ancient Near East; 3) Nicholas Marr’s use of Mesopotamian examples in his sociological theories; 4) the study of Mesopotamian religious texts using folklore methods (historical-genetic and comparative-typological analysis of texts).