Experts believe that the gods of later civilisations are the developments of the Sumerian fertility and storm gods. To the Sumerians the gods were incredibly powerful and anthromorphic (they resembled humans). They saw nature as a living entity and the gods and goddesses were embodiments of the forces of that living land.
Some deities were responsible for the fertility of the land and its people, others took responsibility for organising the storms which occured. It was obviously important that the gods had to be placated to preserve the Sumerian way of life.
The gods were creator gods; as a group they had created the world and the people in it. Like humans, they suffered the ravages of human emotional and spiritual frailties; love, lust, hatred, anger and regret.
The Flood Myth
Among the god's biggest regrets was the creation of human life; Sumerians believed that these gods regretted the creation of human life and sent a flood to destroy their faulty creation, but one man survived by building a boat. While the "Flood Story" is nearly universal in all mythology and religion, experts can't be sure if the Semites, the civilisation who came after the Sumerians,had a similar story or took it over from the Sumerians. There is also another significance; according to the Book of Genesis, the originator of the Hebrew race, patriarch Abraham, originally came from the city of Ur.
The Book of Genesis and the Creation Story
Etymologists have shown that the story of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis is the story of Sumer. Cities mentioned such as Ur, Larsa and Haram were actually in the land of Sumer. The creation story in the Book of Genesis has striking similarities to a Babylonian account of the creation known as Enuma Elish meaning when on high. It was written a thousand years before the Book of Genesis was written.
Further analysis of Genesis, especially the genealogy of Seth and Cain, also traces the creation story to Sumer. There are lists of Sumerian kings from Larsa which named ten kings who reigned before the Flood. The list ends with the words; "After the Flood kingship was sent down from on high." This suggests a new beginning was made after the Flood.
The last name in the second Larsa list is Ziusundra- another name for Utanapishtim, the hero of the Babylonian story of the Flood written on the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic. The seventh king in the Sumerian list was regarded as possessing special wisdom in matters pertaining to the gods and as being the first man to practice prophecy. That seventh name is Enoch, of whom scripture says "he walked with God", and who in later Jewish tradition was held to have been taken to Heaven without dying.
Unlike the religions of later civilisations , the Sumerian religion was orientated squarely in this world. Gods did not occupy some world existentially different from this one and and no rewards or punishments accrued to human beings after death. But what did pass through, was the concept that human beings lived to serve their gods and there was a higher power to answer to. Be it the forces of nature or in the afterlife.
Sources:
www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/SUMER.HTM
Knight, Christopher and Lomas, Robert, The Hiram Key, Arrow Books,London,1997
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