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The Melammu Project

The Heritage of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East


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Melammu (1)

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Topics (move over topic to see place in topic list)

01 Religious and ideological doctrines and imagery

02 Religious and ideological symbols and iconographic motifs
Keywords
Anahita
divine radiance
melammu
Period
Achaemenid Empire
Neo-Assyrian Empire
Channel
Iconographic tradition


Text
The word melammu, which means “divine radiance, splendour, nimbus, aura,” is an Akkadian loanword from Sumerian. It thus concretely attests to the transfer and continuity of a centrally important doctrinal concept from an ideological system to a later one. In Mesopotamia alone, this concept has a documented continuity of over 4500 years, from the earliest cuneiform religious and historical documents (ca. 2600 BCE) till the present day. The iconography of the concept has gone a long way from the radiance surrounding Mesopotamian gods to the halos surrounding the heads of Byzantine angels and saints and the loops hovering over the heads of Christian angels, but the concept itself has survived amazingly well and spread far beyond its original home.

The spread of the concept of “divine radiance” can be traced by observing the diffusion and transformations of the relevant iconographic motif. The logo of Melammu is taken from an Achaemenid seal discovered on the northeast coast of the Black Sea and represents the goddess Anahita, mounted on a lion and surrounded by the divine radiance, appearing to a Persian king. The details of the king’s and the goddess’s dress and crown are Persian, but in all other respects the seal is a faithful reproduction of centuries older Assyrian seals depicting appearances of the goddess Ishtar to members of the imperial ruling class.

It thus illustrates not only the adoption of the Mesopotamian concept of “divine radiance” by the Persians, but also the assimilation of an important Iranian deity to a Mesopotamian one with the concomitant adoption of a whole system of religious beliefs, cultic practices, ideological doctrines, and artistic conventions. The fact that the seal was found outside the area controlled by the Assyrian Empire and possibly carved by a Greek artist, illustrates the dynamic diffusion of these ideas (through imperial propaganda) across geographical and cultural boundaries.


Bibliography

Parpola 2000Parpola, Simo. “The Name and Logo of Melammu.” In: S. Aro and R. M. Whiting (eds.). The Heirs of Assyria. Melammu Symposia 1. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project 2000, xxi. [webpage]

Links (external links will open in a new browser window)
The Name and Logo of Melammu (webpage)

Simo Parpola


URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0001534.php


Illustrations (click an image to view the full-size version in a new window)

Fig. 1: The logo of the Melammu Project, as drawn by Rita Berg from a Greco-Persian style seal found on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea (Collon 1987, no. 432).

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