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This essay looks at matters of religion in the art of the ancient Near East both from the point of view of religion as subject matter in the imagery of works of art, and religion in its wider sense that includes philosophical ideas of a sacral character that permeate the rationale of artistic production. In the first half of the essay, the discussion is centered on the way religion has been viewed and treated in the scholarly literature on the art of ancient Mesopotamia. Then follows a selective historical survey of questions and debates pertaining to religion and religious themes that have dominated the field of the history of ancient Near Eastern art.890 Mehmet-Ali Ataç

The Assyrian Netherworld is often depicted in literature as a grim “hell” whose residents are clad like birds, deprived of light, and have soil and clay as their food and sustenance. It is the land of no return, erṣet la târi, “the house which none who enters ever leaves”, reached by a “path that allows no journey back”. In addition to such a dreary “hell,” however, the Assyrian Netherworld should also be understood in its capacity as a locus of initiation to which the hero or the spiritual adept is able to pay a visit while still alive without being permanently engulfed by it, and as a result attains a superior level of consciousness, perhaps even immortality.This paper focuses on such initiatic aspects of the Netherworld. Especially two poems composed in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a work long ingrained in the Mesopotamian religious consciousness, and the poem known as the Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince, may be thought to shed light on this more covert perception of the Netherworld. Further, since both of these works come from “libraries” in Nineveh, they may after all be thought to reflect the way the Ninevite intellectual elite themselves perceived the Netherworld. This “Underworld Vision” of the Ninevite scholarly milieu is by no means confined to contemporary literature; it is also visible in the royal palaces of Nineveh through representations of gate-guardians, Mischwesen, that belong to that very Netherworld. Nor is this “Underworld Vision” exclusive to the Ninevite elite alone, as it is one which the latter inherited from a long-standing Mesopotamian mystical tradition. Here, however, I shall try to present a glimpse of this Netherworld from a Ninevite perspective.

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