Template talk:Sumerian mythology

"Sumerian" mythology or Mesopotamian mythology

I do not fully grasp the idea behind this template, honestly. Sumerian certainly was a language which can be defined in a coherent way, but there was hardly ever a purely "Sumerian" pantheon, and most of what this documents right now are gods who appear in Old Babylonian school texts written in Sumerian, and who were not exclusively worshiped by people speaking Sumerian - so it's a bit like creating a "Latin mythology" template with a random selection of figures present in texts used to teach Latin in medieval Europe. It creates a false, artificial image of Mesopotamia. Even in the most "Sumerian" areas like Lagash, from the beginning of recorded history deities whose names are hardly linguistically Sumerian appear, both in official sources like royal inscriptions or in personal names, see ex. Selz's 1995 survey of the earliest sources from this area. Then you have scholarly debates about ex. the origin of Enlil, with both Sumerian and Akkadian possibilities being currently considered (something most people in the field are aware of but that hardly left a mark on Wikipedia because sadly here before the 2020s Kramer was still treated as cutting edge researc) Joan Goodnick Westenholz summarized the 2010s consensus with the following statement: "Whereas scholars are beset with the idea of ‘the’ Sumerian pantheon, no such entity existed" (see here, p. 39; further literature on the matter is cited in the footnotes). See also the treatment of the modern consensus of the application of the term "pantheon" in Walther Sallaberger's entry on this matter for the Reallexikon der Assyriologie.

Renaming the temple to "Mesopotamian mythology" and actually making it comprehensive in the way ex. Template:Greek mythology (deities) or Template:Ancient Egyptian religion footer are would be preferable. We do have the awkard sidebar Template:Mesopotamian myth but it's basically "Samual Noah Kramer and Enuma Elish" and on top of that arguably a bit annoying to see in articles, as opposed to a footer. There's also but this nightmare: Template:Sumerian Gods Genealogy but frankly it should be deleted like the similar Egyptian templates were, since it breaks WP:NOR by creating a synthesis of many (mostly low quality) sources. There is simply no particularly good template to use, making Mesopotamia lag behind Greece or Egypt. HaniwaEnthusiast (talk) 11:16, 10 February 2023 (UTC)