Sacred Marriage is a term borrowed from the history of Greek religion (hieros gamos) to describe at least two different sorts of ritual in ancient Mesopotamia. The idea of marriage between deities is used in a number of Mesopotamian myths as one way of explaining creation. In a ritual of which records date mostely from the Neo-Assyrian and Ne-Babylonian Periods or later, a marriage between two deities was enacted in a symbolic ceremony (called hasadu) in which their cult statues were brought together. A ceremonial bed was required so that the statues could ‘marry’. Such symbolic ceremonies are known for Marduk and Sarpanitu (forming part of the New Year Ceremonies); Nabu and Tasmetu (or Nanaya), Samas (Utu) and Aya (Serida); and Anu (An) and Antu. These ‘marriages’ do not appear to have been directly related to particular myths.

Quite different from this, and known from much earlier periods, is a ritual love-making apparently between a deified human king and the goddess Inanna, seen as a symbolic counterpart to the mythical union of the god Dumuzi with Inanna. The exclusively literary evidence for this ‘marriage’ dates from the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Isin Period, and it is still uncertain whether a real (temporary) ‘marriage’ between the king and human priestess representing Inanna actually took place, or if the whole ritual was purely symbolic. The beautiful songs and poems in Sumerian belonging to the Inanna-Dumuzi cult suggest that the fertility of vegetation, animals, and humans was believed in some way to depend upon the union of Inanna and Ama-usumgal-ana (an aspect of Dumuzi); but as no exact description of the ritual survives (in the way that details are preserved of the New Year ceremonies), it is difficult to know whether some form of dramatic re-enactment took place or not. A ‘marriage’ between an entu priestess and a local storm god, probably Adad or Wer, is known from the Syrian town of Emar in the fourteenth century BC. Possibly here too a ruler impersonated the god.

It is not known what the immediate source of information was for the story recounted by Herodotus (who may have visited Babylon in the fifth century BC) according to which a woman spent the night in a shrine on top of the ziggurat of Babylon, waiting to be visited by Bel (Marduk) himself, although it is clearly reminiscent of what is known from earlier periods in Mesopotamia.