(world limit does not include citations or cover page)

Addition questions that can be answered to help provide structural information to the main question:

What roles did ancient Near Eastern societies see the Gods playing in human affairs? What kinds of events did they associate with divine favor or disfavor, and what kinds of help did they think the Gods could provide? How did they approach, petition, or propitiate their gods, and what kind of response did they expect? What seems to be the relationship between rulership and the gods in the Ancient Near East? Are the gods connected to the land itself, to territories, to states, to institutions?

Additional instructions:

Your paper should be in formal essay structure, with an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph, and body paragraphs. Your introductory paragraph should begin by laying out the general topic or historical context about which you’re writing, before spending a sentence or two mentioning which primary sources you will draw upon in composing your essay. It is not necessary to summarize the sources in any detail, though you may provide brief descriptions of your key texts if you wish. The last sentence of your introductory paragraph should be your thesis statement: a concise summary of what you plan to argue, with some indication of how you intend to approach it.

Your body paragraphs should each be dedicated to one specific point under the broader umbrella of your thesis statement—the ‘main idea’ of that paragraph—and should fully develop that point with supporting evidence. It is very important for the structure of your paper that you be very conscious and careful in constructing your body paragraphs. You should not have multiple body paragraphs developing the same main idea, and you should not have multiple main ideas within the same body paragraph.

The most important aspect of your approach to this essay is synthesis—the act of drawing together two or more distinct pieces of information from your sources and presenting a broader conclusion or deeper insight that you can derive from them.

every body paragraph should contain evidence from at least two different sources. Grouping evidence from different sources together, rather than analyzing your sources just one at a time, is the name of the game.