Weidner god list

Weidner god list is the conventional name of one of the known ancient Mesopotamian lists of deities, originally compiled by ancient scribes in the late third millennium BCE, with the oldest known copy dated to the Ur III or the Isin-Larsa period. Further examples have been found in many excavated Mesopotamian cities, and come from between the Old Babylonian period and the fourth century BCE. It is agreed the text served as an exercise for novice scribes, but the principles guiding the arrangement of the listed deities remain unknown. In later periods, philological research led to the creation of extended versions providing explanations of the names of individual deities.

In the second millennium BCE, the Weidner god list spread outside Mesopotamia, with copies known from Emar, Ugarit and Amarna. Hurrian and Ugaritic scribes compiled multilingual editions providing information about correspondences between Mesopotamian, Hurrian and Ugaritic deities, but due to a number of peculiarities characteristic for these texts, it is presumed they do not necessarily accurately reflect contemporary religious beliefs.