In view of the fact that so many of the texts from Mesopotamia are concerned with offerings for the various feasts of the Mesopotamian temples it is surprising that we know so little about the actual mechanisms of offering and distribution of the sacrificial remains. For the earlier periods of Mesopotamian history we have virtually no information about offering procedures. We do not know whether the Sumerian priests destroyed the offering animals totally in the manner of a holocaust, whether they were consumed by the priests during the temple feasts or whether only certain pieces were offered to the gods during the sacrificial meal with the remainder being distributed among the temple personnel as a form of income—which we know to have been the practice in the later periods.
For the Old Babylonian period we are almost as ill-informed. We know, however, that certain cuts of meat were received from the temple by nadītu priestesses as “betrothal gifts” and we have lists of recipients of meat cuts, but in neither case do we know if offering animals were the source of the meat.
The earliest texts expressly concerned with the distribution of offering remains date to the Middle Assyrian and early Neo-Babylonian periods. These take the form of royal rescripts or temple ordinances regulating which temple officials are to receive what remains. The most complete and explicit of these is a temple ordinance for the Eanna in Uruk, composed originally during or shortly after the reign of Nabu-apla-iddin, which we possess in the form of a later copy.