The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.
For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods.
From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups.
The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united.
You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well.
That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.
Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.
You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not?
Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified.
Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god".
Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad".
(But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)
There's definitely some relatable and transmitted stories like the flood, etc. However, the Levant and Egyptian gods "grew up" in different contexts than Mesopotamia. Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. "El" means mountain and Baal was a storm god -- neither of which has (to my understanding) any trace to specific cities.
That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
This is most likely correct. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Many scholars trace the earliest worship of Yahweh to the southern Levant, possibly Edom, Midian, or Seir which were outside of traditional Canaanite (early Hebrews) centers. Inscriptions from 800 BC refer to “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” implying a localized deity.
So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the comment makes sense in context.
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.
The Bible even has the example of Naaman the Aramean, who after being convinced of the might of Israel’s God, asked for a gift of two mule‐loads of Israeli earth so he could worship Him after returning home. (2 Kings 5:17)
Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.
In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok.
In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims).
Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu).
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Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
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But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed.
Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.
I have vague memories from college about China having something similar during the dynasties.
The hierarchical government on earth, with the emperor on top down through layers of bureaucracy down to officials in villages was a mirror of the organization of the heavens. Villages would have their own deities and might go so far as to replace them after bad years of flooding or other weather. That was more of an outlier, though, as usually the emperor or government got the blame first.
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.
This was pretty common in the polytheistic world I think. In the time of the Roman empire (pre-Christianity of course) there was a similar idea. And although Roman gods might be imported, they were often identified with the local gods, rather than replacing them.
I can recommend this episode as well. If I don't mix things up they gave some very good examples of how everyday life wasn't that much different from what it is now. Amazing how stuff like that can be communicated through identations on pieces of clay.
I was wondering about the headline date "missing for a millennium", as this Babylon is much older than 1000 years. From the article it seems like "two millenia" is more accurate: "The text survives in 20 manuscripts, from the 7th to the 2nd/1st centuries BCE"
I don’t think that necessarily follows. The age of the surviving fragments today isn’t the whole story.
We could presumably infer it still wasn’t “missing” as recently as a thousand years ago from later sources referring to it, even if the specific text (or oral tradition) those authors knew of hasn’t survived.
Like how we know about some of now lost Greek plays, originally written in the 5th century BC, because they were still being performed in Imperial Rome and writers of that time described them, even the details of how they were staged.
Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org.
I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.
"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
They did cite the source at the bottom of the phys.org page (The source article and the link)
"More information: Anmar A. Fadhil et al, Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians, Iraq (2025). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2024.23"
the "Hymm's of Innana" are more than a bit interesting, as it shows(clearly) that Innana was the original riot girl goddess who gets whatever she wants...daddy made the universe and none of the "rules" apply to her, well except, that she does get pensive when her latest boy toy wanders.
Not that suddenly catesrophic things dont then happen to said boy, previously praised for bieng "like a young bull".
Especialy interesting are the number of occasions where she breaks into songs of praise for her "galla".........
quite clear that the tavern culture of the times was much like our own
> I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous.
But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .
Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
You're skipping a lot of context here. Ancient Babylonian scribal schools were for a small elite—hardly universal childhood education. Medieval Europe's "regression" had a bit to do with the collapse of the Roman state, plagues, and centuries of instability, not just a lack of ambition. Comparing literacy rates across millennia without mentioning population size, language complexity, or what “schoolchildren” even means is a stretch.
"Progress" and "enlightenment" are neither uniform, linear, upwards, or continuous. All it takes is one absurdly corrupt regime to burn down the "Library of Alexandria", and with it, thousands of years of history and accomplishment.
It's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet
during the Reneissance.
If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated.
I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
That would involve better funding for the humanities, which has been in notoriously short supply for the past century or so. Digitization efforts are underway in many institutions and have been for decades.
Fascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.
I found that the languages are hard to break into as an amateur, owning to the available literature. In contrast Egyptology has many popular treatments, you just have to watch out for the junk.
Speaking of junk, I was in Syria, many years ago, when it had about 250k tourists yearly, under Hafez al-Assad . I was in the company of an Assyriologist and in a shop of a vendor I knew (who sold artifacts under the table).
The vendor proudly showed us a new acquisition, an ancient cylinder seal. The archeologist examined it and told him it was a fake, because he explained, "I can read this language, and it is gibberish."
The UCLA archeologist, then excavating at Tel Mozan with Giorgio Buccellati, had 2 dead languages under his belt, a requirement for his Phd. I was rather in awe of the fellow - 2 dead languages!
Pro-tip: never buy artifacts without an archeologist to advise you. It's likely ethically wrong anyway, and likewise stupid unless you're an expert.
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For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods.
From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups.
The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united.
You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.
Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.
You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not?
Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?
Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god".
Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad".
(But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)
That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Council#Hebrew/Israelit...
So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the comment makes sense in context.
The Bible even has the example of Naaman the Aramean, who after being convinced of the might of Israel’s God, asked for a gift of two mule‐loads of Israeli earth so he could worship Him after returning home. (2 Kings 5:17)
In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok.
In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims).
Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu).
----------
Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
---------
But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed.
Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.
The hierarchical government on earth, with the emperor on top down through layers of bureaucracy down to officials in villages was a mirror of the organization of the heavens. Villages would have their own deities and might go so far as to replace them after bad years of flooding or other weather. That was more of an outlier, though, as usually the emperor or government got the blame first.
This was pretty common in the polytheistic world I think. In the time of the Roman empire (pre-Christianity of course) there was a similar idea. And although Roman gods might be imported, they were often identified with the local gods, rather than replacing them.
We could presumably infer it still wasn’t “missing” as recently as a thousand years ago from later sources referring to it, even if the specific text (or oral tradition) those authors knew of hasn’t survived.
Like how we know about some of now lost Greek plays, originally written in the 5th century BC, because they were still being performed in Imperial Rome and writers of that time described them, even the details of how they were staged.
I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.
"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
> A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.
Even though it's BS I think it's still interesting to read how people relate to the story.
"More information: Anmar A. Fadhil et al, Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians, Iraq (2025). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2024.23"
Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous.
But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .
If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
History isn't exponential—it's bumpy.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_a...
Deleted Comment
I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
The vendor proudly showed us a new acquisition, an ancient cylinder seal. The archeologist examined it and told him it was a fake, because he explained, "I can read this language, and it is gibberish."
The UCLA archeologist, then excavating at Tel Mozan with Giorgio Buccellati, had 2 dead languages under his belt, a requirement for his Phd. I was rather in awe of the fellow - 2 dead languages!
Pro-tip: never buy artifacts without an archeologist to advise you. It's likely ethically wrong anyway, and likewise stupid unless you're an expert.
Deleted Comment
Oh great, just in time for the passage of an interstellar object and the Dalai Lama's reincarnation day.