Did a group of ancient Sumerians or Egyptians believe in Monotheism?

[rakovsky]

Its one thing to label something after a geographical location and quite another to differentiate according to same, which is what the post was about. You compared and contrasted Sumerian and Egyptian religion, differentiating between them on the basis that they were in different locations on the planet. I'm asking, for example, how would one person taking Genesis 1 to America, and another person taking Genesis 2 to Ireland automatically split Judaism into two competing, different religions- American religion and Irish religion?

If Americans and Irish accepted Judaism collectively, that would be their religion.

What you are debating seems to lead to a big debate for another thread, and I would prefer to stay on topic, please.

 

[Hoghead1]

Its one thing to label something after a geographical location and quite another to differentiate according to same, which is what the post was about. You compared and contrasted Sumerian and Egyptian religion, differentiating between them on the basis that they were in different locations on the planet. I'm asking, for example, how would one person taking Genesis 1 to America, and another person taking Genesis 2 to Ireland automatically split Judaism into two competing, different religions- American religion and Irish religion?

Probably. Gen. 1 and 2 give two conflicting chronologies of creation.

 

[Jane_the_Bane]

Archaeological findings make it highly unlikely that our pre-historic ancestors started out as monotheists, or even that monotheistic beliefs dominated the earliest period of recorded history.

Some people maintain that whatever is right must have come first, while others maintain that the latest paradigm must be correct, with anything that came before being more primitive steps on a ladder towards truth. (In fact, the history of religion was plagued by this phenomenon for a long time, and it is quite heavily intertwined with colonialism and the notion of "primitive" cultures in need of some foreign civilization.)

Neither strikes me as very plausible. Age and tradition do not validate or invalidate a world view - other factors do, such as a demonstrable correspondence with reality based on available data.

All of that said, cave paintings and figurines from the pre-historic stone age indicate that religion most likely started with animism: the notion that everything from the rocks and rivers to the skies above was imbued with more or less human-like, personal consciousness.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

All of that said, cave paintings and figurines from the pre-historic stone age indicate that religion most likely started with animism: the notion that everything from the rocks and rivers to the skies above was imbued with more or less human-like, personal consciousness.

There is no way to decide this from pure artwork and statuary. Animism has been proposed as a primitive religious framework, but so has normal polytheism, monism and monotheism.
Many mythographers hold that animism requires a more developed form of theological thought and contend it is a development of polytheism or fetishism.
The form of the earliest religion is an open question unfortunately. For Archaeological remains to be present which we can clearly differentiate as religious, some development must already be present, so it cannot properly tell us what the most primitive form was. Hence anthropology has adopted developmental models to try and account for what we find at a later stage in development. Developmental models have however been eclipsed by descriptive models of anthropology, so Academia is not really discussing the question much anymore, likely on account of its colonialist and racialist implications as mentioned above.

 

[smaneck]

I think they likely believed in a High God but didn't necessarily see Him as the only God nor did they see Him as all that accessible. You go to the minor deities for the little stuff. We see this in African religion. As for Mesopotamia, I'm not persuaded. They seem to have seen the cosmos as made up of competing deities? The Egyptians? They came much closer to monotheism, not just with Ikhnaton but with their tendency to ascribe the qualities of all gods to one god. That is called Henotheism, which I think is a half-way house to monotheism.

 

[rakovsky]

I'd like to return to the question of Sumerian religion as ever having monotheism.

The Anthropologist Custance really makes two arguments:
First, he claims that tablets in 3000 BC showed "only" 750, compared to later ones, and that 575 tablets from 3500 BC showed only two - An and Innina. And he concludes then that in earlier times the Sumerians had fewer gods, and at the earliest point only one. He writes about the tablets:

The Sumerian religion in its latest development before the people disappeared as an entity swallowed up by the later Babylonians, seemed to have involved about 5000 gods. The inscriptions of circa 3000 B.C. or perhaps a millennium earlier show only 750. The 300 tablets or so known from Jamdet Nasr in 1928 when Langdon published these texts, contained only. three gods; the sky god Enlil, the earth god Enki, and the sun god Babbar. The 575 tablets from Uruk translated in 1936, which Langdon dated about 4000 B.C. but are now believed to be more accurately dated 3500 B.C., contain the names of only two deities: the sky god An and the mother goddess Innina. Meek's criticism of Langdon's essay was that the number of gods he mentions for the earlier tablets is in error. In the Jamdet Nasr text there may have been as many as six, not three.
http://custance.org/Library/Volume4/Part_II/chapter1.html

Certainly I can imagine that simpler tribes like those of Eskimos with less paper, records, and far fewer people may think of a smaller number of gods than a many-peopled civilization like the Indus Valley or the Indian civilization that followed.
However, it would be helpful to have more findings of tablets than just a single collection (even if a big one), like that found in Uruk that Custance mentions above, in order to confirm that this proposition is correct.

Custance's second argument is that at a given temple or city only one deity was worshiped, and that it was only later as societies conglomerated into a larger nation that they began to grow their pantheons. He writes of "excavations at Tell Asmar from the period of the third millennium B.C.":

Henry Frankfort wrote in his official report:

• ...we discover that the representations on cylinder seals, which are usually connected with various gods, can all be fitted into a consistent picture in which a single god worshiped in this temple forms the central figure. It seems, therefore, that at this early period his various aspects were not considered separate deities in the Sumero-Accadian pantheon.

This raises an important point; namely, the possibility that polytheism never did arise by the evolution of polydemonism, but because the attributes of a single God were differently emphasized by different people until those people in later years came to forget that they were speaking of the same Person.
http://custance.org/Library/Volume4/Part_II/chapter1.html

A weakness here is that it's theoretical. Maybe some people in the city thought that their own god was supreme and ultimate, or maybe they thought that there were many gods and the one for their city happened to be their own, without it ultimately being the supreme one.

The Earth History website goes along with Custance's arguments that one location had few gods (or in this case two cities had two gods) and that the gods multiplied over time:

...One of the strongest evidences for the view that monotheism preceded polytheism in Sumer is that, until the Late Uruk period, the country knew only two gods: Anu, who had a temple at Uruk, and Ea, who had a temple at Eridu. Somewhat later, they were joined by a third, Ellil, who was worshipped at Nippur.

http://www.earthhistory.org.uk/genesis-6-11-and-other-texts/the-tradition-in-sumer

I can see that Israel's god El or Yahweh/Yah could be associated with other Mesopotamian deities, but to me this doesn't prove whether preceding Mesopotamian civilizations had matching notions of God, like Moses' concept of monotheism.

Quid mentioned Origin of the Idea of God (Ursprung Gottesidee) by Wilhelm Schmidt. I would be interested to see if he talks about Sumeria. I didn't see it in Google Books and don't read German.

 

[rakovsky]

Here are a few issues to consider:

I. Surnames and proper names in Mesopotamia referring to God
An old edition of Theological quarterly reported that F Hommel and F Delitzsch agreed about Sumerian and Arabian "monotheism", saying that according to Hommel, peoples' surnames [I suppose those containing the word for God] showed the existence of monotheism in the Arabs of 2500 BC and "among the Semitic tribes of northern Babylonia."
https://books.google.com/books?id=F...r OR sumeria monotheist OR monotheism&f=false

Delitzsch makes several arguments about Sumerian and Babylonian monotheism - Babylonian religion being a derivation or continuation of the Sumerian one. (Delitzsch, Monotheism, 1903, http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1638&context=ocj) He says that many Babylonian words should be better translated as referring to God than just to "a" god. For example, Bab-ilu should be better called "Gate of God" (The name for Babylon) and Iamlik-Ilu should better be called "God is great" than Gate of A God and A God is Great, respectively.

I have heard similar reasoning about the Yoruban monotheists- one claim is that their monotheism is shown in the fact that they use their word for God in their name. I think they have a version of inclusive monotheism in Nigeria.

II. Quotes from Babylonia about inclusive monotheism:
In Delitzsch's essay, he also writes about Babylon: "free and enlightened minds publicly taught that Nergal and Nebo, moon-god and sun-god, the thunder god Ramman and all the other gods were one in Marduk, the god of light." But he says that polytheism, belief in many gods, was still present in Babylon.
He quotes from a Babylonian Cuneiform tablet:

The god Marduk is written and called Ninib as the possessor of power, Nergal or perhaps Zamama as lord of combat or of battle, Bel as possessor of dominion, Nebo as lord of business, Sin as illuminator of the night, Samas as lord of all that is right, as lord of rain. According, Marduk is Ninib as well as Nergal, moon god as well as sun god, etc.... the names Ninib and Nergal, Sin and Samas are only various designations of the one god Marduk; they are all one with him and in him. Is this not 'indogermanic monotheism, the doctrine of the unity which develops only out of variety'

III. The question of whether Abraham, from Ur, was monotheist
Susan Bauer's book The History of the Ancient World calls Abraham "The First Monotheist", and notes that he came from Ur, the major city in the empires of Sumer and Babylon. (http://erenow.com/ancient/susanhistory/) Can anyone tell me: was Abraham ever practically designated as a monotheist in the Bible, or was Moses the first explicit monotheist?

One Christian writer, Ronald Hendel, says about Abraham:

The book of Joshua says that when God called Abraham from Mesopotamia, Abraham’s family was polytheistic: they “served other gods” (Josh 24:2). But this topic doesn’t come up in the stories about Abraham in Genesis. God calls Abraham and enters into a covenant with him and his family (Gen 12, Gen 15, Gen 17). This is an exclusive relationship between one god and a particular family. In the ancient world, these features belong to the category of family religion, in which the family god is often called “the god of the father.” In addition to the customs of family religion, ancient people also worshiped the gods of tribe, city, or state. In the stories of Abraham, however, the god of the father is also “God Most High, maker of heaven and earth” (Gen 14:19). In other words, the Abraham story shows the merger of family and state religion, yielding the worship of a single god. From the biblical perspective, Abraham was the first monotheist.
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/people/main-articles/abraham

Theoretically, I don't know that belief in a most high god who made heaven and earth is monotheistic, as opposed to henotheistic, ie. it does not rule out lesser deities like a rain god. And then there is even the question of how well the story of Abraham in Genesis in its monotheism represents Abraham's own thinking, since Genesis was written generations later, after Moses' time and the impact of Egyptian culture on the Israelites.

One Harvard Hebrew professor Shaye Cohen says that Abraham's monotheism is not clear, although I think she oversimplifies things a bit:
Is Abraham the founder of monotheism? The texts in Genesis simply have Abraham talking to God and God talking to

Abraham, that's it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/rise-judaism.html

I think we can say that the writers of the Torah would have a general sense of pre-Mosaic religion. And so I think that they probably had a sense of a supreme God, El/Yahweh, if the Torah says so, but beyond that, it seems harder to prove their pre-Mosaic monotheism going on the Bible alone.

 

[smaneck]

Certainly I can imagine that simpler tribes like those of Eskimos with less paper, records, and far fewer people may think of a smaller number of gods than a many-peopled civilization like the Indus Valley or the Indian civilization that followed.

The Indus Valley Civilization appears to have far fewer deities than the Indian Civilization that emerges after the Arya migrations. What we find in the Indus Civilization is a lot of terra-cotta figurines that appear to represent the Mother Goddess. She is the most prevalent deity, but we also find representations of what we think to be an early form of Shiva on a number of clay seals. That's about it.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Quid mentioned Origin of the Idea of God (Ursprung Gottesidee) by Wilhelm Schmidt. I would be interested to see if he talks about Sumeria. I didn't see it in Google Books and don't read German.

I read the shorter one volume work by Schmidt in English translation a few years ago. I don't remember much talk of Sumeria, but I assume he mentioned it in his longer 12 volume German 'Ursprung der Gottesidee'.

His whole premise though is that we can reconstruct primitive human beliefs only from the most primitive peoples, those that are materially and philosophically the simplest. He mostly discussed Aboriginal tribes, Andaman islanders and certain Amerindian groups on account of this. By nature, Sumeria does not fit this regard as they are far too sophisticated, but could perhaps act as corroboration in the longer work?.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Here are a few issues to consider:

I. Surnames and proper names in Mesopotamia referring to God
An old edition of Theological quarterly reported that F Hommel and F Delitzsch agreed about Sumerian and Arabian "monotheism", saying that according to Hommel, peoples' surnames [I suppose those containing the word for God] showed the existence of monotheism in the Arabs of 2500 BC and "among the Semitic tribes of northern Babylonia."
https://books.google.com/books?id=FAggAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA89&lpg=RA1-PA89&dq=sumerian+OR+sumer+OR+sumeria+monotheist+OR+monotheism&source=bl&ots=2cjJWNDuXS&sig=udX5MfTl0E5okwQmeXb0qI2zUwE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj9psO5q_HOAhWHmx4KHRCbADsQ6AEIwwEwIg#v=onepage&q=sumerian OR sumer OR sumeria monotheist OR monotheism&f=false

Delitzsch makes several arguments about Sumerian and Babylonian monotheism - Babylonian religion being a derivation or continuation of the Sumerian one. (Delitzsch, Monotheism, 1903, http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1638&context=ocj) He says that many Babylonian words should be better translated as referring to God than just to "a" god. For example, Bab-ilu should be better called "Gate of God" (The name for Babylon) and Iamlik-Ilu should better be called "God is great" than Gate of A God and A God is Great, respectively.

I have heard similar reasoning about the Yoruban monotheists- one claim is that their monotheism is shown in the fact that they use their word for God in their name. I think they have a version of inclusive monotheism in Nigeria.

II. Quotes from Babylonia about inclusive monotheism:
In Delitzsch's essay, he also writes about Babylon: "free and enlightened minds publicly taught that Nergal and Nebo, moon-god and sun-god, the thunder god Ramman and all the other gods were one in Marduk, the god of light." But he says that polytheism, belief in many gods, was still present in Babylon.
He quotes from a Babylonian Cuneiform tablet:


III. The question of whether Abraham, from Ur, was monotheist
Susan Bauer's book The History of the Ancient World calls Abraham "The First Monotheist", and notes that he came from Ur, the major city in the empires of Sumer and Babylon. (http://erenow.com/ancient/susanhistory/) Can anyone tell me: was Abraham ever practically designated as a monotheist in the Bible, or was Moses the first explicit monotheist?

One Christian writer, Ronald Hendel, says about Abraham:

Theoretically, I don't know that belief in a most high god who made heaven and earth is monotheistic, as opposed to henotheistic, ie. it does not rule out lesser deities like a rain god. And then there is even the question of how well the story of Abraham in Genesis in its monotheism represents Abraham's own thinking, since Genesis was written generations later, after Moses' time and the impact of Egyptian culture on the Israelites.

One Harvard Hebrew professor Shaye Cohen says that Abraham's monotheism is not clear, although I think she oversimplifies things a bit:
Is Abraham the founder of monotheism? The texts in Genesis simply have Abraham talking to God and God talking to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/rise-judaism.html

I think we can say that the writers of the Torah would have a general sense of pre-Mosaic religion. And so I think that they probably had a sense of a supreme God, El/Yahweh, if the Torah says so, but beyond that, it seems harder to prove their pre-Mosaic monotheism going on the Bible alone.

I would be careful with Delitsch though. He comes from an earlier time, before we had as extensive scholarly reconstruction of tablets and as many texts as we have today. Many of his idees have fallen to the wayside academically.

Semitic peoples tend to be Monolatric as can be seen with Ashur or Marduk or even Chemosh and YHWH. I don't think Abraham can be seen as anything but a monolater, especially as we see Rachel carrying off Teraphim or household gods, later with Jacob treating these Teraphim with some importance. It is unlikely that the Genesis writer conceived Abraham therefore as fully monotheistic, I would think.
Similarly the Moses narrative speaks as if YHWH is the greatest God, but saying not to have other gods before Me, implies other gods may exist as does the Egyptian magicians' snakes.
It is tempting to transpose full Monotheism onto the Genesis narrative or into primitive Arabia and Babylonia, but while possible, I think the evidence fits monolatrism just as well.

As you said, I don't think pre-mosaic monotheism can be proven. I don't even think Mosaic monotheism can be proven really, and certain modern scholars think the Prophets in the 7th and 6th centuries made Monolatrism into a Universal Monotheism.

 

[rakovsky]

Notes on Sumerian religion:

I. The first creator: Nammu.
As far as I can tell, Nammu was considered the creatrix of the gods, even mother of the sky father An. A suggestion by the scholar Wiggerman was that her name meant creatrix based on what he called a "native" (ie Akkadian?) commentary. She was goddess of the deep waters of the Abzu, which etymologically means deep waters or deep knowledge (ab + zu). Her sign was Engur, which some say is a combination of the sign letters totality and secret, although one scholar tole me the pictographic letters lacked such a core meaning. I think she was portrayed as lizardlike or serpeantlike due to her association with the seas.
Question: Did all Sumerians always think Nammu was the uncreated creatrix of An? Did any of them suppose that someone else had made Nammu?

II. The supreme God An.
An's name etymologically means "high". It also could be used to refer to heavens. An's sign was Dingir, the sign for deity, made in the form of an 8 pointed star. Dingir meant not only "a deity", but heavens, the god An, or shining/brightness. A few scholars thought Dingir comes from Dimme, to create. An Akkadian linguistic commentary associated or equated An with Gira, the god of fire. So one might think Dingir was a reference to a heavenly fire (the root Tin + Gir) as a star, or something else to do with fire, as Dingir also refers to brightness. I think An was portrayed as humanlike.
Question: Could Dingir refer not only to An or mean "a god", but also refer to God Himself, like NTR, Tengri, and El can mean "god" or "God" in their own languages?

III. Monotheism.
This seems speculative in the case of Sumer, a problem being that we don't have texts on this topic from them. Babylonian theology in a way is a later version of Sumerian theology, and monotheism might be found in Babylonian religion, especially in its treatment of Marduk. But this aspect of the Babylonian mythology does not automatically mean that Sumerians thought this way.

IV. DNA and language
I guess they are pre-Semitic Iraqis. Their language roots have not been totally established. Maybe they had a mix of roots like Turkic and Dravidian. There are competing theories. I vaguely remember that 20% of Sumerian words are Akkadian and another 20% are Dravidian, and that Sumerians came from both north of Sumer and southeast of it.

V. Sumer in video games.
I think entertainment helps you feel the culture a bit. The best I've seen is Age of Empires. There is a Lost Sumeria campaign that looks great.

VI. Sumer in the movies
There does not seem to be alot for this.

I liked Heroes of the Bible: Tower of Babel,

Legacy - The Origins of Civilization - Episode 1: Iraq, the Cradle Of Civilization; http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/legacy-the-origins-of-civilization; This movie was filmed in Iraq in 1991 before the first Gulf War. Good for its time.
(1991) - Filmed before Gulf War. Documentary

VII. Places to see.
Major cities have museums with Sumerian art and tablets.

VIII. Religions in the modern period

The Assyrian Church of the East and Chaldean Church were the two churches in Iraq for centuries. They can have some traces of Mesopotamian culture, but are principally Assyrian, although even the Assyrians were influenced by Sumer. In the Bible, Nammu seems to correspond to some deities in the seas like Leviathon or another one mentioned. She could most of all correspond with Tehom, the watery depths, who is a version of the Babylonian Tiamat. God's splitting the waters into heaven and earth can recall the splitting of the waters in Sumerian mythology.

The Yezidis are sometimes claimed to be a mix of Zoroastrianism and Mesopotamian religions, particularly Babylonian religion. A comparison has been made between the 7 angels who are manifestations of God for yezidis to a claim that suppoedly the Babylonians also taught 7emanations of God, but I couldn't confirm this. The story of the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark and the Flood and the role of the snake is common to Babylonian, Sumerian, and Christian/Abrahamic religions, but this does not prove which religion the Yezidis took these stories from. For example, the appearance of these myths does not prove that they came to the Yezidis from Mesopotamian culture independently of Christianity or Islam. The idea of attending a Yezidi ritual with worship of Melek Taus / Shaytan is repellant to me.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Question: Did all Sumerians always think Nammu was the uncreated creatrix of An? Did any of them suppose that someone else had made Nammu?

Nammu is very poorly represented in Sumerian myths, since she did not seem to have had much of an active cult. Most scholars assume she was either created as backdrop to Enki or if she was prehistorically of importance, that Enki absorbed most of her functions.
I doubt that sufficient sources of sufficient quality survive to answer this. I am unaware of an origin story for Nammu, but to consider her thus uncreated would be transposition of later ideas to the Sumerians, I think.

Question: Could Dingir refer not only to An or mean "a god", but also refer to God Himself, like NTR, Tengri, and El can mean "god" or "God" in their own languages?

It's certainly possible, but again I am unaware of any such usage nor where it is implied.

IV. DNA and language
I guess they are pre-Semitic Iraqis. Their language roots have not been totally established. Maybe they had a mix of roots like Turkic and Dravidian. There are competing theories. I vaguely remember that 20% of Sumerian words are Akkadian and another 20% are Dravidian, and that Sumerians came from both north of Sumer and southeast of it.

There is a misconception here. A large percentage of Akkadian words are of Sumerian origin, as Sumerian acted as the classical language to Akkadian. This is akin to how English has many words of Latin origin.
There isn't really any linguistic affinity between Akkadian (or Semitic languages in general) and Sumerian beyond words loaned from Sumerian to Akkadian. As times progressed following the gradual expansion of Northern Akkad and the Gutian invasions, we see Akkadian slowly replace Sumerian in day to day life, forming a sprachbund between the two languages. This leads to code-switching between the two languages in late Neo-Sumerian times and thereafter. Sumerian however has not been shown to possess Akkadian or even Semitic roots.

As to Dravidian, this is the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis which would link the modern Dravidian languages and an hypothetical Elamite and Sumerian language family, into one broad Super language family. This is highly suppositional and frankly very dubious. In the first place we would have to link Sumerian and Elamite which has never been shown to be reasonable and then secondly link Elamite to Dravidian languages. This second proposition is also not very plausible and rests squarely on the assumption that the Indus Civilization spoke a Dravidian language. While the latter is certainly possible, it cannot be shown to be the case and therefore trying to reconstruct a proto-Dravidian for the Indus to link with Elamite is quite a stretch of the imagination.

Sufficed to say, while it is likely that Sumer consisted of a mixed Sumerian and Semitic population for most of its history, the original Sumerian population is unlikely to be derived from either Dravidian or Semitic stock. This is why it Sumerian is still considered a language isolate.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

The Yezidis are sometimes claimed to be a mix of Zoroastrianism and Mesopotamian religions, particularly Babylonian religion. A comparison has been made between the 7 angels who are manifestations of God for yezidis to a claim that suppoedly the Babylonians also taught 7emanations of God, but I couldn't confirm this. The story of the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark and the Flood and the role of the snake is common to Babylonian, Sumerian, and Christian/Abrahamic religions, but this does not prove which religion the Yezidis took these stories from. For example, the appearance of these myths does not prove that they came to the Yezidis from Mesopotamian culture independently of Christianity or Islam. The idea of attending a Yezidi ritual with worship of Melek Taus / Shaytan is repellant to me.

I don't think the worship of the Peacock Angel is really satanism per se. As I understand Yazidis, it is more of a gnostic religion with some clear neoplatonic elements. Certainly a lot of pseudo-Zoroastrian elements are present amongst Yazidis, but these may just be because they are closely related to the Iranians.

As to the Babylonians holding 7 emanations of the gods/God, I seriously think these are very weak grounds to suggest this. We have many Babylonian religious texts, yet this idea is not mentioned as far as I know.

I think this is more on account of some unfortunate syncretic choices that they have come to be labelled Satanists. But I also would not attend the worship of another being than God; the First Commandment is quite explicit and I think I would feel highly uncomfortable throughout anyway.

 

[rakovsky]

As to Dravidian, this is the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis which would link the modern Dravidian languages and an hypothetical Elamite and Sumerian language family, into one broad Super language family. This is highly suppositional and frankly very dubious. In the first place we would have to link Sumerian and Elamite which has never been shown to be reasonable and then secondly link Elamite to Dravidian languages. This second proposition is also not very plausible and rests squarely on the assumption that the Indus Civilization spoke a Dravidian language. While the latter is certainly possible, it cannot be shown to be the case and therefore trying to reconstruct a proto-Dravidian for the Indus to link with Elamite is quite a stretch of the imagination.

Sufficed to say, while it is likely that Sumer consisted of a mixed Sumerian and Semitic population for most of its history, the original Sumerian population is unlikely to be derived from either Dravidian or Semitic stock. This is why it Sumerian is still considered a language isolate.

OK. I think theoretically you could link Sumerian with Dravidian yet not link either with Elamite.

The other theories I heard is that it could be Uralic or Turkic. I don't have a strong opinion. I know that some Sumerians are considered to come from the north, and I think some words cross over with Turkic, but that doesn't mean most of the language does.

 

[rakovsky]

Your education on these questions is impressive!

I don't think the worship of the Peacock Angel is really satanism per se. As I understand Yazidis, it is more of a gnostic religion with some clear neoplatonic elements. Certainly a lot of pseudo-Zoroastrian elements are present amongst Yazidis, but these may just be because they are closely related to the Iranians.
...
I think this is more on account of some unfortunate syncretic choices that they have come to be labelled Satanists. But I also would not attend the worship of another being than God; the First Commandment is quite explicit and I think I would feel highly uncomfortable throughout anyway.

Well, I think worship of the "Peacock Angel", Shaytan or recognizable demons is different than idolatrous worship of Baal, even if the Bible bans all of them. There also might be different grades of worship as to what normal ecumenical Christians will or won't attend. Since the Bible was so specific on worshiping other gods, it gets hard to worship those it named and banned, like Baal.

With Nammu, a big issue is that I don't think that she is real in the way the Sumerians described. That is, I don't think that there is a powerful supernatural thinking primordial sea goddess who gave birth to a separate heavenly god, An. So I would have trouble making sincere prayers in such a cult. It's only when beings are equated with God Himself - like worshiping Dyeus or Shang Di (Supreme God) that things become more comfortable. So for example missionaries to China sometimes think that ancient Chinese knew the true God as Shang Di.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

. It's only when beings are equated with God Himself - like worshiping Dyeus or Shang Di (Supreme God) that things become more comfortable. So for example missionaries to China sometimes think that ancient Chinese knew the true God as Shang Di.

Yes, perhaps. A while back there was a thread on Wakantanka, the Great Spirit of the Lakota and how the Jesuits saw it as almost akin to the Christian God. This is perhaps similar.

 

[rakovsky]

Yes, perhaps. A while back there was a thread on Wakantanka, the Great Spirit of the Lakota and how the Jesuits saw it as almost akin to the Christian God. This is perhaps similar.

I know.

For the Sumerians, as far as I can tell, "An", the "high one", is designated as Dingir, God. However, onto that, they add that "An" was born of the goddess of the primordial watery depths Nammu (written as Dingir Nammu). And I am not aware of any Sumerian writings that say that Nammu was herself born of another god. Nor am I aware of Sumerian writings that say that the gods were One God, a thesis that Babylonians made. That is, for Babylonians - Sumerians' successors, it was sometimes said that Marduk is God X, God Y, God Z.... and God ____, in a form of inclusive monotheism. Now maybe some Sumerians thought this way, but I don't know of such writings.

Now let's compare that to Judaism - there, "God"(El) is The Existing One (Yahweh). God made the whole Cosmos, including the Watery Depths (Tehom). "God" is The Creator, and He was not Created by some other Creator, or from the watery depths. The depths or "a god" or goddess did not precede _God_. So this seems more logical than proposing that a goddess created God.

There is kind of an interesting issue in Judaism where God is called God or Gods (Elohim). Maybe this reflects inclusive monotheism as in "Your Gods are One". So the Jews could pray to "Gods", who are a single god and who are God. Or in other words, God is Gods, and Gods are One. But the Torah does not really explain all that out. The Inclusive Monotheism (to the extent it exists) only shows up in unstated ways, like when three beings visit Abraham and it says that this was God visiting Abraham.

So maybe for some Jews, the three beings were Gods (Elohim) who were the One God. But the Bible does not really lay such a theory out clearly. It never says that The Father god sent the Son god and that these are two different Gods who make up The One God.

The multiplicity of gods in "Inclusive Monotheism" is clearer in the religions of ancient Egypt and Hinduism. Egyptians could say that "Amun The Hidden One existed at the beginning and that Ptah the Fashioner commanded Creation." But Biblical Jews would not talk that way as it counterposes "gods" too explicitly. That is why Trinitarianism is harder to find in the Old Testament than the New Testament. But it doesn't mean that Trinitarianism does not exist in either.

 

[rakovsky]

This is my weak impression about the Semitic word El regarding the Sumerians: For the Babylonians, the god El, I think was the Sumerian god Enlil. But "god"(el) for them was the Sumerian word Dingir, as it was for the Egyptians. That is, the Egyptians translated NTR(god) as Dingir. And Babylonians equated Dingir with Anu. So for the Babylonians, God(El) was Anu, and yet the god named El was not Anu, but Enlil.

If you went to a Sumerian temple, and prayed to God/NTR/Dingir, your understanding of God/NTR/Dingir would be seriously different than that of the Sumerians. You would not think that God was born of a divine goddess.

 

[rakovsky]

The Sumerians sometimes liked to posit riddles. One was:
‘There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?’
The answer is:

Spoiler

A school.

Here is a riddle that I find myself in Sumerian religion: In Sumerian religion, multiple beings were called "gods", like "the god[dess] Nammu" and "the god Enlil". But only one was called "God", "the god God", and His name was "the high/heavenly one". In Sumerian language, they would write this as "the dingir [god] Dingir [God]", referring to the dingir [god] An [the high one or the heavenly one].

So the riddle for me is this: How is it that for the Sumerians, there were many "gods", but there was only one "God", the High Heavenly One?

One answer could be that "God" was just his name, but that doesn't seem to be the best answer - his own name was in fact An, whereas God was his designation and spelling.

Another answer could be that he was higher than all other gods. But I am not sure this is the best answer either, because in that case he would still be just "one of" the gods, albeit the highest, rather than being "God" Himself.

Another answer might be this: The contemporary Egyptians of the Sumerians' era equated the Sumerian word "Dingir" with their word "NTR", which also meant "God." For the Egyptians, there were very many NeTeRu (gods), but they also spoke of there being one NTR(God) who was composed of all gods, including Ra, Amen, and Ptah. But did the Sumerians reach the same conclusion? I am not aware of Sumerian writings that laid out plainly a theory of "inclusive monotheism" like Egyptians did.

Another answer might be that, like many peoples across the world, the Sumerians had a sense of not just gods but of God Himself. And they, like other peoples, conceived of God as being a Creator who was high up like the heavens. But they went beyond such fundamental concepts and added on ideas about there being many gods and that even the high god of the heavens had a mother(Nammu) and was born at some point. That is, they recognized God Himself at some level, but they also created mythologies and imagined gods in addition to their concept of God. And so the end result could be a confused religion, if that religion turned out to posit that "God" Himself was distinguishable from other gods only in that he was the most powerful or the first father, or if it posited that God in no way existed before his birth by the mother "god"[dess] Nammu.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

The Sumerians sometimes liked to posit riddles. One was:
‘There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?’
The answer is:

Spoiler

A school.

Here is a riddle that I find myself in Sumerian religion: In Sumerian religion, multiple beings were called "gods", like "the god[dess] Nammu" and "the god Enlil". But only one was called "God", "the god God", and His name was "the high/heavenly one". In Sumerian language, they would write this as "the dingir [god] Dingir [God]", referring to the dingir [god] An [the high one or the heavenly one].

So the riddle for me is this: How is it that for the Sumerians, there were many "gods", but there was only one "God", the High Heavenly One?

One answer could be that "God" was just his name, but that doesn't seem to be the best answer - his own name was in fact An, whereas God was his designation and spelling.

Another answer could be that he was higher than all other gods. But I am not sure this is the best answer either, because in that case he would still be just "one of" the gods, albeit the highest, rather than being "God" Himself.

Another answer might be this: The contemporary Egyptians of the Sumerians' era equated the Sumerian word "Dingir" with their word "NTR", which also meant "God." For the Egyptians, there were very many NeTeRu (gods), but they also spoke of there being one NTR(God) who was composed of all gods, including Ra, Amen, and Ptah. But did the Sumerians reach the same conclusion? I am not aware of Sumerian writings that laid out plainly a theory of "inclusive monotheism" like Egyptians did.

Another answer might be that, like many peoples across the world, the Sumerians had a sense of not just gods but of God Himself. And they, like other peoples, conceived of God as being a Creator who was high up like the heavens. But they went beyond such fundamental concepts and added on ideas about there being many gods and that even the high god of the heavens had a mother(Nammu) and was born at some point. That is, they recognized God Himself at some level, but they also created mythologies and imagined gods in addition to their concept of God. And so the end result could be a confused religion, if that religion turned out to posit that "God" Himself was distinguishable from other gods only in that he was the most powerful or the first father, or if it posited that God in no way existed before his birth by the mother "god"[dess] Nammu.

I think I have tried to explain this before, but you are making a fundamental error with the writing of An and dingir.
In cuneiform, the sign signifies 'an' meaning sky or heaven in isolation, but becomes the personal name An if dingir is added to it, or context demands it. It functions as a determinative to designate a god. Also it can be used as a syllabogram for the sounds 'an' or 'il'. Because multiple meanings can and are applied to specific signs, such determinatives become necessary. If written in isolation it does not designate a god at all unless the context makes it clear that it references a god and it is the read as An, not dingir. There is no definitive referencing of God in isolation in Sumerian Cuneiform. It can be very confusing with its multiple readings and shifting meanings, unfortunately, but An and dingir both use the same asterix cuneiform sign.