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

[rakovsky]

1. The true meaning of Dingir for Sumerians - could they envision "God"?

is the sign called Dingir, meaning God in Sumerian. And it also is the symbol for the sky/heavens' god An, their supreme deity. A connection to the god of the ancient Turkic peoples, Tengri, their supreme god, has been suggested by scholars. Polat Kaya a Turkish scholar says its the Turkish TENRI and connects it to the Egyptian word for God NTR and to the Indo-European word Deus (God).

Dingir is different from the main paternal creating god of Sumerians, An. In fact, there is no specific god named "Dingir". Does that mean that the concept of God was distinct from the "gods" of Sumer, and as a result, the Sumerians could envision God as one absolute, true being separate from the belief in many "gods"?

2. Does the observation of multiplying gods show that originally there was belief in just one God?

The Anthropologist Custance notes:

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.

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

The website Earth History notes:

In the hill-country of Canaan, on the outskirts of Sumerian civilisation, ... Abraham is greeted by Melchizedek, king of Jerusalem (Gen 14:18ff). Melchizedek means ‘The righteous one [is] king’, referring to the deity served by this priest-king, and he blesses Abraham in the name of ‘God Most High, maker of heaven and earth’. The word ‘God’ here is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, to whom titles such as ‘most high’, ‘lord of heaven’, ‘maker of heaven and earth’ were regularly applied. As demonstrated by numerous Ugaritic texts, El was the father of the gods, enthroned in heaven, and he ruled over his sons with supreme power.

...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.

Unlike Yahweh, Yah is attested as a component of both Israelite and Eblaite names from long before the time of Moses. The name of Jacob’s great-grandson, Abiah, meant ‘Yah is father’; Joshua meant ‘Yah saves.’ Texts found in the Syrian city of Ebla (c. 2250 BC) include such names as Isa-yah (‘Yah has gone forth’) and Mika-ya (‘Who is like Yah?’). ...

To make it clear that he was the deity whom Israel’s ancestors knew as Yah, Yahweh instructed Moses to tell the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.” ‘I am’ in Hebrew was Eyah, equivalent to Akkadian Ayah, and Ya(h) was a West Semitic contraction of the word. Mesopotamians knew him by his East Semitic name: Ea – or Aya. Like Yahweh, the name was derived from the verb ‘to live’ or ‘to be,’ and meant ‘The Living One’ or ‘I am’. Ea and Yah were the same name, representing the same god, and Yah, in turn, was the same god as Yahweh.

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

If this is correct, it suggests that the Israelite Yah is the Akkadian / West Semitic Aya and the Sumerian/East Semitic Ea or Enki. And it also suggests that "El", another god for Semites, is another name for this same "Yah".

Another thing I am not sure of is whether originally for Sumerians An, the main sky god, was self-conceived or uncreated, or if he came from another god, Nammu. For example, one writing says:

Another inscription from the same period states that Nammu (and not Ki/Uras of later textual evidence) was the spouse of An, an arrangement also found in the OB godlist examined by Kramer in 1944. It's possible that this was an older cosmological notion.

Read more: http://enenuru.proboards.com/thread/407/god-early-occurrences#ixzz42dDTgGIA

3. Do similar descriptions of God across ancient civilizations mean that the one true God, and thus monotheism, is inscribed in peoples' souls, so that it's inherent to them and some of them would think of the one true God, even if a missionary or their parents didn't tell them about Him?

Bishop Alexander Mileant wrote:

Some similarities can be found between the Ten commandments and laws of ancient nations that inhabited the northwestern part of Mesopotamia (well-known laws of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (2050 B.C.), the Amorite king Bilalam, the Sumer-Akkadian ruler Lirit-Ishtar, the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1800 B.C.), and the Assyrian and Hittite laws composed around 1500 B.C. ). These similarities and common elements between the God-revealed and natural laws are due to the fact that the moral law is ingrained by God into the human soul, so human beings, even when they don't know God, have a good natural feeling of what is right and what is wrong. If our nature were not corrupted by primordial sin, it is most likely that just the voice of conscience would be sufficient to regulate our personal and social life.
http://www.stjohntherussian.com/orthodoxy_ten_commandments.html

 

[Arthra]

Oh my goodness...! The poll closes in December 13th 2018! That should be plenty of time for everyone to contribute!

I posted this earlier but the famed Egyptologist Wallis Budge suggested there was an ancient monotheism in Egypt.

See:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/tut/tut12.htm

 

[rakovsky]

Oh my goodness...! The poll closes in December 13th 2018! That should be plenty of time for everyone to contribute!

I posted this earlier but the famed Egyptologist Wallis Budge suggested there was an ancient monotheism in Egypt.

See:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/tut/tut12.htm

I sense that he was right. One of the criticisms I got back when I posted him - and I do think he's relevant, is that his writings are out of date - 1920's.

Where did you post this earlier?

 

[Arthra]

I sense that he was right. One of the criticisms I got back when I posted him - and I do think he's relevant, is that his writings are out of date - 1920's.

Where did you post this earlier?

http://www.christianforums.com/threads/the-bible.7935094/#post-69352885

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

1. The true meaning of Dingir for Sumerians - could they envision "God"?

is the sign called Dingir, meaning God in Sumerian. And it also is the symbol for the sky/heavens' god An, their supreme deity. A connection to the god of the ancient Turkic peoples, Tengri, their supreme god, has been suggested by scholars. Polat Kaya a Turkish scholar says its the Turkish TENRI and connects it to the Egyptian word for God NTR and to the Indo-European word Deus (God).

Dingir is different from the main paternal creating god of Sumerians, An. In fact, there is no specific god named "Dingir". Does that mean that the concept of God was distinct from the "gods" of Sumer, and as a result, the Sumerians could envision God as one absolute, true being separate from the belief in many "gods"?

2. Does the observation of multiplying gods show that originally there was belief in just one God?

The Anthropologist Custance notes:


The website Earth History notes:

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

If this is correct, it suggests that the Israelite Yah is the Akkadian / West Semitic Aya and the Sumerian/East Semitic Ea or Enki. And it also suggests that "El", another god for Semites, is another name for this same "Yah".

Another thing I am not sure of is whether originally for Sumerians An, the main sky god, was self-conceived or uncreated, or if he came from another god, Nammu. For example, one writing says:


3. Do similar descriptions of God across ancient civilizations mean that the one true God, and thus monotheism, is inscribed in peoples' souls, so that it's inherent to them and some of them would think of the one true God, even if a missionary or their parents didn't tell them about Him?

Bishop Alexander Mileant wrote:

1:As to Dingir, in Sumerian it merely means god or goddess and is related to the heavens. It was applied to all the gods and occasionally to human priests as well.
The fact that there is no god called Dingir does not mean that there was some idea of God as separate of the gods or of some summus deus higher god. Its the same if you have many dogs, you don't call them 'Dog' but their names, but may refer to the 'dogs' etc without envisioning a Greater Dog. This is merely wishful thinking on the part of some Monotheists.
There is no evidence of the Sumerians ever seeing one absolute God separate from other gods.

As to the Turkic language loan of the word or vice versa, this is a possible theory that has never been proven. It is popular amongst Turkic peoples as at the moment Sumerian is a language isolate with no known language group. If they can argue affinity, they can argue Sumerian into a larger language family with the Turkic languages and as Sumerian is the oldest recorded language, there are a lot of nationalistic and bragging rights attached to whoever can claim it.

The Indo-European might be related, but this is doubtful as consonant change is unlikely to have occured in this direction.
As to Egyptian, they mostly used a mute determinative in texts to show something was a god, so if they even had a word with the meaning "god" is debated. They had the concept though.

2: Multiplying gods does not mean there was one original God, because gods were also conflated with each other, so the opposite can also be argued. There are many historical examples of one god becoming multiiple and vice versa amongst polytheistic peoples.
As to the argument of Yah as Ea and Enki, these are vastly different gods with little to do with each other. You would expect at least a passing resemblance if they were related. Ea is probably derived from the name of Enki's temple at Eridu as it means house of water. The mischievous nature of Enki and his association with water is completely absent from the Canaanite gods here mentioned.

El was the chief god, but was also a generic term for god in West Semitic languages, hence it was applied to the hebrew's God as well. It is similar to the manner that Allah is used as a proper name, but also just means God to arabic speaking Christians.

As to Yah, this is a shortened form of the Tetragrammaton YHWH which appears in the late Bronze age. This derived from Hebrew and likely means something along the lines of "He that is" or "He that causes to be" and is closely related to the enigmatic I AM of Exodus. This name has etymologically no relation to any other god's name in the area.

An was held as the primordial dome of over the earth with the waters of Nammu outside of it. In the epic Enuma Elish, he is said to be the son of Kisar and Ansar (deities of which little is known). This however is from the first millenium, so is a late source for Sumerian belief. No early texts make any reference to his origin, so we do not know what the Old Sumerians believed regarding this.

3: There are vast differences between peoples' conceptions of their gods, from Monistic Shinto to bloody human sacrifice demanding Aztec gods to very human Greek gods to Pantheistic Hindu ones.
There is however a theory that says that the most primitive, and therefore the closest people to the original state of humanity, have strong tendencies to Monotheism. A good book arguing this point is the Origin of the Idea of God (Ursprung Gottesidee) by Wilhelm Schmidt, but this is maybe a bit dated today, although most of his points remain valid.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

As to Egypt, there were strong tendencies amongst the Heliopolitan priests to treat Ra as a monotheistic deity, although they usually then equated all other gods to an aspect of him.

This was brought to its conclusion when in the 18th dynasty the Pharoah Akhenaton (named Amenhotep IV initially) instituted a Monotheistic cult of the Aten in the 14th century BC. This said that all life flowed from the Aten or sun disc and he was the sole god, but it maintained a quasi divine status for the Pharoah and his family.
He then fell afoul of the powerful Theban priesthood and tried to enforce the worship of his one god, but ultimately failed as his second successor Tutankhamen (Originally Tutankhaten) reverted to Polytheism.
Akhenaton and his god, the Aten, were then expunged from official accounts by the 19th dynasty and their monuments defaced (This incidentally helped conceal Tutankhamen's tomb).
The short period of monotheism is well known in Egyptology and is widely accepted as historic fact, but as to its relation to later monotheism if any, is doubtful.

(There is a perceived similarity of Akhenaton's great Hymn to the Aten and Psalm 104, but this may just be coincidence or repurposing of religious material so proves nothing. The theory that the Israelites were descended from the Aten worshippers was popular in the early 20th century but has been discarded entirely by mainstream Egyptology)

 

[rakovsky]

I am impressed with your answers.

As to Egypt, there were strong tendencies amongst the Heliopolitan priests to treat Ra as a monotheistic deity, although they usually then equated all other gods to an aspect of him.

This was brought to its conclusion when in the 18th dynasty the Pharoah Akhenaton (named Amenhotep IV initially) instituted a Monotheistic cult of the Aten in the 14th century BC. This said that all life flowed from the Aten or sun disc and he was the sole god, but it maintained a quasi divine status for the Pharoah and his family.
He then fell afoul of the powerful Theban priesthood and tried to enforce the worship of his one god, but ultimately failed as his second successor Tutankhamen (Originally Tutankhaten) reverted to Polytheism.
Akhenaton and his god, the Aten, were then expunged from official accounts by the 19th dynasty and their monuments defaced (This incidentally helped conceal Tutankhamen's tomb).
The short period of monotheism is well known in Egyptology and is widely accepted as historic fact, but as to its relation to later monotheism if any, is doubtful.

(There is a perceived similarity of Akhenaton's great Hymn to the Aten and Psalm 104, but this may just be coincidence or repurposing of religious material so proves nothing. The theory that the Israelites were descended from the Aten worshippers was popular in the early 20th century but has been discarded entirely by mainstream Egyptology)

 

[rakovsky]

Your ideas are impressive.

1:As to Dingir, in Sumerian it merely means god or goddess and is related to the heavens. It was applied to all the gods and occasionally to human priests as well.
The fact that there is no god called Dingir does not mean that there was some idea of God as separate of the gods or of some summus deus higher god. Its the same if you have many dogs, you don't call them 'Dog' but their names, but may refer to the 'dogs' etc without envisioning a Greater Dog. This is merely wishful thinking on the part of some Monotheists.
There is no evidence of the Sumerians ever seeing one absolute God separate from other gods.

I don't know how to prove it. It seems if the turkics, Egyptians, Hindus, and others as you mentioned in #3 Conceived of monotheism, maybe Sumerians did too.

As to the Turkic language loan of the word or vice versa, this is a possible theory that has never been proven. It is popular amongst Turkic peoples as at the moment Sumerian is a language isolate with no known language group. If they can argue affinity, they can argue Sumerian into a larger language family with the Turkic languages and as Sumerian is the oldest recorded language, there are a lot of nationalistic and bragging rights attached to whoever can claim it.

The Indo-European might be related, but this is doubtful as consonant change is unlikely to have occured in this direction.
As to Egyptian, they mostly used a mute determinative in texts to show something was a god, so if they even had a word with the meaning "god" is coincidence.debated. They had the concept though.

Egyptians used the term NTR for god. It reminds me of Turkish TENRI, and DIVINE and DINGIR. I suppose that the similarity is not a coincidence.

2: Multiplying gods does not mean there was one original God, because gods were also conflated with each other, so the opposite can also be argued. There are many historical examples of one god becoming multiiple and vice versa amongst polytheistic peoples.

Not sure how your answer is shown in practice to refute the multiplication of God's theory.

As to the argument of Yah as Ea and Enki, these are vastly different gods with little to do with each other. You would expect at least a passing resemblance if they were related. Ea is probably derived from the name of Enki's temple at Eridu as it means house of water. The mischievous nature of Enki and his association with water is completely absent from the Canaanite gods here mentioned.

Hmmm... it seems like Canaan it especially had a god called Yah who the website claims was associated with the god EA and AYA. It looks like the names derived from each other.

El was the chief god, but was also a generic term for god in West Semitic languages, hence it was applied to the hebrew's God as well. It is similar to the manner that Allah is used as a proper name, but also just means God to arabic speaking Christians.

As to Yah, this is a shortened form of the Tetragrammaton YHWH which appears in the late Bronze age. This derived from Hebrew and likely means something along the lines of "He that is" or "He that causes to be" and is closely related to the enigmatic I AMof Exodus. This name has etymologically no relation to any other god's name in the area.

The website claims the names are related. It might give more detailed info on the connection.

An was held as the primordial dome of over the earth with the waters of Nammu outside of it. In the epic Enuma Elish, he is said to be the son of Kisar and Ansar (deities of which little is known). This however is from the first millenium, so is a late source for Sumerian belief. No early texts make any reference to his origin, so we do not know what the Old Sumerians believed regarding this.

I get that the story about An and Kiser was late.
Didn't the earlier Sumerian texts still say he came from Nammu though?

3: There are vast differences between peoples' conceptions of their gods, from Monistic Shinto to bloody human sacrifice demanding Aztec gods to very human Greek gods to Pantheistic Hindu ones.
There is however a theory that says that the most primitive, and therefore the closest people to the original state of humanity, have strong tendencies to Monotheism. A good book arguing this point is the Origin of the Idea of God (Ursprung Gottesidee) by Wilhelm Schmidt, but this a maybe a bit dated today, although most of his points remain valid.

I want to hear more about this.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Egyptians used the term NTR for god. It reminds me of Turkish TENRI, and DIVINE and DINGIR. I suppose that the similarity is not a coincidence.

Unfortunately, the similarity is probably coincidence if you follow the rules of linguistic change and the historical development of the language families.
Divine from Indo-European Dyaus for instance, looks similar today, but the original is quite different as you can see (incidentally this is the same word that morphed into Greek Zeus, Norse Aesir and Latin Deus from which divine and divinity were derived) . It may be related to Tenri, as stated above.
If they are all related it would have to have been from millennia before the Sumerians and therefore impossible to say for certain.
As to ntr as Egyptian for god, this is beloved by websites, but there is actually a big debate in Egyptology itself regarding this topic. Some say it means god, for it is used to refer to gods, but it is also used to refer to people or objects at other times. This may merely mean that those things were god-like, but it remains uncertain. Usually if a divine thing was meant, they used a Hieroglyphic determinative to show this thing was holy, so the actual term ntr is less frequently used in hieroglyphic texts than we would think as usually it was a name with the determinant.

Not sure how your answer is shown in practice to refute the multiplication of God's theory.

It doesn't refute the theory, but it does make it less plausible.

Hmmm... it seems like Canaan it especially had a god called Yah who the website claims was associated with the god EA and AYA. It looks like the names derived from each other.

The website is wrong.
Yah is a shortening of YHWH as in Halleyah. See above post for etymology.
Ea means house of water and is an alternative name for the Sumerian god Enki. A water god trickster and craftsman.
Aya is a goddess, the consort of Shamash. Her name means Dawn in Akkadian and is a sun goddess and goddess of sexual love.
All three names are from three different peoples, in two different language families and describe radically different divine beings.

The website claims the names are related. It might give more detailed info on the connection.

El was applied to YHWH since early times as it is the generic name for god in West Semitic languages. As in El Elyon or Elohim in the bible which is used alongside the Tetragrammaton.
The terms are related in that manner.

I get that the story about An and Kiser was late.
Didn't the earlier Sumerian texts still say he came from Nammu though?

I have never read any such thing and a quick referencing in my mythology books could not turn it up either, but I will investigate this and get back to you.

I want to hear more about this.

Anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adduced a sort of primitive monotheism or primeval monotheism in certain tribes and nations such as Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in America. They especially looked at the most primitive tribes by technology to look for this and then extrapolated how this original monotheism could have become degraded when these peoples became more civilised.

Scottish Anthropologist Andrew Lang concluded in 1898 that a 'All-Father' figure existed in simple tribes before western contact, a sort of original father of the entire tribe from which they all derived, who created the first couple in the tribe.

Then Wilhelm Schmidt developed it further in the book I referred to above: He concluded that Monotheism was the natural human form of theism and all other views such as pantheism or polytheism were later degenerations thereof. He found evidence in creator figures or father figures in various mythologies of tribes that had in common a general set of attributes such as familial feeling with the tribe and being 'first'. He would show how other gods or such figures could then arise through known cultural traditions.
He founded the Vienna school of Anthropology which would go on to argue his Urmonotheismus hypothesis for the next 50 years. In the 1960s they started to speak more of a High God than One God for their first god as this was more widely accepted in Academia.

These ideas have however fallen out of fashion as developmental schools of Anthropology have largely been replaced by more historical based analyses. The reasoning though still stands even if it is no longer popular.

The argument in Schmidt's book is quite complex and it is quite long, but if you are interested in this hypothesis, I suggest you look for it. Word of warning though, you will have to wade through quite a lot of repetition, Academic Jargon and mythology, with the latter being mostly the mythology of small tribes numbering a few hundred at most, so very little you would be familiar with.

 

[rakovsky]

Unfortunately, the similarity is probably coincidence if you follow the rules of linguistic change and the historical development of the language families.
Divine from Indo-European Dyaus for instance, looks similar today, but the original is quite different as you can see (incidentally this is the same word that morphed into Greek Zeus, Norse Aesir and Latin Deus from which divine and divinity were derived) . It may be related to Tenri, as stated above.
If they are all related it would have to have been from millennia before the Sumerians and therefore impossible to say for certain.
As to ntr as Egyptian for god, this is beloved by websites, but there is actually a big debate in Egyptology itself regarding this topic. Some say it means god, for it is used to refer to gods, but it is also used to refer to people or objects at other times. This may merely mean that those things were god-like, but it remains uncertain. Usually if a divine thing was meant, they used a Hieroglyphic determinative to show this thing was holy, so the actual term ntr is less frequently used in hieroglyphic texts than we would think as usually it was a name with the determinant.



It doesn't refute the theory, but it does make it less plausible.



The website is wrong.
Yah is a shortening of YHWH as in Halleyah. See above post for etymology.
Ea means house of water and is an alternative name for the Sumerian god Enki. A water god trickster and craftsman.
Aya is a goddess, the consort of Shamash. Her name means Dawn in Akkadian and is a sun goddess and goddess of sexual love.
All three names are from three different peoples, in two different language families and describe radically different divine beings.



El was applied to YHWH since early times as it is the generic name for god in West Semitic languages. As in El Elyon or Elohim in the bible which is used alongside the Tetragrammaton.
The terms are related in that manner.



I have never read any such thing and a quick referencing in my mythology books could not turn it up either, but I will investigate this and get back to you.



Anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adduced a sort of primitive monotheism or primeval monotheism in certain tribes and nations such as Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in America. They especially looked at the most primitive tribes by technology to look for this and then extrapolated how this original monotheism could have become degraded when these peoples became more civilised.

Scottish Anthropologist Andrew Lang concluded in 1898 that a 'All-Father' figure existed in simple tribes before western contact, a sort of original father of the entire tribe from which they all derived, who created the first couple in the tribe.

Then Wilhelm Schmidt developed it further in the book I referred to above: He concluded that Monotheism was the natural human form of theism and all other views such as pantheism or polytheism were later degenerations thereof. He found evidence in creator figures or father figures in various mythologies of tribes that had in common a general set of attributes such as familial feeling with the tribe and being 'first'. He would show how other gods or such figures could then arise through known cultural traditions.
He founded the Vienna school of Anthropology which would go on to argue his Urmonotheismus hypothesis for the next 50 years. In the 1960s they started to speak more of a High God than One God for their first god as this was more widely accepted in Academia.

These ideas have however fallen out of fashion as developmental schools of Anthropology have largely been replaced by more historical based analyses. The reasoning though still stands even if it is no longer popular.

The argument in Schmidt's book is quite complex and it is quite long, but if you are interested in this hypothesis, I suggest you look for it. Word of warning though, you will have to wade through quite a lot of repetition, Academic Jargon and mythology, with the latter being mostly the mythology of small tribes numbering a few hundred at most, so very little you would be familiar with.

Your familiarity with the topic is impressive.
You mention how NTR can be associated with nongod objects. I read the same thing about the Hindu word deva.

The Biblical scholars Delitszch and Bottero proposed that Yah was a semitic deitys name like EA and Aya. Supposedly people found nonjewish manuscripts using this name Yah in a pagan context. In Jeremiah IIRC Jeremiah speaks of seeing Yah, not explicitly YAHWEH. Under this theory the Hebrew Yah god is the same name as used by some other tribes, but it doesn't mean of course that it's the same exact concept of God, eg. a water god.

With An and Nammu the curious thing for me is not if some stories say An came from the primordial Nammu, but how early those claims were from the first time we have found in Sumerian writing. That is, I want to have a better guess as to whether they always thought he came from Nammu or if at some early time they thought he is himself a kind of first cause and first source.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Your familiarity with the topic is impressive.
You mention how NTR can be associated with nongod objects. I read the same thing about the Hindu word deva.

The Biblical scholars Delitszch and Bottero proposed that Yah was a semitic deitys name like EA and Aya. Supposedly people found nonjewish manuscripts using this name Yah in a pagan context. In Jeremiah IIRC Jeremiah speaks of seeing Yah, not explicitly YAHWEH. Under this theory the Hebrew Yah god is the same name as used by some other tribes, but it doesn't mean of course that it's the same exact concept of God, eg. a water god.

With An and Nammu the curious thing for me is not if some stories say An came from the primordial Nammu, but how early those claims were from the first time we have found in Sumerian writing. That is, I want to have a better guess as to whether they always thought he came from Nammu or if at some early time they thought he is himself a kind of first cause and first source.

I doubt you will find what you are looking for regarding Nammu and An. Ancient texts seldom discuss specific theology and the idea of a first cause in that manner is quite sophisticated. Especially if you are looking for an early form thereof, you won't find it. (Greek thought for instance developed ideas of a Prime Mover as original God, but this was only in the 4th century BC while the oldest Greek texts go back to the 13th (Mycenaean)).

As to Yah, you are now reaching slippery ground. Etymologically Yah itself means nothing, so as a god-name this is very unlikely to be its primary form. If you look at the general area, only Yahweh fits the bill for the name it may be derived from.
As stated, Yahweh is derived from Hebrew for statements denoting self-existence.
The Israelites used Yah as a short form in many areas of the bible and many theophoric names: EliYAH, JeremiYAH etc.
The fact that Jeremiah uses it should easily show they are the same.

Now, there are debates on Yahweh however. It is clear from the archaealogical record that Yahweh was associated with other gods at various times, such as given a consort Asherah or worshipped with Baal. But this is not surprising as we see this denounced in the Bible. This is the 'Pagan context' that was referred to above in most instances.
The name first surfaces in Sinai however amongst the Shasu of YHW in Egyptian sources in the 15th century BC, but this fits Moses revelation etc and Jethro and the Midianites, so doesn't really pose a problem. The name then rapidly becomes associated only with the Kingdom of Israel and Judah where it is used for a national God, usually in a monalatric sense (as on the Moabite Stele).

There is an alternative theory that derives the name Yahweh from a title of El - 'el du yahwi sabaot' or El who creates the host. This then says that El was the original god of Israel, hence the name IsraEL, which became conflated with Judah's YHWH after the fall of the northern Kingdom and that the refugees then invented an affinity between themselves and the tribes of the southern Kingdom. Another alternate theory derives it from the god Yahu worshipped at Ebla in Syria, however the reading of this god's name is uncertain.
These two above theories are generally discarded by mainstream Archaealogy as it fails to account for the Shasu of YWH references in Sinai, which makes the independant derivation of YHWH more likely.

As to Friedrich Delitzsch, he found three names in tablets from the first dynasty of Babylon (circa 1830 BC) in the 1890s that he proposed were West Semitic from the preceding invasion by people of this stock and therefore hypothesised that a god of these names was worshipped by Western Semites from at least the 19th century BC. The names are Ya-a-e-ilu, Ya-ve-ilu and Ya-um-um-ilu which would be essentially theophoric names with a partiple Yah for the god. These tablets are fragmentary though and the reading is very uncertain, so even Delitzsch was cautious on it. They can just as easily refer to the god El's title as mentioned above instead of using the form Yah.
Delitzsh also tries to derive the name of YHWH from Sumerian Ea through adding the West Semitic nominative ending Yau, but ran into a lot of linguistic difficulties. Based on this and the sinai references, this view has been completely discarded by Assyriology and Archaeology in general since at least the 1920s.

Jean Bottero is a more recent Assyrologist who speculated a derivation of Yah and El from Ea/Enki from when Ebla was under Mesopotamian suzerainty, but this relies heavily on the one inscription at Ebla mentioned above, the reading of which is uncertain. He himself said that this is only speculation as the sources are too few to make a difinitive statement.

 

[rakovsky]

Your replies have been impressive.

 

[rakovsky]

Is the Egyptian word NTR, "god", related to nature and what is its etymology?

Humanity, the World and God: Understandings and Actions
Willem Bernard Drees, ‎Hubert Meisinger, ‎Taede A. Smedes - 2007 ‎, Page 205

A complex linguistic structure, the Egyptian word nTr may be extended over the entire energetic spectrum of life, sacralisgng it; ... According to Hornung (1971, 32) neither the etymology, nor the original meaning can be found.

The Temple in Man
R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz

Schwaller de Lub icz explains in Le Temple de l'Homme (Caracteres, 1957) that in the an cient temple civilization of Egypt, numbers, our most ancient fo rm of symbol, did not simply designate quantities but instead wer e considered to be concrete definitions of energetic formative prin ciples of nature. The Egyptians called these energetic principles Net ers, a word which is conventionally rendered as "gods."

To conform with the true meaning of the symbol in a ncient Egypt, we ought to use the Egyptian term Medu-Neter u, the Greek translation of which, "heiroglyphs," distorts the E gyptian meaning. Medu-Neteru are the Neters, or the principles conve yed by a sign.
...
"'Divine" man (without t h i s part of the brain ) represents the Principle or Neter, capable of living and actin g, but only as the executant of an impulse that he receives; hence, he plays the role of an intermediary between the abstract impulse, outsi de of Nature, and its execution in Nature, without actual choice. In this regard, this entity has a primitive, and "prenatural" character

...each of these individual members of the ve getable kingdom belongs to a genus, and this genus to a fam ily; and these families belong to an original "lineage." At the he ad of this lineage is a Neter, a "Principle" synthesizing all the char acteristics of this lineage: its number, its rhythm, its classific ation in the general harmony.

Let us further elucidate, by means of a geometrical image, the role of the Neter as head or Principle of a lineage.

http://www.fatuma.net/text/R.A.Schw...einMan-SacredArchitectureandthePerfectMan.pdf

WEST-AFRICAN ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
Professor Catherine Acholonu

INTERNATIONAL WORDS (INDO-EUROPEAN) THAT DERIVE FROM
AFA CULT LANGUAGE OF THE ANCIENT IGBO PRIESTS
Common historical experiences have brought about borrowing across several European borders, such that most international words are found in almost all European languages. We have selected a few words as examples, though there are many more of such words with Igbo roots across several European languages
Nature (Nne Atu Ora – Mother of the Living Word of the Sun God)
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/igbo/westafricanorigin.htm

Land of Osiris
By Stephen S. Mahler

First translated by early Egyptologists after Champollion as God or Goddess, this meaning has since been challenged. R A Schwaller de Lubicz was one of the first to question this translation in the early 1950's, choosing rather to define Neter as principle" and/or "attribute", as a divine aspect of the whole, not in the sense we use the word Deity. The Greeks [sic, no, it must be the Latins] derived their word Nature from Neter, therefore equating the Divine with the natural as the Khemitians taught them. The ancient Khemitians knew every principle or attribute of Nature was also divine, of God - all interconnected and interrelated to the whole, the source.

 

[Four Angels Standing]

Amenhotep IV, known also as Akhenaten,Pharaoh during the 18th dynasty, to my knowledge was the first Pharaoh to introduce monotheism to his people. The god he believed in was known as Aten, the sun God.
As you can imagine the priesthood in Egypt was not pleased. Each god and goddess had their own priests and turning to a monotheistic system put many of them out of business, you might say.
When Akhenaten died his name was struck from many of the stela and other records in Egypt. Which did return to a polytheistic system.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Is the Egyptian word NTR, "god", related to nature and what is its etymology?




http://www.fatuma.net/text/R.A.Schw...einMan-SacredArchitectureandthePerfectMan.pdf

The problem is that Egyptian is the oldest of the Afroasiatic (the old Hamito-Semitic) languages that we have on record. While the Semitic language all use three consonant word roots, egyptian also has mono and bi consonantal roots. These latter roots appear to be a primitive feature, possibly also present in the proto-afriasiatic language from which they all descend. The problem is though, that Egyptian and the Semitic languages both seem to have undergone a regularisation of the tri-consonant roots which differ markedly, therefore separate regularisation had to have occurred. This means that it is very difficult to try and reconstruct the proto-language with certainty, which is why word-borrowings and definite etymologies for Ancient Egyptian all remain largely conjecture. We just cannot see if the Egyptian or Semitic or Cushitic sense of a word is closer or not to the original. This is different from Indo-European where we have a nice record of language change for millenia which we could backtrack to a presumed proto-language, as changes between language groups generally followed similar patterns.

As to NTR, I would think a good analogy is probably the Kami of Shinto. They are routinely called gods in English, for they look as if it is a polytheistic system, but actually they are manifestations of a monistic Musubi. It is closer to a power or an emanation of power than to gods in actual fact. This is why the Emperor or a mountain or a tree could all be Kami, without being in a sense gods at all. Everything is seen as Musubi, some just stronger and other weaker emanations thereof. Perhaps NTR is similar, especially if we take in account its wide use. But this is of course again conjecture, we just can't say for certain at this point. There are arguments for multiple interpretations of this word and its meaning.

 

[rakovsky]

As to NTR, I would think a good analogy is probably the Kami of Shinto. They are routinely called gods in English, for they look as if it is a polytheistic system, but actually they are manifestations of a monistic Musubi. It is closer to a power or an emanation of power than to gods in actual fact. This is why the Emperor or a mountain or a tree could all be Kami, without being in a sense gods at all. Everything is seen as Musubi, some just stronger and other weaker emanations thereof. Perhaps NTR is similar, especially if we take in account its wide use. But this is of course again conjecture, we just can't say for certain at this point.

This looks to be a promising explanation by you, considering the relationship between gods and elements in Egyptian and other ancient religions, eg. primordial waters (Nun), Sun (Ra), sky/heavens (Nut) etc.

Can you read Spanish? This article looks promising on providing more evidence on the relationship between NTR and Latin "Natura". Here is my crude Spanish translation into English:

About the Egyptian origin of the term nature and its relation with naturalistic medicine
Francisco Tomás Verdú Vicente, MEDICINA NATURISTA, 2011; Vol. 5 - N.º 2: 80-81

Abstract:The term nature comes from the word Egyptian ntr and it means God. Later on the Greeks identified the divine thing with the goddess of the nature Isis creating the term Phisis and later the Romans denominated Nature.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/3695453.pdf

The notion expressed by nutar as substantive and nutra as adjective or verb should be looked for in the Coptic Nout, which in the Biblical tradition corresponds to the Greek Dynamis (energy), ischis (strength), ischiros (strong), and and ischiron(protection). This form of neter means strong and protection.

Wallis Budge, as a a great Egyptologist, remembers something fundamental about the word nature/natura: "The other definition of the word, given by Brugsch, has to signify 'the active energy that produces and believes the things with regular recurrence; it confers new life and returns its youthful vigor' and adds the innate concept of the word for completing the original meaning of the Greek voice physis and the Latin natura.

One must ask whether an Egyptian word could really cross boundaries into Greece and Rome. It looks like that happened with the word "Natron", a chemical used in Egyptian funerals.

Natron deposits in the Era Kohor crater in the Tibesti Mountains, Chad

Natron is a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate (Na2CO3·10H2O, a kind of soda ash) and about 17% sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda, NaHCO3) along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate.

The English word natron is a French cognate derived from the Spanish natrón through Greek νίτρον nitron. This derives from the Ancient Egyptian word nṯry 'natron'. Natron refers to Wadi El Natrun or Natron Valley in Egypt, from which natron was mined by the ancient Egyptians for use in burial rites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natron

The Egyptian word for Natron, the chemical used for drying mummies, was "netjeri," which sounds quite close to NTR, pronounced Neter or netjer.

Vicente proposes that the story of Isis making a serpent to get Ra's secret name is related to the Greek name Physis and the Latin Natura. He says that Isis became the Greek word Physis, which means nature in Greek. This raises the question of whether this can be confirmed by finding out the name of "Physis" in Egyptian. One book I checked says:

The uroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, is an ancient Egyptian and Democritiean emblem of Physis- an image of the self-fructifying, never ending cycle of nature.

In fact, in many mythologies, the cosmic serpent is the wellspring, the source of all manifestation. It stands for the primal matter or the limitless ocean out of wich life emerged. In ancient Egypt, Nun, the primordial water, is most often depicted as a serpent.
Archetype and Character: Power, Eros, Spirit, and Matter Personality Types
By V. Odajnyk

Here we see the image of the serpent reappearing, which is what Isis used in the legend to get Ra's secret name. It would not be a surprise if Vicente is right and NTR is the secret name of Ra, since NTR is occasionally used in Egyptian to denote the name of the one true God, when potentially monotheistic texts are encountered without naming a specific god.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

This looks to be a promising explanation by you, considering the relationship between gods and elements in Egyptian and other ancient religions, eg. primordial waters (Nun), Sun (Ra), sky/heavens (Nut) etc.

Can you read Spanish? This article looks promising on providing more evidence on the relationship between NTR and Latin "Natura". Here is my crude Spanish translation into English:


One must ask whether an Egyptian word could really cross boundaries into Greece and Rome. It looks like that happened with the word "Natron", a chemical used in Egyptian funerals.

The Egyptian word for Natron, the chemical used for drying mummies, was "netjeri," which sounds quite close to NTR, pronounced Neter or netjer.

Vicente proposes that the story of Isis making a serpent to get Ra's secret name is related to the Greek name Physis and the Latin Natura. He says that Isis became the Greek word Physis, which means nature in Greek. This raises the question of whether this can be confirmed by finding out the name of "Physis" in Egyptian. One book I checked says:


Here we see the image of the serpent reappearing, which is what Isis used in the legend to get Ra's secret name. It would not be a surprise if Vicente is right and NTR is the secret name of Ra, since NTR is occasionally used in Egyptian to denote the name of the one true God, when potentially monotheistic texts are encountered without naming a specific god.

No, I don't speak Spanish, but I do have a smattering of Latin.

Interesting theory, but it conflicts with the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language.
From my etymology books, Latin Natura is derived from Natus, itself a past participle from Nasci. This in turn is from Nascor derived via the form Gnasci from Proto-indo-european Gene. It denotes birth.
Physis descends via phuosis from Proto-indo-european bheue. It denotes growing or to be.

Isis in turn means Throne as a personification of the Pharoah's power.

So linguistics doesn't really seem to support the theory. As you pointed out with Natron, eastern words can and did enter Latin and Greek, but Natura and Physis do not appear to be amongst these, they aren't even related to each other in an Indo-European sense.

Ra was used in a pseudo-Monotheistic or all gods are Ra sense by the Heliopolitan priesthood, I agree. I think that to say NTR itself was used in this sense as well needs a lot of corroboration which I doubt that sufficient texts of sufficient quality are extent to make this connection.

Serpents due to their undulating shape resembling waves are closely connected to water in many cultures. This leads to many false friend connections especially in comparative mythology. Hence Leviathan, Tiamat, Apophis, the Hydra, Khoi Watersnake etc. Likewise the Ouroboros was widely used for Existence in the Mediteranean world, perhaps helped by assumptions of primordial waters from which existence was born. It is possible it may be related to the Egyptian myth, but it might not be. We can make suppositions, but nothing definite can be said on this, I fear.

 

[Greg1234]

Does that mean that the concept of God was distinct from the "gods" of Sumer, and as a result, the Sumerians could envision God as one absolute, true being separate from the belief in many "gods"?

Aboriginal, Caucasian, Asian, African, American, English, Canadian, Arabian, Egyptian, Hungarian, Sumerian, Russian, French, Venezuelan, Cuban, Indian, Indo-Germanic religions all different religions? Who set the definition of a religion based on race and/or nationality to the point where simply being a part of another land on the planet equals a different religion?

 

[rakovsky]

Aboriginal, Caucasian, Asian, African, American, English, Canadian, Arabian, Egyptian, Hungarian, Sumerian, Russian, French, Venezuelan, Cuban, Indian, Indo-Germanic religions all different religions? Who set the definition of a religion based on race and/or nationality to the point where simply being a part of another land on the planet equals a different religion?

There is no Caucasian religion, but there is a Jewish religion, Judaism, the religion of Judah.

To answer your question, if a big majority, maybe 95% of a people pick a certain religion, or their kingdom officially chooses it, it can be called in common speech their religion.

 

[Greg1234]

There is no Caucasian religion, but there is a Jewish religion, Judaism, the religion of Judah.

To answer your question, if a big majority, maybe 95% of a people pick a certain religion, or their kingdom officially chooses it, it can be called in common speech their religion.

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?