Ancient Middle Eastern Religions: General Considerations

Epic of Gilgamesh

Several authors. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. “Ancient Middle Eastern Religions.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Pages 60-95.

General Considerations:

"Ecumeme," a term of art, is a cultural-historical community. There are architectural, metallurgical, ceramic reflections/artifacts and other industries associated with the varied communities. Manufacturing and services were governed by guilds.

There were “religious guilds” with personnel specializing in sacrifices, oracles, divinations, and other services of priest-craft. There was a “mobility of guilds through the entire area,” spreading “specific religious ideas” and techniques from the “Indian Ocean to the Aegean Sea, the Nile River to Central Asia” (60).

Homer’s Odyssey notes the mobility of the guildsmen, religious personnel, architects, physicians, singers and minstrels. Guild priests were called kohanim at ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean Sea of northern Syria. Mycenean Greeks had sacrifices akin to the Hebrews.

People moved. They took themselves, their ideas, their beliefs and their skill sets with them.

There was an “archaeological revolution” in the 19th-20th centuries.

• Decipherment of Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts in the 19th century

• New vistas opened up

• Previously, studies had been confined to Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts

• Ancient objects, artifacts of daily life, and architecture were turned up

• The ziggurat at Babylon illustrates the Biblical “Tower of Babel”

• The Flood or Deluge was illustrated in the Gilgamesh Epic. A fragment of this was found at Megiddo, Israel in the 14th century

• The Hittite culture was shown to be a “major power of antiquity” with a “rich source of religious texts” (61)

• Sumerology has emerged as an academic discipline when the Sumerian term and its culture “had vanished without reference in the literatures of the world”

• Ugarit texts of the 15th to 13th centuries afforded insights

Literary Sources:

• Livy (59/64 B.C. – 17 A.D.) described “religious rites of the ancient Middle East”

• Virgil (70 B.C. – 19 B.C.) in the Aeneid and Eclogues described Egyptian, Semitic, Anatolian and Greek religious views and practices

• Plutarch (40/50 A.D. – 120/125 A.D.), the historian and biographer, in his De Iside et Osiride (= Concerning Isis and Osiris) described the Egyptian views and the cult of the dead

• The Greek satirist and rhetorician, Lucian (120-190 A.D.) in his De Dea Syra ( = Concerning the Syrian Goddess) described Canaanite religion

• Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., remains “an indispensable source for cultural history and religion of the ancient Middle East” (61)

• Due to the Ugarit discoveries, the Homeric epics are “now firmly linked to ancient Middle Eastern literature” (61)

• The Hebrew Bible is the “most important source of knowledge of the ancient Middle East, reflecting life from Egypt to Iran” (61)

• The Hebrew Bible reflects similar literary genres: “psalms, hymns, laws, rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types” (61). The Egyptian document, Wisdom of Amenemope, shows significant parallels to Proverbs.