For many its the Roman empire or the Greeks. Similarly ancient Egypt. Or the British empire. Maybe the Japanese, Chinese and Norse as the next 3.
I have deliberately not mentioned time periods there.
These are the most commonly beloved. What are your favourites and why?
Ancient Mesopotamia, hands down. You’ve got the Sumerians, the Babylonian empire, the Akkadian empire. There’s creation myths, flood myths, myths about great battles between the elder gods. Gilgamesh, Sargon, Hammurabi. Such cool artwork and artifacts were left behind for us to find. Friggin ziggurats. And they figured out writing, which has proven useful. Also they had cultural overlap with other notable societies like the ancient Israelites/Canaanites and Egyptians, which allowed for borrowing and retelling of stories, myths, and legends among the people of the time. Pieces of the story of Moses are apparent in Sargon’s personal account of his history. You can see lots of the Noah story in Gilgamesh, and also in Atrahasis. An elder, primordial god named Tiamat is an embodiment of sea water and its associated chaotic nature that existed in the void before creation, and is probably cognate with the Hebrew word “tehom” meaning “the abyss”.
Man if not for the damn abrahamic religions I wonder what the culture of the world would be like now with the old gods.
Say we keep Judaism and remove Christianity plus Islam, I think the world would be more interesting.
With what’s happening at Gaza I wouldn’t miss Judaism too.
I wonder, too. But, the flavors of nature are ever changing, and also I think the ancient Israelites kind of inadvertently set their religion up in such a way that eventual division was kind of inevitable. Prophets can be born or inspired to deliver a message at any time at all, and a concept of the destruction and renewal of the world was noteworthy at least as far back as the Book of Daniel at ~200BCE. Check out Jewish Apocalypticism for a little more about that. But the transition from pantheon to monotheism that took place in the ancient Near East is a really interesting time period not only because of the really cool diversity of myths it produced but also because it took place at a time where history was just starting to be recorded, so there’s just so much cool interactions going on between cultures, a rapidly evolving and diversifying larger civilization, lots of languages with overlapping and phonetically-similar words but varying means of recording their language, religious leaders and their students often being among the very few who could read anything being documented (imagine the power imbalance that created).
Really interesting section, thanks for sharing. Would be cool to see some videos made on the matter with references to texts. Like explaining that Tiamat part with paragraphs from their texts talking about it.
Nice! Look for content about the Enuma Elish (which is basically like the Babylonian creation story) to hear all about Tiamat and their counterpart, Apsu (embodiment of fresh waters amongst the void) and their relationship followed by an eventual battle that ensues between descendants of Apsu and Tiamat, leading to a god named Marduk becoming the head of their pantheon (and also the god that raised Babylon from sand into a great city). From there, check out the wiki for tehom and if you’re looking for videos, peruse the online video warehouse of your pleasure for links between Babylonian Tiamat and Hebrew tehom and you will not be disappointed. I’m pretty sure Richard Elliot Friedman covers it in one of his lectures about the Hebrew Bible/OT, although I can’t recall exactly which one offhand.