Damien Marie AtHope’s Art 

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The Sumerian word for “sky” or “heaven” and “goddess” or “god”

may connect to the Ghassulian Culture “Star “

The Sumerian word for “god” that originally was an ideogram for the Sumerian word “sky” or “heaven” was then extended to a logogram for the word (Dingir) (“goddess” or “god”). The three symbols relate to the holy triad: Inanna/Ishtar, Nanna/Sin, Utu/Shamash, that is morning star (Venus), lunar (moon crescent), solar disk (sun).

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Around 7,200 years ago spread both European-related dogs into the levant (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey) and Iranian-related dogs across the Near East. ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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“At 4500–3500 BCE or around 6,500 to 5,500 years old, the Proto-Semitic is the hypothetical reconstructed proto-language ancestral to the Semitic languages.” ref

“The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. Semitic languages include the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and ancient South Arabian alphabets. Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date in West Asia, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from the 30th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the north eastern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian and Elamite (2800 BCE to 550 BCE), both language isolates, and Egyptian (3000 BCE), a sister branch of the Afroasiatic family, related to the Semitic languages but not part of them. Amorite appeared in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant circa 2000 BC, followed by the mutually intelligible Canaanite languages (including Hebrew, Phoenician, Moabite, Edomite, and Ammonite, and perhaps Ekronite, Amalekite and Sutean), the still spoken Aramaic, and Ugaritic during the 2nd millennium BCE.” ref

6,500–5,800 years ago in Israel Late Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Period in the Southern Levant Seems to Express Northern Levant Migrations, Cultural and Religious Transfer

DNA evidence expresses waves of migration from Anatolia and the Zagros mountains (today’s Turkey and Iran) to the Levant helped develop the Chalcolithic culture that existed in Israel’s Upper Galilee region some 6,500 years ago. ref

“After 10 years of research, we understand that Anatolia/Turkey, especially from the west, is part of the basis of all European peoples. Matching how all European cattle are all descended from Iranian cattle dispersed by farmer herders leaving Anatolia/Turkey.” – Joachim Burger – Anthropologist & Population Geneticist Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2vYr6gx56o&t=651s

The Levant which may refer to Isreal in a common use way generally includes Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and the Northern Sinai Peninsula.

Movement of people from the Near East 9,000 years ago, especially from Turkey spreading early paganism as it went. By leapfrogging from island to island across the northern Mediterranean, Neolithic people were able to quickly spread their farming lifestyle across southern Europe some 9,000 years ago, genetics suggest. It seems that sometime after individuals in the Near East first developed farming and herding around 12,000 years ago they later transferred it and its new agricultural religion of early paganism out to many others.

The genetic expresses that people from the Near East migrated into Turkey and then rapidly went through the islands of Greece and Sicily, before making their way north into the center of the continent. People living in central Turkey today, for example, share SNPs with Sicilians and Palestinians, but Sicilians and Palestinians have mutations that the two populations don’t have in common.

People have common ancestral roots in Turkey but have not had much contact since. People even living around the Mediterranean today have common ancestors in Turkey. But then the genes diverge in two main different sets, with Greek islands like the Dodecanese archipelago and Crete forming a sort of genetic bridge to the rest of Greece, Sicily, Italy, and north into Europe.

Genetics of modern-day Egyptians, Libyans, Tunisians, and Moroccans form a separate genetic branch, thus, two distinct paths lacking much genetic mingling once separating ways north and south from Turkey. However, there is some evidence, such as found blades in Neolithic settlements in Tunisia made from volcanic glass that comes from isolated islands near Sicily.

Agriculture and its new Neolithic religion of early paganism, spread across land through central and northern Europe at a rate of about half a mile each year, thus taking millennia to journey from the Balkans to Germany. But the Mediterranean was quite different with these new pagan farmers jumping from island to island, getting from Italy all the way to Portugal in the space of just six generations. ref

Archaeo-genetic studies have described the formation of Eurasian ‘steppe ancestry’ as a mixture of Eastern and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. The horizon of cultural innovations in the around 6,000 years ago and after that subsequently facilitated the advance of pastoral societies likely linked to the dispersal of Indo-European languages had some odd dispersal, suggesting that the Caucasus acted as a bridge to human movement from Yamnaya and subsequent pastoralist cultures show evidence for previously undetected Anatolian farmer-related ancestry from different contact zones, while Steppe Maykop individuals harbor additional Upper Palaeolithic Siberian and Native American related ancestry. ref

“The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan;

a Proto-Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna or Star of Venus?

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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1. From a Gerzeh/Naqada II Late Predynastic Egyptian palette with a goddess “Bat/Hathor” cow-head sun/stars motif.
2. From a Hierakonpolis late Gerzeh/Naqada II Predynastic or early Naqada III Proto-Dynastic Egyptian porphyry fluted bowl with two reliefs on the rim, one of which was a goddess “Hathor/Bat” cow-head sun/stars motif.
3. From an Abydos tomb, u-210 which held a small seal with a goddess “Bat/Hathor” sun/stars motif from the Gerzeh/Naqada II Late Predynastic Egyptian period.
4. A Mongolian Copper Age bull sun/star shamanism petroglyph
5. A Mongolian Bronze Age deer sun/star shamanism petroglyph symbol.
6. A Kyrgyzstan Saimaly-Tash possibly Bronze Age shamanism cow-sun person symbol petroglyph.
7. Similar X-ray style images among different peoples of the North from Siberia to Central Asia with shamanism petroglyphs of horned animals with sun symbols from possibly as old as the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. ref, ref, ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Who Were Artists in Ancient Egypt and What Audiences Did They Address?

Hathor was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles.

As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra’s feminine counterpart, and in this form, she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies. Her contrasting, beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two sides of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor also crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife. Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspects, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk. She could also be represented as a lioness, cobra, or sycamore tree.

Cattle goddesses similar to Hathor were portrayed in Egyptian art in the fourth millennium BC, but she herself may not have appeared until the Old Kingdom (4,686–4,181 years ago). With the patronage of Old Kingdom rulers, she became one of Egypt’s most important deities. More temples were dedicated to her than to any other goddess, of which the most prominent was Dendera Temple in Upper Egypt. She was also worshipped in the temples of her male consorts. The Egyptians connected her with foreign lands such as Nubia and Canaan and their valuable goods, such as incense and semiprecious stones, and some of the peoples in those lands adopted her worship. In Egypt itself, she was one of the deities commonly invoked in private prayers and votive offerings, particularly by women desiring children. ref

“Aten” is an Egyptian name for the sun-disk as a deity and the term “silver aten” was sometimes used to refer to the moon. ref

Around 8,000 years ago, Neolithic settlements appear all over Egypt and based evidence have attributed these settlements to migrants from the Fertile Crescent in the Near East returning during the Egyptian and North African Neolithic, bringing agriculture to the region. linked the earliest farming populations at Fayum, Merimde, and El-Badari, to Near Eastern populations. ref

However, the archaeological data also suggests that Near Eastern domesticates were incorporated into a pre-existing foraging strategy and only slowly developed into a full-blown lifestyle, contrary to what would be expected from settler colonists from the Near East. Finally, the names for the Near Eastern domesticates imported into Egypt were not Sumerian or Proto-Semitic loan words, which further diminishes the likelihood of a mass immigrant colonization of lower Egypt during the transition to agriculture. ref

Weaving is evidenced for the first time during the Faiyum A Period. People of this period, unlike later Egyptians, buried they’re dead very close to, and sometimes inside, their settlements. Moreover, the examination of the many Egyptian words for “city” provide a hypothetical list of reasons why the Egyptians settled. In Upper Egypt, terminology indicates trade, protection of livestock, high ground for flood refuge, and sacred sites for deities. ref

Dozens of cat mummies and a rare collection of mummified scarab beetles have been discovered in seven sarcophagi, some dating back more than 6,000 years, at a site on the edge of the pyramid complex in Saqqara, south of Cairo. A couple of days ago, when we discovered those coffins, they were sealed coffins with drawings of scarabs. Among the dozens of cat mummies unearthed were 100 wooden, gilded statues of cats and one in bronze dedicated to the cat goddess Bastet. Cats held a special place in ancient Egypt and were mummified as religious offerings. A collection of wooden, gilded statues of a lion, a cow, and a falcon was also unearthed at the Saqqara site. ref

From about 5000 to 4200 BC the Merimde culture, so far only known from a big settlement site at the edge of the Western Delta, flourished in Lower Egypt. The culture has strong connections to the Faiyum A culture as well as the Levant. People lived in small huts, produced a simple undecorated pottery and had stone tools. Cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs were held. Wheat, sorghum and barley were planted. The Merimde people buried their dead within the settlement and produced clay figurines. The first Egyptian lifesize head made of clay comes from Merimde. ref

The El Omari culture is known from a small settlement near modern Cairo. People seem to have lived in huts, but only postholes and pits survive. The pottery is undecorated. Stone tools include small flakes, axes, and sickles. Metal was not yet known. Their sites were occupied from 6,000 years ago to the Archaic Period. The Maadi culture (also called Buto Maadi culture) is the most important Lower Egyptian prehistoric culture contemporary with Naqada I and II phases in Upper Egypt from the site Maadi near Cairo but also many other places in the Delta to the Fayum region. Copper was known, pottery is simple and undecorated and shows, in some forms, strong connections to the southern Levant. People lived in small huts, partly dug into the ground. The dead were buried in cemeteries, but with few burial goods. The Maadi culture was replaced by the Naqada III culture; whether this happened by conquest or infiltration is still an open question. ref

The Tasian culture was the next in Upper Egypt. This culture group is named for the burials found at Der Tasa, on the east bank of the Nile between Asyut and Akhmim. The Tasian culture group is notable for producing the earliest blacktop-ware, a type of red and brown pottery that is painted black on the top and interior.^[40] This pottery is vital to the dating of Predynastic Egypt. Because all dates for the Predynastic period are tenuous at best, WMF Petrie developed a system called Sequence Dating by which the relative date, if not the absolute date, of any given Predynastic site, can be ascertained by examining its pottery. ref

As the Predynastic period progressed, the handles on pottery evolved from functional to ornamental. The degree to which any given archaeological site has functional or ornamental pottery can also be used to determine the relative date of the site. Since there is little difference between Tasian ceramics and Badarian pottery, the Tasian Culture overlaps the Badarian range significantly. From the Tasian period onward, it appears that Upper Egypt was influenced strongly by the culture of Lower Egypt. ref

The Star of Ishtar or Star of Inanna

Goddesses Ishtar/Inanna were worshipped in Sumer at least as early as the Uruk period (6,000 – 5,100 years ago). The Star of Ishtar or Star of Inanna is a symbol of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna and her East Semitic counterpart Ishtar. Alongside the lion, it was one of Ishtar’s primary symbols. Because Ishtar was associated with the planet Venus, the star is also known as the Star of Venus.

“Happy Easter” Well Happy Eostre/Ishter

The star of Inanna usually had eight points, though the exact number of points sometimes varies. Six-pointed stars also occur frequently, but their symbolic meaning is unknown. It was Inanna’s most common symbol and, in later times, it became the most common symbol of the goddess Ishtar, Inanna’s East Semitic counterpart. It seems to have originally borne a general association with the heavens, but, by the Old Babylonian Period, it had come to be specifically associated with the planet Venus, with which Ishtar was identified. Starting during this same period, the star of Ishtar was normally enclosed within a circular disc. During later times, slaves who worked in Ishtar’s temples were sometimes branded with the seal of the eight-pointed star. On boundary stones and cylinder seals, the eight-pointed star is sometimes shown alongside the crescent moon, which was the symbol of Sin, god of the Moon, and the rayed solar disk, which was a symbol of Shamash, the god of the Sun. ref

Astarte (Greek: Ἀστάρτη, Astártē) is the Hellenized form of the Middle Eastern goddess Astoreth (Northwest Semitic), a form of Ishtar (East Semitic), worshipped from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity. The name is particularly associated with her worship in the ancient Levant among the Canaanites and Phoenicians. She was also celebrated in Egypt following the importation of Levantine cults there. The name Astarte is sometimes also applied to her cults in Mesopotamian cultures like Assyria and Babylonia.

Astarte is one of a number of names associated with the chief goddess or female divinity of those peoples. She is recorded in Akkadian as As–dar–tu, the masculine form of Ishtar. The name appears in Ugaritic as ʻAthtartor ʻAṭtart, in Phoenician as Ashtart or Aštart, in Hebrew as Ashtoret. The Hebrews also referred to the Ashtarot or “Astartes” in the plural. The EtruscanPyrgi Tablets record the name Uni-Astre. Astarte was connected with fertility, sexuality, and war. Her symbols were the lion, the horse, the sphinx, the dove, and a star within a circle indicating the planet Venus.

Pictorial representations often show her naked. She has been known as the deified morning and/or evening star. The deity takes on many names and forms among different cultures and according to Canaanite mythology, is one and the same as the Assyro-Babylonian goddess Ištar, taken from the third millennium BC Sumerian goddess Inanna, the first primordial goddess of the planet Venus. Inanna was also known by the Aramaic people as the god Attar, whose myth was construed in a different manner by the people of Greece to align with their own cultural myths and legends, when the Canaanite merchants took the First papyrus from Byblos (the Phoenician city of Gebal) to Greece sometime before the 8th century by a Phoenician called Cadmus the first King of Thebes. Astarte riding in a chariot with four branches protruding from the roof, on the reverse of a Julia Maesa coin from Sidon.

Astarte was worshipped in Syria and Canaan beginning in the first millennium BC (around 3,000 years ago) and was first mentioned in texts from Ugarit. She came from the same Semitic origins as the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and a Ugaritic text specifically equates her with Ishtar. Her worship spread to Cyprus, where she may have been merged with an ancient Cypriot goddess. This merged Cypriot goddess may have been adopted into the Greek pantheon in Mycenaean and Dark Age times to form Aphrodite. Stephanie Budin, however, argues that Astarte’s character was less erotic and more warlike than Ishtar originally was, perhaps because she was influenced by the Canaanite goddess Anat, and that therefore Ishtar, not Astarte, was the direct forerunner of the Cypriot goddess. Greeks in classical, Hellenistic, and Roman times occasionally equated Aphrodite with Astarte and many other Near Eastern goddesses, in keeping with their frequent practice of syncretizing other deities with their own.

Other major centers of Astarte’s worship were the Phoenician city-states of Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos. Coins from Sidon portray a chariot in which a globe appears, presumably a stone representing Astarte. “She was often depicted on Sidonian coins as standing on the prow of a galley, leaning forward with right hand outstretched, being thus the original of all figureheads for sailing ships.” In Sidon, she shared a temple with Eshmun. Coins from Beirut show Poseidon, Astarte, and Eshmun worshipped together. Other centers were Cythera, Malta, and Eryx in Sicily from which she became known to the Romans as Venus Erycina.

A bilingual inscription on the Pyrgi Tablets dating to about 2,500 years ago found near Caere in Etruria equates Astarte with Etruscan Uni-Astre, that is, Juno. At CarthageAstarte was worshipped alongside the goddess Tanit. The Aramean goddess Atargatis (Semitic form ʻAtarʻatah) may originally have been equated with Astarte, but the first element of the name Atargatis appears to be related to the Ugaritic form of Asherah‘s name: Athirat. ref

Temples in the Ghassulian Culture: Terminology and social implications

Otherness and interaction in copper metallurgy in the

Chalcolithic of the Southern Levant: the Transcaucasian connection

The Chalcolithic period of the Southern Levant (6,500-5,600 years ago) a period of transition stages
of socio-economic formations such as Neolithic village communities and Early Bronze proto-urban societies. The interaction sphere holds conditions in which those otherwise locally ‘autonomous’ societies were also connected on a regional basis – that is, local social systems could be identified by distinctive settlement patterns in specific ecological or geographical circumstances, the practice of appropriate subsistence techniques, and the maintenance and reproduction of historically determined cultural ways and associated material culture though there seem to be certain goods ‘bounded’ these local systems within a large, regional or super-regional area.

In order to perpetuate the flow of these goods, furthermore, a common code of values and beliefs, manifested in a shared corpus of symbols, was invented to facilitate the social interactions needed to exchange the goods. This common code, if not conceived by elites, soon became controlled by them. The exotic type of some raw material of a non-local origin presumably may have come from Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan or the Caucasian region. Although some are more inclined to trace their origin to Eastern Anatolia by analogy with the discovery of Anatolian obsidian in the Southern Levant.

Nonetheless, there is evidence that the manufacture of arsenical copper artifacts seems to be local and the iconography of the objects is similar to that of the Ghassulian and Golanian local cultures. And there is the pre-Ghassulian stages in Tuleilat Ghassul as well as Late Neolithic or Early Chalcolithic cultures like Besor or Qatifian that point to a somewhat local origin.

However, foreign influence should not be dismissed since it is possible that the hoard of Nahal Mishmar and the presence of arsenical copper metallurgy may have been the consequence of the movement of people from the north.results of general analyses on humans remains of the mortuary cave of Peqi’in were presented. From a sample of 22 individuals, 20% have relations with Anatolian Neolithic population and that another 20% with Iranian Chalcolithic population. It should be noted that on this site were found five copper objects similar to those of Nahal Mishmar.

Ashalim Cave held a lead mace-head and in Bet Shemesh there was a leaded copper mace-head which, in
addition to being typologically linked to the Nahal Mishmar mace-heads, also indicate links with the north regions.
To attempt to offer a possible answer to the question – how did this raw material arrive? – it may be useful to make a comparison with the Kura-Arakse cultural phenomenon (or Early Transcaucasian Culture = ETC).

Although it is chronologically contemporary with the Early Bronze III of the southern Levant highlight that their migratory movements reached to the Beth Yerah region and it could be a first Transcaucasian antecedent of the carriers of the Khirbet Kerak Ware. It is also possible that the likeness of these phenomenons may respond to a similar economic strategy of risk administration of seminomadic peoples. In fact, these must have been relatively small human displacements, not monolithic waves of nomadic pastoralists.

It has been suggested that several of the iconographical motifs found in sites of the called Late Pottery Neolithic / Early Chalcolithic in the Southern Levant has strong influences from the Caucasus, North Mesopotamia, and Anatolia which in in separated regions have a common ideological and religious background, but also as the existence of cultural contacts between these regions, and the possibility of certain technocultural exchanges. ref

Archaic conceptions about procreation: a reinterpretation of the Chalcolithic figurines from Gilat

The symbolism of the two complementary figurines found at the Chalcolithic site of Gilat – a woman with a churn and a ram with cornets – is reconsidered. The paper argues that male sexual symbolism of the ram, the seminal associations of the cornets, and their position on the animal’s back suggest that the ram figurine expresses the belief that semen, the vital element of the paternal issue, originates in the spinal cord. With her emphasized genitals and the uterine symbolism of the churn, the woman figurine evokes the transformation of the semen into bones in the womb. Analysis of the red painting used in the figurines suggests that heat was considered the physical factor behind the production of semen and its ensuing transformation into bones. The analysis also underscores the importance of blood, the maternally transmitted vital fluid, for the formation of flesh in the embryo. These findings, echoed in other ancient cultures, attest to the earliest integrated representation of the phenomenon of procreation discovered so far. This representation, however, is perceptible only after the viewer is made aware of the hidden continuity in the ceramic wall between each figure (ram, woman) and its associated artifact (cornets, churn). It is concluded that, given that this esoteric information focuses on the mysteries of procreation, the two figurines may not necessarily represent deities. ref

Peqi`in  a Chalcolithic Burial Cave in Peqi`in, Upper Galil 

The cave shows two phases of use: at first, in the pre-Ghassulean stage, it most probably served for a seasonal dwelling. Later, in the Ghassulian phase of the Copper Age, the cave was transformed into a burial place from which most of the artifacts originated with the most common objects found are ossuaries of a variety of types. Rectangular box with a separate gable lid with flat plaques with symbolic faces, plaques with painted faces, plaques with applied human facial features and three-dimensional sculpted human heads. Another common type consists of ossuaries possessing a closed box and such types of ossuary are common to the coastal plain of which Haderah has been its northernmost limit. ref

Inanna appears in more myths than any other Sumerian deity. Many of her myths involve her taking over the domains of other deities.

Queen of Heaven was a title given to a number of ancient sky goddesses worshipped throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East during ancient times. Goddesses known to have been referred to by the title include Inanna, Anat, Isis, Astarte, and possibly Asherah (by the prophet Jeremiah). In Greco-Roman times Hera, and her Roman aspect Juno bore this title. Forms and content of worship varied. In modern times, the title “Queen of Heaven” is still used by contemporary pagans to refer to the Great Goddess, while Catholics, Orthodox, and some Anglican Christians now apply the ancient title to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Inanna-Ishtar’s most famous myth is the story of her descent into and return from Kur, the ancient Sumerian Underworld, a myth in which she attempts to conquer the domain of her older sister Ereshkigal, the queen of the Underworld, but is instead deemed guilty of hubris by the seven judges of the Underworld and struck dead. Three days later, Ninshubur pleads with all the gods to bring Inanna back, but all of them refuse her except Enki, who sends two sexless beings to rescue Inanna.

Inanna[a] is an ancient Mesopotamian goddess associated with love, beauty, sex, desire, fertility, war, justice, and political power. She was originally worshipped in Sumer and was later worshipped by the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians under the name Ishtar.[b] She was known as the “Queen of Heaven” and was the patron goddess of the Eanna temple at the city of Uruk, which was her main cult center. She was associated with the planet Venus and her most prominent symbols included the lion and the eight-pointed star. Her husband was the god Dumuzid (later known as Tammuz) and her sukkal, or personal attendant, was the goddess Ninshubur (who later became the male deity Papsukkal).

Inanna was worshipped in Sumer at least as early as the Uruk period (around 6,000 – 5,100 years ago), but she had little cult prior to the conquest of Sargon of Akkad. During the post-Sargonic era, she became one of the most widely venerated deities in the Sumerian pantheon, with temples across Mesopotamia. The cult of Inanna-Ishtar, which may have been associated with a variety of sexual rites, including homosexual transvestite priests and sacred prostitution, was continued by the East Semitic-speaking people who succeeded the Sumerians in the region. She was especially beloved by the Assyrians, who elevated her to become the highest deity in their pantheon, ranking above their own national god Ashur. Inanna-Ishtar is alluded to in the Hebrew Bible and she greatly influenced the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who later influenced the development of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. ref

Although the title of Queen of Heaven was often applied to many different goddesses throughout antiquity, Inanna is the one to whom the title is given the most number of times. In fact, Inanna’s name is commonly derived from Nin-anna which literally means “Queen of Heaven” in ancient Sumerian (It comes from the words NIN meaning “lady” and AN meaning “sky”), although the cuneiform sign for her name (Borger 2003 nr. 153, U+12239 ????) is not historically a ligature of the two. In several myths, Inanna is described as being the daughter of Nanna, the ancient Sumerian god of the Moon. In other texts, however, she is often described as being the daughter of either Enki or An. These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that Inanna may have been originally a Proto-Euphratean goddess, possibly related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, she at first had no sphere of responsibilities. The view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists. In Sumer Inanna was hailed as “Queen of Heaven” in the third millennium BC. In Akkad to the north, she was worshipped later as Ishtar. In the Sumerian Descent of Inanna, when Inanna is challenged at the outermost gates of the underworld, she replies:

“I am Inanna, Queen of Heaven, On my way to the East.”

Her cult was deeply embedded in Mesopotamia and among the Canaanites to the west. F. F. Bruce describes a transformation from a Venus as a male deity to Ishtar, a female goddess by the Akkadians. He links Ishtar, Tammuz, Innini, Ma (Cappadocia), Mami, Dingir-Mah, Cybele, Agdistis, Pessinuntica and the Idaean Mother to the cult of a great Mother-goddess.

The goddess, the Queen of Heaven, whose worship Jeremiah so vehemently opposed, may have been possibly Astarte. Astarte is the name of a goddess as known from Northwestern Semitic regions, cognate in name, origin and functions with the goddess Ishtar in Mesopotamian texts. Another transliteration is ‘Ashtart; other names for the goddess include Hebrew Ashtoreth), Ugaritic ‘ṯtrt (also ‘Aṯtart or ‘Athtart), Akkadian DAs-tar-tú (also Astartu) and Etruscan Uni-Astre (Pyrgi Tablets). ref

Early Asherah goddess?

Could the skeleton of the body be a type of tree of life inside us

and thus one reason to connect trees, life, and early goddesses?

This 7,500-year-old goddess figurine from Neve Yam is among the world’s earliest evidence for established religion, the origins of which date back to the agricultural revolution, around 10,000 years ago. It is similar to contemporaneous figurines, especially the one discovered at Hagosherim, some 100 km away. The striking resemblance between the two objects indicates that the cult of the goddess was widespread by this time. In later periods, the combination of a plant motif (the Tree of Life) with the image of a woman (the goddess) became a common image throughout the Ancient Near East, where it represented the goddess Asherah. ref

The tree of life is a widespread myth or archetype in the world’s mythologies, related to the concept of sacred tree more generally, and hence in religious traditions. The tree of knowledge, connecting to heaven and the underworld, and the tree of life, connecting all forms of creation, are both forms of the world tree or cosmic tree and are portrayed in various religions and philosophies as the same tree. The tree is commonly seen as living in the three realms: roots in the underworld, body of the tree a living skeleton in the earth realm and the tree top and upper leaves in the heaven or sacred sky above. ref

The Star of Ishtar or Star of Inanna

Goddesses Ishtar/Inanna were worshipped in Sumer at least as early as the Uruk period (6000 – 5,100 years ago). The Star of Ishtar or Star of Inanna is a symbol of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna and her East Semitic counterpart Ishtar. Alongside the lion, it was one of Ishtar’s primary symbols. Because Ishtar was associated with the planet Venus, the star is also known as the Star of Venus.

“Happy Easter” Well Happy Eostre/Ishter

The star of Inanna usually had eight points, though the exact number of points sometimes varies. Six-pointed stars also occur frequently, but their symbolic meaning is unknown. It was Inanna’s most common symbol and, in later times, it became the most common symbol of the goddess Ishtar, Inanna’s East Semitic counterpart. It seems to have originally borne a general association with the heavens. But, by the Old Babylonian Period, it had come to be specifically associated with the planet Venus, with which Ishtar was identified.

Starting during this same period, the star of Ishtar was normally enclosed within a circular disc. During later times, slaves who worked in Ishtar’s temples were sometimes branded with the seal of the eight-pointed star. On boundary stones and cylinder seals, the eight-pointed star is sometimes shown alongside the crescent moon, which was the symbol of Sin, god of the Moon, and the rayed solar disk, which was a symbol of Shamash, the god of the Sun. ref

Astarte (Greek: Ἀστάρτη, Astártē) is the Hellenized form of the Middle Eastern goddess Astoreth (Northwest Semitic), a form of Ishtar (East Semitic), worshipped from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity. The name is particularly associated with her worship in the ancient Levant among the Canaanites and Phoenicians.

She was also celebrated in Egypt following the importation of Levantine cults there. The name Astarte is sometimes also applied to her cults in Mesopotamian cultures like Assyria and Babylonia. Astarte is one of a number of names associated with the chief goddess or female divinity of those peoples. She is recorded in Akkadian as As–dar–tu, the masculine form of Ishtar. The name appears in Ugaritic as ʻAthtartor ʻAṭtart, in Phoenician as Ashtart or Aštart, in Hebrew as Ashtoret. The Hebrews also referred to the Ashtarot or “Astartes” in the plural.

The EtruscanPyrgi Tablets record the name Uni-Astre. Astarte was connected with fertility, sexuality, and war. Her symbols were the lion, the horse, the sphinx, the dove, and a star within a circle indicating the planet Venus. Pictorial representations often show her naked. She has been known as the deified morning and/or evening star. The deity takes on many names and forms among different cultures and according to Canaanite mythology, is one and the same as the Assyro-Babylonian goddess Ištar, taken from the third millennium BC Sumerian goddess Inanna, the first primordial goddess of the planet Venus.

Inanna was also known by the Aramaic people as the god Attar, whose myth was construed in a different manner by the people of Greece to align with their own cultural myths and legends, when the Canaanite merchants took the First papyrus from Byblos (the Phoenician city of Gebal) to Greece sometime before the 8th century by a Phoenician called Cadmus the first King of Thebes. Astarte riding in a chariot with four branches protruding from roof, on the reverse of a Julia Maesa coin from Sidon. Astarte was worshipped in Syria and Canaan beginning in the first millennium BC (around 3,000 years ago) and was first mentioned in texts from Ugarit. She came from the same Semitic origins as the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and a Ugaritic text specifically equates her with Ishtar. Her worship spread to Cyprus, where she may have been merged with an ancient Cypriot goddess. This merged Cypriot goddess may have been adopted into the Greek pantheon in Mycenaean and Dark Age times to form Aphrodite.

Stephanie Budin, however, argues that Astarte’s character was less erotic and more warlike than Ishtar originally was, perhaps because she was influenced by the Canaanite goddess Anat, and that therefore Ishtar, not Astarte, was the direct forerunner of the Cypriot goddess. Greeks in classical, Hellenistic, and Roman times occasionally equated Aphrodite with Astarte and many other Near Eastern goddesses, in keeping with their frequent practice of syncretizing other deities with their own. Other major centers of Astarte’s worship were the Phoenician city-states of Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos. Coins from Sidon portray a chariot in which a globe appears, presumably a stone representing Astarte. “She was often depicted on Sidonian coins as standing on the prow of a galley, leaning forward with right hand outstretched, being thus the original of all figureheads for sailing ships.” In Sidon, she shared a temple with Eshmun. Coins from Beirut show Poseidon, Astarte, and Eshmun worshipped together. Other centers were Cythera, Malta, and Eryx in Sicily from which she became known to the Romans as Venus Erycina. A bilingual inscription on the Pyrgi Tablets dating to about 2,500 years ago found near Caere in Etruria equates Astarte with Etruscan Uni-Astre, that is, Juno. At CarthageAstarte was worshipped alongside the goddess Tanit. The Aramean goddess Atargatis (Semitic form ʻAtarʻatah) may originally have been equated with Astarte, but the first element of the name Atargatis appears to be related to the Ugaritic form of Asherah‘s name: Athirat. ref

Seeming evidence of a Universal goddess

In Ptolemaic times Isis’s sphere of influence could include the entire cosmos. As the deity that protected Egypt and endorsed its king, she had power over all nations, and as the provider of rain, she enlivened the natural world. The Philae hymn that initially calls her ruler of the sky goes on to expand her authority, so at its climax her dominion encompasses the sky, earth, and Duat. It says her power over nature nourishes humans, the blessed dead, and the gods. Other, Greek-language hymns from Ptolemaic Egypt call her “the beautiful essence of all the gods”. In the course of Egyptian history, many deities, major and minor, had been described in similar grand terms. Amun was most commonly described this way in the New Kingdom, whereas in Roman Egypt such terms tended to be applied to Isis. Such texts do not deny the existence of other gods but treat them as aspects of the supreme deity, a type of theology sometimes called “summodeism”. ref

Historically, the Jewish religion had elements of polytheism,

especially the worship of goddesses and a cult of the mother goddess.

Asherah is identified as the queen consort of the Sumerian god Anu, and Ugaritic El, the oldest deities of their respective pantheons, as well as Yahweh, the god of Israel and Judah. This role gave her a similarly high rank in the Ugaritic pantheon. Despite her association with Yahweh in extra-biblical sources, Deuteronomy 12 has Yahweh commanding the destruction of her shrines so as to maintain purity of his worship. The name Dione, which like ‘Elat means “Goddess”, is clearly associated with Asherah in the Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, because the same common epithet (‘Elat) of “the Goddess par excellence” was used to describe her at Ugarit. The Book of Jeremiah, written circa 628 BC, possibly refers to Asherah when it uses the title “Queen of Heaven”[b] in Jeremiah 7:16-18[7] and Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25.

Asherah in ancient Semitic religion, is a mother goddess who appears in a number of ancient sources. She appears in Akkadian writings by the name of Ašratu(m), and in Hittite as Aserdu(s) or Asertu(s). Asherah is generally considered identical with the Ugaritic goddess ʼAṯirat.

She is also called Elat,[e] “Goddess”, the feminine form of El (compare Allat) and Qodesh, “holiness”.[f] Athirat in Akkadian texts appears as Ashratum (or, Antu), the wife of Anu, the God of Heaven. In contrast, ʿAshtart is believed to be linked to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar who is sometimes portrayed as the daughter of Anu while in Ugaritic myth, ʿAshtart is one of the daughters of El, the West Semitic counterpart of Anu.

Among the Hittites this goddess appears as Asherdu(s) or Asertu(s), the consort of Elkunirsa (“El the Creator of Earth”) and mother of either 77 or 88 sons. Among the Amarna letters a King of the Amorites is named Abdi-Ashirta, “Servant of Asherah”. ref

Stars: Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities (at least back to around 6,000 years ago)

Stars, to me, as a religious belief relate to “Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities.” 

(at least back to around 6,000 years ago, with connections to shamanism)

Journeys to the Sun: Heavenly Symbols in Shamanism and Rock Art of Siberia and Central Asia

List of solar deities

Need to Mythicized: gods and goddesses

Sun Worship

by Patti Wigington

The summer solstice, the sun is at its highest point in the sky. Many ancient cultures marked this date as significant, and the concept of sun worship is one nearly as old as mankind itself. In societies that were primarily agricultural, and depending on the sun for life and sustenance, it is no surprise that the sun became deified. While many people today might take the day to grill out, go to the beach, or work on their tans, for our ancestors the summer solstice was a time of great spiritual import. The Egyptian peoples honored Ra, the sun god. For people in ancient Egypt, the sun was a source of life. It was power and energy, light and warmth. It was what made the crops grow each season, so it is no surprise that the cult of Ra had immense power and was widespread. Ra was the ruler of the heavens. He was the god of the sun, the bringer of light, and patron to the pharaohs. According to legend, the sun travels the skies as Ra drives his chariot through the heavens. Although he originally was associated only with the midday sun, as time went by, Ra became connected to the sun’s presence all day long. The Greeks honored Helios, who was similar to Ra in his many aspects. Homer describes Helios as “giving light both to gods and men.” The cult of Helios celebrated each year with an impressive ritual that involved a giant chariot pulled by horses off the end of a cliff and into the sea. In many Native American cultures, such as the Iroquois and Plains peoples, the sun was recognized as a life-giving force.

Many of the Plains tribes still perform a Sun Dance each year, which is seen as a renewal of the bondman has with life, earth, and the growing season. In MesoAmerican cultures, the sun was associated with kingship, and many rulers claimed divine rights by way of their direct descendency from the sun. Sun worship is found in Babylonian texts and in a number of Asian religious cults. Today, many Pagans honor the sun at Midsummer, and it continues to shine its fiery energy upon us, bringing light and warmth to the earth. Sun worship is found in Persia, the Middle East, and Asia. As part of the cult of Mithra, early Persian societies celebrated the rising of the sun each day.

The legend of Mithra may well have given birth to the Christian resurrection story. Honoring the sun was an integral part of ritual and ceremony in Mithraism, at least as far as scholars have been able to determine. One of the highest ranks one could achieve in a Mithraic temple was that of heliodromus, or sub-carrier. Sun worship has also been found in Babylonian texts and in a number of Asian religious cults. Today, many Pagans honor the sun at Midsummer, and it continues to shine its fiery energy upon us, bringing light and warmth to the earth. ref

Sedentism and the Creation of goddesses around 12,000 years ago as well as male gods after 7,000 years ago.

Sun and Moon Goddesses

The sun, moon, planets, and stars have been worshipped as gods in a number of cultures.

The following is a list of solar deities:

• African mythology
• Australian Aboriginal mythology
• Ainu mythology
• Arabian mythology
• Aztec mythology
• Baltic mythology
• Basque mythology
• Brazilian mythology
• Buddhist mythology
• Canaanite mythology
• Celtic mythology
• Chinese mythology
• Egyptian mythology
• Etruscan mythology
• Germanic mythology
• Greek mythology
• Hindu mythology
• Hittite mythology
• Incan mythology
• Inuit mythology
• Japanese mythology
• Lusitanian mythology
• Māori mythology
• Maya mythology
• Mesopotamian mythology
• Minoan mythology
• Muisca mythology
• Native American mythology
• Norse mythology
• Persian mythology
• Polynesian mythology
• Roman mythology
• Sami mythology
• Slavic mythology
• Turkic mythology
• Zoroastrianism
• Zunism

Star-worship may have evolved from the awe felt at the beauty, regularity, mystery, and power of the heavenly bodies (especially of the sun) and in response to their effect, real or imagined, on terrestrial and human life. The sun and moon, in particular, are perceived as the givers of time (time being measures by their motions) and the sun as the regulator of the cycle of the seasons. Star-worship usually accompanies, indeed triggers, the early development of Astronomy and calendrics and sanctions the parallel growth of Astrology. This was certainly so in Mesopotamia in the last 4,000 years ago and in Central America such as among the Maya. Star-worship probably underlies the prehistoric megalithic astronomical sites of northern Europe [e.g. Stonehenge] and similar sites in North America the Big Horn medicine wheel. From Mesopotamia, star-worship passed into Graeco-Roman culture. Sun-worship became, in the 3rd-century CE, something of an official religion in the Roman empire, contemporary ideology seeing in the divine emperor (Emperor-Worship) a terrestrial counterpart of the sun as sovereign of the universe. At the same time, Mithras was worshipped as a solar god ( see Mithraism ) and his mysteries incorporated much arcane astral lore.

There are no known Mesopotamian tales about the end of the world, although it has been speculated that they believed that this would eventually occur. This is largely because Berossus wrote that the Mesopotamians believed the world to last “twelve times twelve sars“; with a sar being 3,600 years, this would indicate that at least some of the Mesopotamians believed that the Earth would only last 518,400 years. Berossus does not report what was thought to follow this event, however. ref, ref

• Astronomy: (from Greek: ἀστρονομία) is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It applies mathematics, physics, and chemistry, in an effort to explain the origin of those objects and phenomena and their evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and comets; the phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma-ray bursts, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, all phenomena that originate outside Earth’s atmosphere are within the purview of astronomy. A related but distinct subject, physical cosmology, is concerned with the study of the Universe as a whole. Astronomy is one of the oldest of the natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history, such as the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Nubians, Iranians, Chinese, Maya, and many ancient indigenous peoples of the Americas performed methodical observations of the night sky. Historically, astronomy has included disciplines as diverse as astrometry, celestial navigation, observational astronomy and the making of calendars, but professional astronomy is now often considered to be synonymous with astrophysics.  ref
• Astrology: Astrology is the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial objects as a means for divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events. Astrology has been dated to at least 4,000 years ago or more, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Many cultures have attached importance to astronomical events, and some – such as the Indians, Chinese, and Maya – developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Early evidence for humans making conscious attempts to measure, record, and predict seasonal changes by reference to astronomical cycles, appears as markings on bones and cave walls, which show that lunar cycles were being noted as early as 25,000 years ago. This was a first step towards recording the Moon’s influence upon tides and rivers, and towards organizing a communal calendar. Farmers addressed agricultural needs with increasing knowledge of the constellations that appear in the different seasons—and used the rising of particular star-groups to herald annual floods or seasonal activities. By the 3rd millennium BCE, civilizations had a sophisticated awareness of celestial cycles and may have oriented temples in alignment with heliacal risings of the stars. Scattered evidence suggests that the oldest known astrological references are copies of texts made in the ancient world. The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa thought to be compiled in Babylon around 1700 BCE. A scroll documenting an early use of electional astrology is doubtfully ascribed to the reign of the Sumerian ruler Gudea of Lagash (c. 2144 – 2124 BCE). This describes how the gods revealed to him in a dream the constellations that would be most favorable for the planned construction of a temple. However, there is controversy about whether these were genuinely recorded at the time or merely ascribed to ancient rulers by posterity. The oldest undisputed evidence of the use of astrology as an integrated system of knowledge is therefore attributed to the records of the first dynasty of Mesopotamia (1950–1651 BCE). This astrology had some parallels with HellenisticGreek (western) astrology, including the zodiac, a norming point near 9 degrees in Aries, the trine aspect, planetary exaltations, and the dodekatemoria (the twelve divisions of 30 degrees each). The Babylonians viewed celestial events as possible signs rather than as causes of physical events. The system of Chinese astrology was elaborated during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) and flourished during the Han Dynasty (2nd century BCE to 2nd century CE), during which all the familiar elements of traditional Chinese culture – the Yin-Yang philosophy, theory of the five elements, Heaven and Earth, Confucian morality – were brought together to formalize the philosophical principles of Chinese medicine and divination, astrology and alchemy. ref

• Shamanism: an approximately 30,000-year-old belief system
• “Shamans and Symbols” addressing the picture above with sun symbols and horned animals of the sun
• 12,000 – 10,000 years old Shamanistic Art in a Remote Cave in Egypt
• Horned female shamans and Pre-satanism Devil/horned-god Worship? at least 10,000 years ago
• 9,000-8,500 year old horned Female shaman Bad Dürrenberg Germany
• Black, White, and Yellow Shamanism?
• Similarity in Shamanism?

I believe there is a connection with:

“Sky-Burials” and “Star-People/Worship including Star-Ancestors/Spirit Animals/Deities“

‘Sky Burial’ theory and its possible origins at least

12,000 years ago to likely 30,000 years ago or older.

Shamanistic SASH PAINTING from Australia dated to around 19,000 years ago.

A group of delicately painted human figures in the Kimberley area of northwest Australia, which were to become known as the Bradshaws. These paintings, some tens of thousands of which exist, are similar in style to so-called “dynamic” figures from neighboring Arnhem Land, and although the Bradshaw figures are difficult to date, comparison with the Arnhem Land paintings suggests they were made before around 10,000 years ago. One painting was scientifically dated to around 19,000 years ago. Bradshaws are elegantly painted human figures who wear a panoply of ceremonial gear, including sashes (as in this example, worn at the waist), headdresses, whisks, skirts, armlets, and tassels—objects that are still worn today in Irian Jaya and which suggest a long tradition of ritual clothing and art in the region. Modern Australian aborigines do not know the meaning of the figures, believing they were painted by a bird that applied its own blood to the rock with its beak. Interestingly, the characteristic fine strokes—some as narrow as 1 millimeter—indicate that the most probable implement used to create these paintings was a feather quill. Technically, Bradshaws are exceptional examples of fine painting, in which specific brushstrokes and holding techniques, deliberate use of pressure, and variable directions of stroke have been observed. Moreover, this is not a limited expression, as bizarre, vaguely human figures in rock art have long puzzled viewers. They look a little like people yet clearly they’re something else. Why do they have weird heads, often without facial features? Why do they often have fewer than five fingers on each hand (or occasionally more)? Why do they have long torsos and missing limbs? It has been argued that many odd figures in rock art, including the spirals, dots, and therianthropes (figures that combine human and animal characteristics) were images typical of a visionary trance brought on by chanting, drumming, fasting, and taking hallucinogenic drugs. In relation to the Drakensberg (South Africa) rock art paintings, reviewing stories told by San (Bushmen/Khoi San) people and recorded since the 19^th century. Some told of a shaman catching a “rain beast” – usually a female ox, eland, elephant or another large herbivore. This was done through a trance, with the help of the group chanting, drumming, and dancing. Then the beast was sacrificed, and rain would fall where the beast was killed. Interestingly, two San men that Patricia Vinnicombe interviewed saw the therianthropes in this image as mythical people of an earlier race, the First Bushmen, not images of transformed shamans. ref, ref

Understanding Religion Evolution: Animism, Totemism, Shamanism, Paganism & Progressed organized religion

“Star-People/Worship”

The term “star people” was taken from an existing Native American spiritual concept. Native American Star People legends, what might be termed the folklore traditions of various Indian tribes, of having been in contact with extraterrestrials, or as being their ancestors, as a study of human societies and cultures, as anthropology, so that the more incredible aspects of this topic might be afforded a conventional context. It may be perhaps the norm for native legends to reference the Sky, and ancient interactions with those who dwell in the sky, or that resulted in celestial fixtures, such as the formation of the Pleiades, due to events on earth. ref

The term “star worship” (Astrolatry) references the worship of stars and other heavenly bodies as deities, or the association of deities with heavenly bodies. The most common instances of this are sun gods and moon gods in polytheistic systems worldwide. Also notable is the association of the planets with deities in Babylonian, and hence in Greco-Roman religion, viz. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Babylonian astronomy from early times associates stars with deities, but the heavens as the residence of an anthropomorphic pantheon, and later of monotheistic God and his retinue of angels, is a later development, gradually replacing the notion of the pantheon residing or convening on the summit of high mountains. It has been argued that there is a parallelism of the “stellar theology” of Babylon and Egypt, both countries absorbing popular star-worship into the official pantheon of their respective state religions by identification of gods with stars or planets. Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курган), meaning tumulus or burial mound referenced as the Kurgan hypothesis explaining the “kurganized” cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture to the west. From these kurganized cultures came the immigration of Proto-Greeks to the Balkans and the nomadic Indo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC. Astrolatry does not appear to have been common in the Levant prior to the Iron Age (possibly around or after 3,200 – 2,550) and becomes popular under Assyrian (2,911 – 2,609) influence. Who emerged as the most powerful state in the known world at the time, coming to dominate the Ancient Near East, East Mediterranean, Asia Minor, Caucasus, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, eclipsing and conquering rivals such as Babylonia, Elam, Persia, Urartu, Lydia, the Medes, Phrygians, Cimmerians, Israel, Judah, Phoenicia, Chaldea, Canaan, the Kushite Empire, the Arabs, and Egypt. As the people settled in the new land, they became exposed to Assyrian cultural ideas such as “royal ideologies, religious ideas, and mythologies…” and it “was incessantly propagated to all segments of the population through imperial art, emperor cult, religious festivals, and the cults of Aššur, Ištar, Nabû, Sîn and other Assyrian gods.” This was a process known as “Assyrianization.” The process of Assyrianization was a gradual process that occurred through generations of intermarriages, military participation, and daily interaction with Assyrian people (those who weren’t descended from the deportees’ generations earlier). Through the generations of cultural and linguistic exchange, there came to be a homogenous Assyrian identity. Mesopotamian religion refers to the religious beliefs and practices of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia at least 5,500 years ago. ref, ref, ref

“Theological” astrology

In some countries of the ancient world of view of astrology were entirely theological, i.e. religious. So in the Babylon astrology of the planet were considered if not as gods then one of the forms of their embodiment. Ancient Indians also saw in planets of gods which it was possible to influence prayers and magic ceremonies.

Relation to astrology in different religions

Buddhism  Hermeticism  Gnosticism  Taoism  Old Russian paganism  Jainism  Zoroastrianism  Religions of Indians of America  Hinduism  Islam  Judaism  Cabbala  Confucianism  Manichaeism  Mithraism  Neopythagoreanism  Neoplatonism  Orphism  Sabaism  Jehovah’s Witnesses  Christianity  Church of Light

STAR-WORSHIP: By Executive Committee of the Editorial Board., M. Seligsohn

“Star-Worship Among the Israelites”

This [astrolatry/astrotheology] is perhaps the oldest form of idolatry practiced by the ancients. According to Wisdom xiii. 2, the observation of the stars in the East very early led the people to regard the planets and the fixed stars as gods. The religion of the ancient Egyptians is known to have consisted preeminently of sun-worship. Moses sternly warned the Israelites against worshiping the sun, moon, stars, and all the host of heaven (Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3); it may be said that the prohibition of making and worshiping any image of that which is in heaven above (Ex. xx. 4; Deut. v. 8) implies also the stars and the other celestial bodies. The Israelites fell into this kind of idolatry, and as early as the time of Amos they had the images of Siccuth and Chiun, “the stars of their god” (Amos v. 26, R. V.); the latter name is generally supposed to denote the planet Saturn. That the kingdom of Israel fell earlier than that of Judah is stated (II Kings xvii. 16) to have been due, among other causes, to its worshiping the host of heaven. But the kingdom of Judah in its later period seems to have out-done the Northern Kingdom in star-worship. Of Manasseh it is related that he built altars to all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of Yhwh, and it seems that it was the practice of even kings before him to appoint priests who offered sacrifices to the sun, the moon, the planets, and all the host of heaven. Altars for star-worship were built on the roofs of the houses, and horses and chariots were dedicated to the worship of the sun (ib. xxi. 5; xxiii. 4-5, 11-12). Star-worship continued in Judah until the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign (621 B.C.), when the king took measures to abolish all kinds of idolatry (ib.). But although star-worship was then abolished as a public cult, it was practiced privately by individuals, who worshiped the heavenly bodies, and poured out libations to them on the roofs of their houses (Zeph. i. 5; Jer. viii. 2, xix. 13). Jeremiah (vii. 18) describes the worship of the queen of heaven to have been more particularly common among the women. Ezekiel, who prophesied in the sixth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin (591 B.C.), describes the worship of the sun as practiced in the court of the Temple (Ezek. viii. 16et seq.), and from Jer. xliv. 17 et seq. it may be seen that even after the destruction of the Temple the women insisted on continuing to worship the queen of heaven. In Job (xxxi. 26 et seq.) there is an allusion to the kissing of the hand in the adoration of the moon (see Moon, Biblical Data). According to Robertson Smith (“The Religion of the Semites,” p. 127, note 3, Edinburgh, 1889), star-worship is not of great antiquity among the Semites in general, nor among the Hebrews in particular, for the latter adopted this form of idolatry only under the influence of the Assyrians. But Fritz Hommel (“Der Gestirndienst der Alten Araber,” Munich, 1901) expresses the opposite opinion. He points to the fact that the Hebrew root which denotes the verb “to swear” is the same as that which denotes “seven,” and claims that this fact establishes a connection between swearing and the seven planets; and he furthermore declares that there are many Biblical pieces of evidence of star-worship among the ancient Hebrews. Thus, the fact that Terah, Abraham’s father, had lived first at Ur of the Chaldees, and that later he settled at Haran (Gen. xi. 31), two cities known from Assyrian inscriptions as places of moon-worship, shows that Abraham’s parents were addicted to that form of idolatry. According to legend, Abraham himself worshiped the sun, moon, and the stars before he recognized the true God in Yhwh (see Abraham in Apocryphal and Rabbinical Literature). The golden calf, Hommel declares, was nothing more than an emblem of the moon-god, which, in the Assyrian inscription, is styled “the youthful and mighty bull” and the lord of the heavenly hosts (comp. “Yhwh Ẓeba’ot,” which term is intentionally omitted from the Pentateuch). He assigns the same character to the two calves made by Jeroboam several centuries later (I Kings xii. 28). The ancient Hebrews, being nomads, like the Arabs favored the moon, while the Babylonians, who were an agricultural nation, preferred the sun. But, as appears from Ezek. xx. 7-8, the moon-worship of the Israelites, even while they were still in Egypt, was combined with sun-worship. The close similarity between the ancient Hebrews and the southern Arabs has led Hommel furthermore to find allusion to moon-worship in such Hebrew names as begin with “ab” (= “father”), as in “Abimelech” and “Absalom,” or with “‘am” (= “uncle”), as in “Amminadab” and “Jeroboam,” because these particles, when they appear in the names of southern Arabs, refer to the moon. The term “star-worship” (“‘abodat kokabim u-mazzalot”) in the Talmud and in post-Talmudic literature is chiefly a censor’s emendation for “‘abodah zarah.” In connection with star-worship, it is related in the Mishnah (‘Ab. Zarah iv. 7) that the Rabbis (“zeḳenim”) were asked if God dislikes idolatry why He did not destroy the idols. The Rabbis answered: “If the heathen worshiped only idols perhaps God would have destroyed the objects of their adoration, but they worship also the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the host of heaven, and God can not destroy the world on account of the heathen.” ref

Astrotheology and Shamanism

Stellar allusions appear early in the history of religions. In Shaman: The Wounded Healer anthropologist Joan Halifax explains that the shamanic “realization of a solar identity” experienced by the tribal priest reveals to her or him the “deepest structures of the psyche.” The shamanic practices of hunter-gatherer societies rely on drugs, fasting, dance and other trance-inducing techniques to produce a state of religious ecstasy. In this state, the shaman feels as if she or he receives personally and communally meaningful information from an astral dimension. In her survey of shamanic traditions, Halifax includes examples of shamanic art that depict human forms embellished with radiant auras and interprets such images as expressions of the psyche’s core. If shamanism, with its emphasis on direct transcendental experience, typifies hunter-gatherer societies, then a ceremonialized expression of the stellar calling seems to be the derivative religious form in agrarian societies. When human societies organized themselves around farming, then rituals, ceremonies, and pageantries tended to supplant personal revelation as the focus of religious life. Human labor became increasingly fragmented, and other influences—lunar, atmospheric, and finally terrestrial—gave rise to pantheons, doctrines, and creeds. The religious sensibility’s solar orientation got grounded and became vitiated among these competing influences. But a handful of civilizations, rather than sprout a pantheon of nature gods, remained steadfastly solar. Mircea Eliade, in Patterns in Comparative Religion, characterizes a peculiarity of the most consistently sun-centric civilizations. A solar deity remained the primary focus of the local religion, he observes, in those civilizations that came to exercise the greatest historical import.

“It is really only in Egypt, Asia, and in primitive Europe that what we call sun worship ever attained sufficient popularity to become at any time, as in Egypt for instance, really dominant. If you consider that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the solar religion was developed only in Peru and Mexico, only, that is, among the two ‘civilized’ peoples of America, the only two who attained any level of real political organization, then you cannot help discerning a certain connection between the predominance of sun religions and what I may call ‘historic’ destinies. It could be said that where ‘history is on the march,’ thanks to kings, heroes, or empires, the sun is supreme.” ref

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Sky Burials: Animism, Totemism, Shamanism, and Paganism

‘Sky Burial’ theory and its possible origins at least

12,000 years ago to likely 30,000 years ago or older.

Ancestor Belief Connections to the Star people or the People of the Stars?

A Lakota legend speaks of seven maidens being chased by a bear. On their knees, they prayed for divine intervention, the result being that the ground beneath them erupted, high into the air, lifting them out of harm’s way, as the bear clawed at the risen ground. The result was Devil’s Tower (Wyoming), the bear’s claws having carved vertical geological features into the rock, and the seven maidens having been installed above as the Pleiades. The Hopi believe their ancestors came from the Pleiades, the place, or people they call Chuhukon, or, those who cling together, a reference it seems to that tightly grouped starry cluster, as it appears to the naked eye. Likewise, early Dakota legends speak of the Pleiades, or Tiyami, as the abode of the ancestors. Other native oral histories, or legends, speak of an origin, if not in the Pleiades, then in the stars generally, or other constellations. The Cree, for example, arrived on earth from the stars, as spirits, and then became human beings. The Zuni Indians offer one of many belief systems, if not actual experiences, related to ancestors who came from the sky, a phrasing that has since morphed into the more new age Star People reference, as opposed to Sky People. ref

Astrology India and Japan

In India, there is a long-established and widespread belief in astrology. It is commonly used for daily life, particularly in matters concerning marriage and career, and makes extensive use of electional, horary and karmic astrology. Indian politics have also been influenced by astrology. It is still considered a branch of the Vedanga. Recent genome studies appear to show that most South Asians are descendants of two major ancestral components, one restricted to South Asia (Ancestral South Indian) and the other component (Ancestral North Indian) more closely related to those in Central Asia, West Asia, and Europe. The macrohaplogroup M which is considered as a cluster of the proto-Asian maternal lineages represents more than 60% of South Asian MtDNA.

Virtually all modern Central Asian MtDNA M lineages seem to belong to the Eastern Eurasian (Mongolian) rather than the South Asian subtypes of haplogroup M, which indicates that no large-scale migration from the present Turkic-speaking populations of Central Asia occurred to India. The absence of haplogroup M in Europeans, compared to its equally high frequency among South Asians, East Asians and in some Central Asian populations contrasts with the Western Eurasian leanings of South Asians. Due to its great age, haplogroup M is a mtDNA lineage which does not correspond well to present-day ethnic groups. It is found among Siberian, Native American, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Central Asian, South Asian, Melanesian, European, Northeast African, and various Middle Eastern populations at varying frequencies.  Moreover, recently it has been detected ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains in Siberia at roughly 100,000 years ago.

These data contrast with the phylogenetic hypothesis of a sole and fast dispersal of modern humans out of Africa around 60 kya following a southern route. In principle, it could be adduced, as it was in the case of the early human remains from Skhul and Qafzeh in the Levant, that the presence in China and Siberia of modern humans at that time was the result of a genetically unsuccessful exit from Africa. Among the descendant lineages of haplogroup M are C, D, E, G, Q, and Z. Z and G are found in North Eurasian populations, C and D exists among North Eurasian and Native American populations, E is observed in Southeast Asian populations, and Q is common among Melanesian populations. The lineages M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M18, and M25 are exclusive to South Asia, with M2 reported to be the oldest lineage on the Indian sub-continent. M1 has been observed among ancient Egyptian mummies excavated at the Abusir el-Meleq archaeological site in Middle Egypt, which date from the Pre-Ptolemaic/late New Kingdom and Roman periods. Fossils at the Early Neolithic site of Ifri n’Amr or Moussa in Morocco, which have been dated to around 5,000 BCE, have also been found to carry the M1 subclade. These ancient individuals bore an autochthonous Maghrebi genomic component that peaks among modern Berbers, indicating that they were ancestral to populations in the area. The ancient Egyptian aristocrats Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht were also found to belong to the M1a1 subclade. The half-brothers lived during the 12th Dynasty, with their tomb located at the Deir Rifeh cemetery in Middle Egypt. Haplotypes with HVSI transitions defining 16129- 16223-16249-16278-16311-16362; and 16129-16223-16234-16249-16211-16362 have been found in Thailand and among the Han Chinese (Fucharoen et al., 2001; Yao et al., 2002) and these were originally thought to be members of Haplogroup M1. However, on the basis of currently available FGS sequences, carriers of these markers have been found to be in the D4a branch of Haplogroup D, the most widespread branch of M 1 in East Asia. There are two principal branches, D4 and D5’6. D1 is a basal branch of D4 that is widespread and diverse in the Americas. D2, which occurs with high frequency in some arctic and subarctic populations (especially Aleuts), is a subclade of D4e1 parallel to D4e1a and D4e1c, so it properly should be termed D4e1b. D3, which has been found mainly in some Siberian populations and in Inuit of Canada and Greenland, is a branch of D4b1c.

• D4 (3010, 8414, 14668): The subclade D4 is the most frequently occurring mtDNA haplogroup among modern populations of northern East Asia, such as Japanese, Okinawans, Koreans, and Mongolic– or Tungusic-speaking populations of northern China. D4 is also the most common haplogroup among the Buryats and Khamnigans of the Buryat Republic, the Kalmyks of the Kalmyk Republic, and the Telenghits and Kazakhs of the Altai Republic. Spread also all over China, Southeast Asia, Siberia, Central Asia, and indigenous peoples of the Americas.
• D5’6 (16189): Mainly in East Asia and Southeast Asia, especially among Chinese people. Generally lower in Siberia, Central Asia, and East India, though the D5a2a2 subclade is prevalent among the Yakuts of Siberia. ref, ref, ref, ref

Carriers of human mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup M colonized India from southeastern Asia

In Japan, there is strong belief in astrology has led to dramatic changes in the fertility rate and the number of abortions in the years of Fire Horse. Adherents believe that women born in hinoeuma years are unmarriageable and bring bad luck to their father or husband. In 1966, the number of babies born in Japan dropped by over 25% as parents tried to avoid the stigma of having a daughter born in the hinoeuma year. In Japan, DNA flow in a general way goes something like, Palaeolithic to Jomon 40,000-12,000 years ago (N9b 65%, D4h2 17%, G1b 11%. M7a 7%) Yayoi 3,000-1,700 years ago (D4 is most common in the Japanese and Yayoi populations), and Historical 1,700 BP. ref, ref

Religious transfer to Japan 675

In 513 Dan Yangi a “confucian” scholar was dispatched to Japan from Baekje in southwest Korea further distributing Chinese philosophies such as Wu Xing (five elements) as well as yin and yang. It was accepted as a practical system of divination. These practices were influenced further by Taoism, Buddhism and Shintoism, and around 675 it had evolved into the system of Onmyodo (The Way of Yin and Yang) is a traditional Japanese esoteric cosmology. It is thought that Onmyodo took in elements from Taoism including magical elements such as katatagae (changing directions), monoimi (talismans with monoimi on it), henbai (protection ceremony), and ceremonies to Taoistic gods such as the Taizan Fukun originally a Chinese deity of the Eastern mountain Taizan (where the souls of the dead congregated then judged for good and evil deeds by Taizan Fukun) also known as the Great Emperor of the mountain peak. Taizan Fukun was also identified with Enma/Yama the god of hell in Buddhism who is believed to have power over life and judges souls of the dead deciding who goes to heaven or hell. The word Enma comes from Yama in Sanskrit and Pali, a language for Buddhist writings in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. He is said to be a human ancestor in the Rigveda (an ancient Indian sacred book). Ref, Ref, Ref, Ref, Ref, Ref

Religious transfer to Japan 6th century

Northern Han Chinese Was Shaped Prior to 3,000 Years Ago

The History of China — Over 3,000 Years of Civilization

While it is true that a geographic barrier maintains genetic difference if there is any, but it is irrelevant to a more interesting question: whether southern and northern populations are descendants of the same population or, alternatively, populations that arrived in China from different sources.

Furthermore, the understanding of the origin of the populations in East Asia may shed light on the populations of Siberia and America. revealed a clear distinction between southern and northern Chinese populations, although the number of Chinese populations included in this phylogeny is small. Three northern Chinese populations clustered with the Japanese and Korean as expected. The southern populations in this phylogeny are not representative because three of the five southern populations are Taiwanese Aborigines speaking Austronesian languages. , but some populations analyzed in this study were included in Bowcock et al. (Cambodian, Karitiana, Mayan, Australian, New Guinean, Italian, Zaire Pygmy, Central Republic Pygmy, and Lissongo). Populations from East Asia form a distinctive cluster indicating a common ancestry shared among those groups. Taiwanese Aborigines populations derived from the southern population cluster from the continent, indicating the probable origin of those populations and probably Polynesians. The analyses of metric and nonmetric cranial traits of modern and prehistoric Siberian and Chinese populations showed that Siberians are closer to Northern Chinese and Mongolian than European.

The same notion holds for the facial flatness. European populations did not appear in Siberia, western Mongolia, and China until the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Furthermore, cranial and dental analyses have linked the Arctic peoples, Buryat and east Asians with American Indians, which arrived through Beringia (Bering land bridge) somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. These observations are generally consistent with the genetic evidence based on this research and mitochondrial DNA data. Therefore, it is more likely that ancestors of Altaic-speaking populations originated from an East Asian population that was originally derived from Southeast Asia, although the current Altaic-speaking populations undeniably admixed with later arrives from mid-Asia and Europe (see link). The possibility of early northern route migration from mid-Asia to Siberia is doubtful, given the fact that the last glacier started to recede only 15,000 years ago (see link). ref

Symbolic stars and Chinese astrology

“The symbolic stars” is sometimes translated literally, as “gods and devils”; but in fact, the symbolic stars do not relate to any ghosts or celestial beings— in this case, “shen” means beneficial influence, and “sha” means baneful influence of the cyclical signs of the heavenly stems and earthly branches. In Chinese astrology, there are more than 180 symbolic stars. The calculation of the symbolic stars is logically connected to the theory of Yin and Yang, Five Elements, Ten Gods theory, Na Yin melodic elements theory, Twelve Energy States, etc. The symbolic stars are like the “leaves” of the heavenly stems and earthly branches in the big tree of Chinese astrology and can provide a very specific information in the horoscope analysis. The symbolic stars are used in many methods of Chinese astrology and metaphysics: Four Pillars of Destiny, Zi wei dou shu, Da Liu Ren, and Feng Shui.

Chinese astrology is based on the traditional astronomy and calendars. The development of Chinese astrology is tied to that of astronomy, which came to flourish during the Han Dynasty (2nd century BC to 2nd century AD). Chinese astrology has a close relation with Chinese philosophy(theory of the three harmony: heaven, earth, and water), and uses the principles of yin and yang and concepts that are not found in Western astrology, such as the Wu Xing teachings, the 10 Celestial stems, the 12 Earthly Branches, the lunisolar calendar (moon calendar and sun calendar), and the time calculation after year, month, day, and shichen. Recently, a large number of graves were excavated at a necropolis called Hengbei located in the southern part of Shanxi Province, China, on the Central Plain (link), that dates back to approximately 3,000 years ago (Zhou dynasty), a key transitional period for the rise of the Han Chinese. In a previous study investigating when haplogroup Q1a1 entered the genetic pool of the Han Chinese, we analyzed Y chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from human remains excavated from the Hengbei (HB) site and identified haplogroups for 27 samples.

Haplogroup Q is found predominantly in Central Siberia, Central Asia and among Native Americans. Approximately 90% of pre-Columbian Native Americans belonged to haplogroup Q, and all descend from the branch Q1a2a1 (L54), including various subclades of Q1a2a1a1 (M3) and Q1a2a1a2 (Z780). In Europe haplogroup Q is found chiefly in southern Sweden (5%), among Ashkenazi Jews (5%), and is various isolated pockets in central and Eastern Europe such as the Rhône-Alpes region of France, southern Sicily, southern Croatia, northern Serbia, parts of Poland and Ukraine. Šarić et al. (2013) also found 6.1% of haplogroup Q out of 412 samples from the island of Hvar in southern Croatia (accompanied by 2% of East Asian mtDNA haplogroup F). ref, ref 

The Han Culture and Chinese Traditional Religion

The majority of China consists of the Han people (93.3%), “Chinese traditional patriarchal religion”, “Clan-based traditional patriarchal religion” or “Chinese traditional primordial religion” is used to define the traditional religious system organized around the worship of ancestor-gods. Chinese traditional primordial religion as faith in God (Shangdi)’s original form. Moreover, Chinese folk religion (Chinese popular religion) or Han folk religion is the religious tradition of the Han people (an East Asian ethnic group), including veneration of forces of nature and ancestors, exorcism of harmful forces, and a belief in the rational order of nature which can be influenced by human beings and their rulers as well as spirits and gods.

Worship is devoted to a multiplicity of gods and immortals, who can be deities of phenomena, of human behavior or progenitors of lineages. Stories regarding some of these gods are collected into the body of Chinese mythology. By the eleventh century (Song period) these practices had been blended with Buddhist ideas of karma (one’s own doing) and rebirth, and Taoist teachings about hierarchies of gods, to form the popular religious system which has lasted in many ways until the present day. Chinese religions have a variety of sources, local forms, founder backgrounds, and ritual and philosophical traditions. Despite this diversity, there is a common core that can be summarised as four theological, cosmological, and moral concepts: such as Tian (天), Heaven. The Han Chinese trace a common ancestry to the Huaxia, a name for the initial confederation of agricultural tribes living along the Yellow River. The ethnic stock to which the Han Chinese originally trace their ancestry from were confederations of late neolithic and early bronze-age agricultural tribes known as the Huaxia During the Warring States (2,475–2,221 year ago), the self-awareness of the Huaxia identity developed and took hold in ancient China.

Initially, Huaxia defined mainly a civilized society that was distinct and stood in contrast to what was perceived as the barbaric peoples around them. The name Han was derived from the Han dynasty, which succeeded the short-lived Qin dynasty, and is historically considered to be the first golden age of China’s Imperial era due to the power and influence it projected over much of East Asia. Han Chinese maintain cultural affinities to Chinese territories outside of their host locale through ancestor worship and clan associations. The Xia Dynasty (4,070–3,600) — Early Bronze Age China. Possibly the first dynasty in ancient China, it’s generally believed that the Xia Dynasty consisted of several clans, living along the Yellow River. There was a bronze age Yellow River civilization at this time at Erlitou in Henan, however, artifacts don’t show conclusively that this was the Xia Dynasty of later writings so it could involve some myths. ref, ref, ref

Movement and Religious Transfer

• DNA traces Native Americans’ ancestry to Siberia
• One wave of migration from Siberia populated the Americas, DNA shows
• The Central Siberian Origin for Native American Y Chromosomes
• 12,000 – 7,000 Years Ago – Paleo-Indian Culture (The Americas)
• Shamanistic rock art from central Aboriginal Siberians and Aboriginal drums in the Americas
• 12,000 – 2,000 Years Ago – Indigenous-Scandinavians (Nordic)
• Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans | ScienceNordic
• Ancient DNA Reveals Prehistoric Gene-Flow from Siberia
• Norse did not wear helmets with horns?

It is possible to follow the genetic trail; all the way from the Kostenki genome (Kostenki 14 – A 36,000-Year-Old European), closer to hunter-gatherers in Siberia 25,000 years ago and farmers 7,000-8,000 years ago in Spain, Luxembourg, and Sweden, up to present-day Europeans. “Actually, the Kostenki genome was closer to Danes, Swedes, Finns, and Russians than to Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans. The separation time between Asians and Europeans relates to the Kostenki genome therefore likely a time around 37,000 years ago. Here the lines must have split, while the 45,000-year-old genome from the recently discovered Ust’ Ishim in Siberia sets the limit in the other direction. This gives the answer to one of the biggest questions in the history of mankind; scientists now know that it is within the 8,000-year gap that Europeans and Asians went their separate ways. It turns out that Scandinavians are more closely related to the Kostenki man than any other now-living population. This means that Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans. However, the genome also indicates that many European traits, including those from the Middle East, were already present in the first Europeans. ref

Historical summary of the migrations from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe to other parts of Europe

• 6,200-5,900 years ago: Late Copper Age horse riders invade the old Balkanese tell settlements of eastern Romania and Bulgaria. Most of the towns and villages of the Gumelnita, Varna and Karanovo VI cultures are abandoned. A new hybrid culture emerge, the Suvorovo-Cernavodă culture (6,000-5,200 years ago), which will expand further south to the Aegean during the Ezero period (3300-2700 BCE).
• 5,500 years ago: Other advances from the steppe into the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture lead to the formation of the hybrid Coţofeni culture, also known as Usatovo culture, in north-eastern Romania.
• 5,200-4,800 years ago: First north-west expansion of the Yamna culture from the western steppe to modern Poland, Germany, Scandinavia and Baltic countries. Creation of the Corded-Ware (or Single Grave, or Battle-Axe) culture (3200-1800 BCE).
• 4,800-4,500 years ago: Hybrid people from the Cotsofeni and Ezero cultures start moving up the Danube and settle in mass in the Hungarian plain. The southward expansion of the Abashevo, Poltakva and Catacomb cultures from the Volga-Ural to the Black Sea shores pushed more pastoralists of the late Yamna culture to Europe.
• 4,500-4,2300 years ago: Indo-Europeans expand from the Hungarian plain to Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, southern Poland and southern Germany and start the most important Central European Bronze Age culture: Unetice (or Aunjetitz).
• 4,300-4,000 years ago: The Indo-Europeans continue their advance to Western and Northern Europe, spreading the Bronze Age and the single grave tradition with them.
• 4,000-3,100 years ago: The Sea Peoples invade the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean from the north (probably from the Black Sea). This is one of the most controversial part of ancient history due to the lack of clear evidence about the origin of the Sea Peoples. The Indo-Europeans from the steppe or from Europe itself were the only warriors with sufficiently advanced weapons and knowledge of seafaring to have destroyed the powerful palace-states of Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt. It also fits the 1000-year interval otherwise lacking any major migration from the steppes, at the time when the eastern Indo-Europeans were conquering Pakistan and India from Central Asia.
• 2,800-2,550 years ago: The Cimmerians are ousted from the Pontic steppe by their cousins the Scythians coming from the Volga-Ural region and Central Asia. The Cimmerians settle in Anatolia and around modern Romania around 800 BCE. The Cimmerian culture commenced circa 1200 BCE. Some archaeologists place their origins in the North Caucasus. Some accounts have it that the Cimmerians moved to northern Germany and the Netherlands and became the ancestors of some Germanic tribes, like the Sicambri (ancestors of the Franks). The Scythians followed between 650 and 550 BCE in Transylvania, Hungary and southern Slovakia. They kept trade routes with the steppes until the Roman conquest of Pannonia and Dacia.
• 100-500 CE : The Huns from southern Siberia invade Eastern Europe, pushing the Alans (a Samartian-descended tribe) westward. The Goths, Vandals, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others cross into the Roman Empire under pressure from the new steppe migrants, which caused the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
• 550-1000 CE : The next invaders from the steppe were the Avars, who entered the lower Danube region in 562. The Avars established their dominion over the Danube basin, from central Romania to eastern Austria, from the late 6th to early 9th century.In the 4th century, some Bulgars had crossed the Caucasus into Armenia while others had already followed the Huns, then the Avars to Central Europe. The Pontic steppe and North Caucasus was ruled by the Bulgars during the Old Great Bulgaria period in the 7th century. Under pressure from the Khazars, the Bulgars split in two groups; one migrating north to Volga Bulgaria, and the other to the Carpathians founding the First Bulgarian Empire (680–1018 CE) around modern Romania and Bulgaria.The Magyars and Khazars migrated from the Ural-Volga region to modern Ukraine around 830, raided their way across the Carpathians as far as Bavaria, where they were stopped in 956, then established themselves permanently in Hungary in the 10th century and founding the Kingdom of Hungary in 1001.
• 1235-1300 CE : The Mongol Empire reached Europe around 1235 and the Mongols invaded relentlessly Bulgaria, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Serbia and Byzantine Thrace. They were eventually defeated and expelled from Europe, but may have left some genetic traces (although very minor ones based on current evidence).
• 1350-1550 CE : The last people from Central Asia to come to Europe were the Turks, who conquered the Balkans from 1359 to 1481, then the Carpathians and Hungary from 1520 to 1566. They were not technically from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but from areas of Central Asia settled over 4000 years ago by the Indo-Europeans from the Volga-Ural steppe. Like other Turkic peoples (Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, Tatars) the Turks supposedly brought a lot of R1a lineages with them (+ a little R1b). ref

Paleogenomics. Genomic structure in Europeans dating back at least 36,200 years.

The origin of contemporary Europeans remains contentious. We obtained a genome sequence from Kostenki 14 in European Russia dating from 38,700 to 36,200 years ago, one of the oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans from Europe. We find that Kostenki 14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from central Siberia, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, some contemporary western Siberians, and many Europeans, but not eastern Asians. Additionally, the Kostenki 14 genome shows evidence of shared ancestry with a population basal to all Eurasians that also relates to later European Neolithic farmers. We find that Kostenki 14 contains more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present Europeans. Our findings reveal the timing of divergence of western Eurasians and East Asians to be more than 36,200 years ago and that European genomic structure today dates back to the Upper Paleolithic and derives from a metapopulation that at times stretched from Europe to central Asia. ref

• 31,000 – 20,000 years ago Oldest Shaman was Female, Buried with the Oldest Portrait Carving
•  And going back at Around 500,000 – 233,000 years ago, Oldest Anthropomorphic art (Pre-animism) is also Related to Female.
• Early Shamanism around 30,000 to 20,000 years ago: Sungar (Russia) and Dolni Vestonice (Czech Republic)

Ancient DNA Reveals Prehistoric Gene-Flow from Siberia

in the Complex Human Population History of North East Europe

Archaeology sites were dated to the Mesolithic and the Early Metal Age (7,500 – 3,500 years ago).

In the picture that is a reference to the paganistic Goddess cult concept relating to the three realms: heaven (assumed goddess figure arms up), earth (assumed pre-goddess figure arms around the body or little to no arms), and the underworld (assumed goddess figure arms down).

I surmise that there is an expression in goddess representation that relates to the three realms sky goddess with the upturned arms relating to the waxing crescent, the fat sitting goddess is a representation to the full moon and the arms turned down are a representation of the waning crescent. And it this way both up and down arms represent metaphorical bullhorns and why goddesses are associated with bulls or as bulls. Especially, with paganism.

Could it be that the emergence of this new goddess cult of the sitting mother goddess in the Levant, somehow related to the new problems these Neolithic women faced as there was a decrease in mean age at death for Neolithic females which may be the result in higher levels or maternal risk associated with child-birth. It is intriguing to consider the shifts in perceptions and behaviors surrounding women’ health, pregnancy, and childbirth, and kin relations that might extend from such changes. Studies point to increasing fertility and higher birth rates among some newly sedentary groups. ref

The monumental figures from MPPNB contexts: ‘Ain Ghazal, Jericho, and, possibly, Nahal Hemar. The most numerous (n=34) and best-studied examples come from ‘Ain Ghazal. Some of the figures are busts and others are full-bodied. They were made by applying plaster over bundles of reeds that are bent and tied into the torso, limb,and head elements. The majority of statues lack overt sexual characteristics. There are three exceptions, two statues with breasts, and one with external genitals, especially a woman’s. There is a general acceptance that these larger figures had a role in public events. First, they are typically found in caches, which represent unique depositional contexts. Second, aspects of their morphology suggest that they were produced to be viewed at some distance, i.e. their size/weight and stylized features. Embedded dirt and pigment indicate that they were placed on the ground or another flat surface. Their flattened profiles seem to suggest that they were placed against a wall or niche, rather than being viewed from 360 degrees. ref

Ain-Ghazal (Jordan) Pre-pottery Neolithic B Period

Ain-Ghazal human-like figures could represent special ancestors (which later may attach to the emergence of gods), several lack arms, have a non-anthropomorphic feature that include elongated almond-shaped eyes with pupils and irises shaped like diamonds rather than circles. In addition, a number of the large figures have two heads and others have six or seven toes. Possibly, the figures represent part of the southern Levant’s PPNB emerging pantheon. Two-headed statues and images occur from the Neolithic era down through the 5,000 years ago. Babylonian texts seem to refer to these explicitly as deities. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic examples also have similarities to statues associated with ghost and witchcraft rituals in Babylonian cuneiform literature. Whatever explanation one finds most appealing, it is noteworthy that most of the Neolithic examples have indecipherable sex, while a small number have female attributes. ref

Goddess and the Bull and what of the smaller

figurines from Neolithic contexts in the southern Levant?

Neolithic Levantine figurines are typically deposited in domestic fill, rather than pits, caches, or other distinctive features. Some are made of stone, but most are made of clay. Breakage patterns suggest that some of the figurines may have been intentionally broken. The stone examples indicate perhaps different meanings attached to different kinds of rituals being performed as in a more personal domestic cult (involving an association with mother goddess) and an additional clan ancestor cult many seem male in expression some with erect or presented phallus  and the many associations in art like that at Çatalhöyük it wich groups of men are believed to be performing ritual hunting scenes that may involve group taunting of the horned animals (involving an association with horned animals such as the bull-horns being both a part of the early phallus phenomena as well as a representation of the moons emerging crescent or dissipating crescent associated with arms of the goddess). In terms of sex/gender identification, there are figurines that encode no recognizable clues about sex or gender. And there are also examples of figurines with dual-sex connotations. While the majority exhibit a female form, there are also examples of male figurines. ref, ref

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Mesopotamia is surrounded by a circular “bitter river” or Ocean, and eight “regions”, depicted as triangular sections, are shown as lying beyond the Ocean. It has been suggested that the depiction of these “regions” as triangles might indicate that they were imagined as mountains. Babylon north of the center of the map; parallel lines at the bottom seem to represent the southern marshes, and a curved line coming from the north, northeast appear to represent the Zagros Mountains. There are seven small interior circles at the perimeter areas within the circle, and they appear to represent seven cities. Eight triangular sections on the external circle (water perimeter) represent named “regions” (nagu). The description of five of them has survived. ref

1. “Mountain” (Akkadian: šá-du-ú) 2. “City” (Akkadian: uru) 3. Urartu (Akkadian: ú-ra-áš-tu) 4. Assyria(Akkadian: kuraš+šurki) 5. Der (Akkadian: dēr) 6. ? 7. Swamp (Akkadian: ap–pa–ru) 8. Susa (capital of Elam) (Akkadian: šuša) 9. Canal/”outflow” (Akkadian: bit-qu) 10. Bit Yakin(Akkadian: bῑt-ia-᾿-ki-nu)

11. “City” (Akkadian: uru) 12. Habban (Akkadian: ha-ab-ban) 13. Babylon(Akkadian: tin.tirki), divided by Euphrates14 – 17. Ocean (salt water, Akkadian: idmar-ra-tum)18 – 22. outer “regions” (nagu)23 – 25. No description.

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People don’t commonly teach religious history, even that of their own claimed religion. No, rather they teach a limited “pro their religion” history of their religion from a religious perspective favorable to the religion of choice. 

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Do you truly think “Religious Belief” is only a matter of some personal choice?

Do you not see how coercive one’s world of choice is limited to the obvious hereditary belief, in most religious choices available to the child of religious parents or caregivers? Religion is more commonly like a family, culture, society, etc. available belief that limits the belief choices of the child and that is when “Religious Belief” is not only a matter of some personal choice and when it becomes hereditary faith, not because of the quality of its alleged facts or proposed truths but because everyone else important to the child believes similarly so they do as well simply mimicking authority beliefs handed to them. Because children are raised in religion rather than being presented all possible choices but rather one limited dogmatic brand of “Religious Belief” where children only have a choice of following the belief as instructed, and then personally claim the faith hereditary belief seen in the confirming to the belief they have held themselves all their lives. This is obvious in statements asked and answered by children claiming a faith they barely understand but they do understand that their family believes “this or that” faith, so they feel obligated to believe it too. While I do agree that “Religious Belief” should only be a matter of some personal choice, it rarely is… End Hereditary Religion!

Opposition to Imposed Hereditary Religion

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Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey 

“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref

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We are like believing machines we vacuum up ideas, like Velcro sticks to almost everything. We accumulate beliefs that we allow to negatively influence our lives, often without realizing it. Our willingness must be to alter skewed beliefs that impend our balance or reason, which allows us to achieve new positive thinking and accurate outcomes.

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“These ideas are my speculations from the evidence.”

I am still researching the “god‘s origins” all over the world. So you know, it is very complicated but I am smart and willing to look, DEEP, if necessary, which going very deep does seem to be needed here, when trying to actually understand the evolution of gods and goddesses. I am sure of a few things and less sure of others, but even in stuff I am not fully grasping I still am slowly figuring it out, to explain it to others. But as I research more I am understanding things a little better, though I am still working on understanding it all or something close and thus always figuring out more. 

Sky Father/Sky God?

“Egyptian: (Nut) Sky Mother and (Geb) Earth Father” (Egypt is different but similar)

Turkic/Mongolic: (Tengri/Tenger Etseg) Sky Father and (Eje/Gazar Eej) Earth Mother *Transeurasian*

Hawaiian: (Wākea) Sky Father and (Papahānaumoku) Earth Mother *Austronesian*

New Zealand/ Māori: (Ranginui) Sky Father and (Papatūānuku) Earth Mother *Austronesian*

Proto-Indo-European: (Dyḗus/Dyḗus ph₂tḗr) Sky Father and (Dʰéǵʰōm/Pleth₂wih₁) Earth Mother

Indo-Aryan: (Dyaus Pita) Sky Father and (Prithvi Mata) Earth Mother *Indo-European*

Italic: (Jupiter) Sky Father and (Juno) Sky Mother *Indo-European*

Etruscan: (Tinia) Sky Father and (Uni) Sky Mother *Tyrsenian/Italy Pre–Indo-European*

Hellenic/Greek: (Zeus) Sky Father and (Hera) Sky Mother who started as an “Earth Goddess” *Indo-European*

Nordic: (Dagr) Sky Father and (Nótt) Sky Mother *Indo-European*

Slavic: (Perun) Sky Father and (Mokosh) Earth Mother *Indo-European*

Illyrian: (Deipaturos) Sky Father and (Messapic Damatura’s “earth-mother” maybe) Earth Mother *Indo-European*

Albanian: (Zojz) Sky Father and (?) *Indo-European*

Baltic: (Perkūnas) Sky Father and (Saulė) Sky Mother *Indo-European*

Germanic: (Týr) Sky Father and (?) *Indo-European*

Colombian-Muisca: (Bochica) Sky Father and (Huythaca) Sky Mother *Chibchan*

Aztec: (Quetzalcoatl) Sky Father and (Xochiquetzal) Sky Mother *Uto-Aztecan*

Incan: (Viracocha) Sky Father and (Mama Runtucaya) Sky Mother *Quechuan*

China: (Tian/Shangdi) Sky Father and (Dì) Earth Mother *Sino-Tibetan*

Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian: (An/Anu) Sky Father and (Ki) Earth Mother

Finnish: (Ukko) Sky Father and (Akka) Earth Mother *Finno-Ugric*

Sami: (Horagalles) Sky Father and (Ravdna) Earth Mother *Finno-Ugric*

Puebloan-Zuni: (Ápoyan Ta’chu) Sky Father and (Áwitelin Tsíta) Earth Mother

Puebloan-Hopi: (Tawa) Sky Father and (Kokyangwuti/Spider Woman/Grandmother) Earth Mother *Uto-Aztecan*

Puebloan-Navajo: (Tsohanoai) Sky Father and (Estsanatlehi) Earth Mother *Na-Dene*

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Sky Father/Sky Mother “High Gods” or similar gods/goddesses of the sky more loosely connected, seeming arcane mythology across the earth seen in Siberia, China, Europe, Native Americans/First Nations People and Mesopotamia, etc.

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Hinduism around 3,700 to 3,500 years old. ref

 Judaism around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500) ref, ref

Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)

“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref

“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref

“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref

Jainism around 2,599 – 2,527 years old. ref

Confucianism around 2,600 – 2,551 years old. ref

Buddhism around 2,563/2,480 – 2,483/2,400 years old. ref

Christianity around 2,o00 years old. ref

Shinto around 1,305 years old. ref

Islam around 1407–1385 years old. ref

Sikhism around 548–478 years old. ref

Bahá’í around 200–125 years old. ref

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Expressions of Atheistic Thinking:

• Around 2,600 years ago, Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian philosopher, who is the first known proponent of Indian materialism. ref
• Around 2,535 to 2,475 years ago, Heraclitus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor or modern Turkey. ref
• Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, according to The Story of Civilization book series certain African pygmy tribes have no identifiable gods, spirits, or religious beliefs or rituals, and even what burials accrue are without ceremony. ref
• Around 2,490 to 2,430 years ago, Empedocles, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. ref
• Around 2,460 to 2,370 years ago, Democritus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher considered to be the “father of modern science” possibly had some disbelief amounting to atheism. ref
• Around 2,399 years ago or so, Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher was tried for sinfulness by teaching doubt of state gods. ref
• Around 2,341 to 2,270 years ago, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher known for composing atheistic critics and famously stated, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?” ref

This last expression by Epicurus, seems to be an expression of Axiological Atheism. To understand and utilize value or actually possess “Value Conscious/Consciousness” to both give a strong moral “axiological” argument (the problem of evil) as well as use it to fortify humanism and positive ethical persuasion of human helping and care responsibilities. Because value-blindness gives rise to sociopathic/psychopathic evil.

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Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):

Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism

My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or Quotes, My YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com