A few notes from "The Ancient Gods"
Jan. 27th, 2012 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ikhet_sekhmet(Happy New Year peeps. lj is coming up in Japanese. God knows why.)
I seem to have photocopied some pages from this book at random! I'm always on the lookout for goddesses I haven't heard of before, though - here we have "... the Babylonian Nanna in combination with Isis became Namaia" (p 86). I think "Namaia" may be the Mesopotamian goddess Nanaia or Nanaya, also worshipped at Palmyra - although how she would be a combination of Isis with a male Sumerian deity idk; James does not provide a reference.
Other names I hadn't encountered before include two Hittite goddesses: Hannahanna, "the grandmother"; and Shaushka, "the Anatolian counterpart of the Babylonian Ishtar" who "combined belligerent qualities with those of sexuality and love, and had her attendants Ninatta and Kalitta, and other local 'Ishtars' under Anatolian names at Samuha and elsewhere in south-east Anatolia".
Interestingly, James remarks that the ancients' "readiness to identify one deity with another made it possible to evolve some kind of unity out of this jumble of cults" (p 85), and suggests that "pagan thought was moving more and more towards the conception of one universal Magna Mater" (p 86) - sort of the reverse of the idea of an original Neolithic Great Goddess, I suppose.
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James, E.O. The Ancient Gods: the history and diffusion of religion in the ancient Near East and the eastern Mediterranean. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
I seem to have photocopied some pages from this book at random! I'm always on the lookout for goddesses I haven't heard of before, though - here we have "... the Babylonian Nanna in combination with Isis became Namaia" (p 86). I think "Namaia" may be the Mesopotamian goddess Nanaia or Nanaya, also worshipped at Palmyra - although how she would be a combination of Isis with a male Sumerian deity idk; James does not provide a reference.
Other names I hadn't encountered before include two Hittite goddesses: Hannahanna, "the grandmother"; and Shaushka, "the Anatolian counterpart of the Babylonian Ishtar" who "combined belligerent qualities with those of sexuality and love, and had her attendants Ninatta and Kalitta, and other local 'Ishtars' under Anatolian names at Samuha and elsewhere in south-east Anatolia".
Interestingly, James remarks that the ancients' "readiness to identify one deity with another made it possible to evolve some kind of unity out of this jumble of cults" (p 85), and suggests that "pagan thought was moving more and more towards the conception of one universal Magna Mater" (p 86) - sort of the reverse of the idea of an original Neolithic Great Goddess, I suppose.
__
James, E.O. The Ancient Gods: the history and diffusion of religion in the ancient Near East and the eastern Mediterranean. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
