Notices by DaveTLV (surasanji@qoto.org), page 4

@js290 Well, not really. We're not personifying ancient people because they are people. We're not giving them person-like traits they didn't actually have because they were human beings like us, and undoubtedly led as rich and interesting lives as any other human being does today.

It is true that we don't fully understand many ancient peoples. We don't know why they did certain things, and the whens of particular historical events can get exceedingly muddy the further back you go. All we can do is make an educated guess based on what evidence we do find.

Bringing it back to Ancient Canaanite religion- there isn't an awful lot known about it. The ancient Canaanites seem to have taken papyrus paper from their Egyptian neighbors as their preferred writing medium and most of the contemporary writings to those eras are lost or remain as of yet undiscovered.

Most of what we do know is traced back through the surviving children of the Canaanites- Jewish and Samaritan histories and religious texts, which are perhaps not the most honest of historical sources, and from cuneiform tablets found in Ugarit.

The rest is pieced together from later Greek sources.

That being said, there is a lot more about ancient human societies and cultures that we don't know than we do. We're making our best guess based on those shreds of evidence that have survived (sometimes) thousands of years.

It's a puzzle we'll likely never fully solve.

@js290 I'm not sure I'd classify it as a narrative. The personification of that which we don't understand seems to be a fairly natural response to those things we can't explain.

Taking, for instance, ancient religions- you have concepts such as war, or avatars of storms and lightning. Gods of the ocean, or of fertility and crops.

We began to explain our world and our place in it through the observations we could make with the tools we had in that particular time. The questions of why we are, what we are, where we are, and how everything works are questions that humanity has been asking itself for as long as we've been able to do so.

It is in our nature to give human characteristics even to things we do understand. People ascribe human elements to their vehicles (cars, or boats in particular), or to their pets for instance.

You can also see elements of this personification of things in language and how we communicate. Some languages ascribe gender to objects, as an example.

As for how we'll be viewed in the eyes of history? I'm not sure, I don't really have an answer for how the world will be ten thousand years down the line. That is a really, really long time. I can only hope that historians ten thousand years from now remember me, personally, as handsome and a nice guy.

@freemo It's a really interesting thing, but I'm biased due to my personal connection.

Of particular interest is that at one point, before the Babylonian captivity, the religion that would later become Judaism was most likely monolatristic . That is to say that they worshiped one god over all the other gods- they still had a polythestic pantheon. The king was the head of the religion, and had the divine right thing going.

You can see this in some of the wording which even survives until today. References to foreign gods 'The gods of Egypt' or how the ten commandments is often translated 'No other gods before me'.

The Babylonians roll in, though, and take into captivity all the movers and shakers- the priests, the wealthy, the nobility- and the religion undergoes a major change in those years.

Something random-

I've been reading up on ancient Canaanite religion recently, and it is a very interesting subject. Particularly when you look at it as the precursor religion to what would eventually become Judaism.

A lot of the god names are maintained in Hebrew- which is, itself, a Canaanite language- the only living (Although you could say resurrected) Canaanite language. Yam (long A, Yaam) for instance is one that is super easy to spot because the word, in Hebrew, for ocean is still yam.

It's a very interesting thing to study for me, as a Jewish person and a secular Zionist who ascribes to the notion that the Jewish people are the aboriginal people to the region of the world I've chosen to make my home.

However, from a history standpoint it's particularly interesting to see where my culture and the religion associated with said culture came from and evolved from.

@freemo Hi, Freemo! Great to be here, thank you.

#introduction I'm just a dude living a life in Tel Aviv. I'm no expert when it comes to STEM, and certainly not professionally educated in any such field but I am certainly a fan.

Outside of my interest in general knowledge, I'm into gaming, table top role playing, and have been a member of the telnet based Mu* (Mush/Mud/Mux) online Roleplaying communities for just about two decades now.

I'm big into discussing different topcs, always happy to learn something new, and share my own personal experiences and knowledge with any and everyone.