All the historical evidence that is currently available strongly suggests that humans have been believing in and worshipping deities for a very long time. The worship of deities almost certainly predates the advent of writing by tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands. Given this ancient history, it comes as no surprise that many people have wondered who the oldest deity or deities were.
In this post, I will explore some of the oldest deities that humans are known to have worshipped, starting with possible examples from the Upper Paleolithic and continuing through the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Finally, I will conclude with the very earliest deities whose names are directly attested in writing in ancient Sumer in the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE).
The oldest deities humans have ever worshipped—an unanswerable question
Unfortunately, historians and religious studies scholars really have no idea who the oldest deities humans have ever worshipped were. There is simply no surviving evidence that we could use to answer such a question and the various answers that have been proposed all lack empirical evidence to support them.
Followers of Abrahamic religions, including Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Muslims, and Druze have, of course, long believed that their God is the original God of all humanity and therefore the God whom humans worshipped the earliest. This view, however, is not substantiated by any kind of historical evidence.
As I will discuss later in this post, the earliest written sources directly attesting the names of deities come from Sumer and date to the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE). By contrast, the earliest known reference to YHWH the God of Israel that can be securely dated and that the majority of scholars agree is genuine occurs on the Mesha Stele, which dates to around 840 BCE, over two thousand years later.
Recently, a group of researchers working for an Evangelical Christian apologetics organization have claimed that they have found a lead curse tablet from Mount Ebal that dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE and contains two instances of the name of the God of Israel. As I discuss in this post I wrote last month, there are very good reasons to be skeptical of these researchers’ claims.
Even if everything the researchers claim is completely true, though, and the tablet is really exactly as old as they claim it is, this would still leave YHWH as a relative latecomer among attested deities. (For reference, between 1400 and 1200 BCE is roughly the same period as the earliest known attestations of the names of Greek deities like Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and Dionysos in Mycenaean Linear B clay tablets.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the earliest generally-agreed-on occurrence of the divine name YHWH on the Mesha Stele, dating to around 840 BCE
In accordance with the state of the evidence, since the nineteenth century, critical scholars of religion have generally discarded the idea that the Abrahamic God is the original God of all humans. In place of this idea, the Victorian English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (lived 1832 – 1917) proposed an influential cultural evolutionist model for the origins of religion in his book Primitive Culture, originally published in 1871. In this book, he argues that human societies have gradually progressed from the simplest and most primitive form to more complex and civilized forms. He therefore sees the history of religion as a progression of gradually increasing complexity and civilization.
In this model, Tylor posits that the earliest religion of humanity was something that he calls “animism,” which he defines as “the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general.” He maintains that “primitive” cultures around the world still practice animism, while more advanced humans have progressed from animism to polytheism, from polytheism to monotheism, and will eventually progress to reject religion altogether and embrace enlightened scientific rationality.
Modern religious studies scholars generally reject Tylor’s idea that there was a single primitive religion of all humanity as simplistic and his idea that this religion was “animism” as an unfounded one rooted in his own colonialist prejudice against Indigenous peoples and their religious traditions. Nonetheless, his idea continues to have influence with the general public and you can still easily find misleading charts online that purport to show the “family tree” of all religions leading back to primitive “animism.”
ABOVE: Portrait of the prominent nineteenth-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who proposed that “animism” was the first religion of all humanity
The Löwenmensch figure: an Upper Paleolithic deity of some kind?
Sadly, as we have seen, it is impossible to know who the oldest deity ever was. Nonetheless, we can explore the earliest surviving evidence for possible deities. To find this evidence, we are going to have to go all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic.
On 25 August 1939, archaeologists in the cave Hohlenstein-Stadel in the Swabian Jura in the German state of Baden-Württemberg found the first fragments of a prehistoric statuette carved from mammoth ivory using a flint knife. The statuette was forgotten for decades, but later rediscovered. Over the course of the past half century, archaeologists have found more fragments of the statuette in the cave and have managed to piece more and more of it together. The current reconstruction stands at 31.1 centimeters (12.2 inches) tall.
Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that the statuette was carved sometime between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago during the early Aurignacian culture of the very early Upper Paleolithic, making it one of the oldest known works of figurative art ever discovered and one of the oldest known statues. It may have been carved at a time when Neanderthals were still alive in Europe and Denisovans were still alive in some parts of Asia.
The statue is even more remarkable because it depicts a being with the body of a human, but the head of a lion. Archaeologists disagree whether the statue depicts a male or a female, since the figure’s sex is ambiguous. The figure is known in German as the Löwenmensch or “Lion-Human” of Hohlenstein-Stadel.
Archaeologists really don’t know what the make of the Löwenmensch. Is it the oldest surviving cult statue? Is it some kind of totem or ritual artifact other than a cult statue? Is it a decoration? Is it a child’s toy? Something someone just carved for fun because they were bored? What does it represent? Does it represent a deity? An ancestor? A magician or shaman? A legendary hero? A monster? A creature somebody saw in a dream? Could it be all of these things at once? No one really knows and it is unlikely that we ever will know, but it is clear that the figure is relevant to the question of the first deities.
ABOVE: Photographs from Wikimedia Commons showing the “Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel” from the front and from the back
The “Venus” figurines
The oldest surviving undisputed depiction of a fully anthropomorphic being and the oldest surviving “Venus” figurine is the so-called “Venus of Hohle Fels,” a statuette carved from mammoth ivory that depicts a nude woman with enormous breasts and hips, a huge, gaping vulva, and a tiny head. She holds her hands underneath her breasts as though lifting them up to display them.
Archaeologists discovered this statuette in 2008 in the cave Hohle Fels in the Swabian Jura in Baden-Württemberg. It dates to the same period as the Löwenmensch (i.e., between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago during the early Aurignacian culture), but it is much smaller, measuring only 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) tall.
ABOVE: Two different photographs from Wikimedia Commons showing the so-called “Venus of Hohle Fels,” the oldest surviving undisputed depiction of a fully anthropomorphic being, from the side (left) and from the front (right)
Archaeologists have found over two hundred some so-called “Venus” figurines, most of which date to the Gravettian culture (lasted 33,000 – 21,000 years ago), which was the culture in Europe that came after the Aurignacian. Nearly all these figurines are of small size, meaning they would have been portable, and they are crafted from a wide variety of materials.
The most famous such “Venus” figurine is the so-called “Venus of Willendorf,” which is thought to date to sometime around 25,000 years ago. It is carved from oolitic limestone and was originally colored all over with red ochre, although the coloring is less visible now than it was originally. It stands at 11.1 centimeters (4.4 inches) tall and depicts a woman with enormous breasts, a corpulent body, and a prominent vulva. Her head is nondescript, with no face and she has no feet or lower legs. Her arms are tiny and spread across her breasts. The figurine was found in 1908 at a site near the village of Willendorf in the Wachau Valley in Lower Austria and it is currently held in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
ABOVE: Two different photographs from Wikimedia Commons showing the so-called “Venus of Willendorf,” the most famous “Venus” figurine, from the front (left) and from the side (right)
Archaeologists and art historians hotly debate what exactly these figurines are supposed to represent and what they were used for. The oldest hypothesis, which remains one of the most popular, holds that they represent some sort of goddess of sex and fertility akin to the later Roman goddess Venus, after whom the figurines take their modern name. This explanation is plausible, but it is far from the only plausible explanation and it is not necessarily the explanation that best explains all aspects of the figurines.
Personally, I think that the Paleolithic “Venus” figurines were most likely fashioned for people to wear or carry around as amulets. This would explain why, even over the course of a thousand years, they always remained such a consistently small, easily portable size, why there seem to be so many of them, and why people kept making them in more-or-less exactly the same way for thousands of years. It also explains why few of the figurines, if any, would have originally been able to stand upright on their own; quite simply, they didn’t need to stand up on their own because they were always meant to be worn or carried.
I personally think that they most likely do not represent specific women or specific goddesses, but rather anonymous, generic women with intentionally exaggerated sexual characteristics. This would explain why they never have faces, why the breasts, hips, and vulvas are consistently so exaggerated, and why features such as the arms and legs that are unrelated to sex and fertility are consistently deemphasized or absent entirely. They clearly had some purpose related to fertility or sex. For instance, this kind of figurine might have been intended for a woman to wear or carry around in order to increase her sexual attractiveness, her fertility, or both, or maybe for a man to wear or carry in order to attract a woman.
Another hypothesis, proposed by Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermott, holds that these figurines are, in fact, self-portraits by women who carved them while looking down at their own bodies as models. This hypothesis purports that the statues do not have faces because women at this time did not have access to mirrors and therefore could not see their own faces. It further holds that the breasts and bodies of the figurines are exaggerated proportionally because those parts are closer to the face when one is looking down and therefore look bigger.
It is certainly true that these figurines—or at least some of them—could have been carved by women. The hypothesis that foreshortening explains the figurines’ unusual proportions, though, is plainly nonsense. For one thing, Upper Paleolithic women wouldn’t have needed mirrors in order to see their own reflections, because they could have easily seen their reflections in puddles of still water, which must have been just as common in the Upper Paleolithic as they are in nature today.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, dating to between 29,000 and 25,000 years ago, representing the oldest known use of ceramic
Furthermore, even if, for the sake of the argument, we accept McCoid and McDermott’s contention that Upper Paleolithic women would never have seen their own reflections, their hypothesis still does a very poor job of explaining the proportions of the “Venus” figurines. For instance, it does not explain why the vulva—a part of the body that a woman generally cannot see on herself clearly and completely simply by looking down and, in fact, would require either a mirror or an extraordinary degree of skill in the art of contortion in order to see clearly and completely—is consistently one of the most exaggerated features in these figurines.
Nor does it adequately explain why the arms are either miniscule or absent altogether and the feet are nearly always absent altogether, when these are parts of a woman’s body that she could very easily see by simply looking down. (Indeed, the arms at least would be closer to her face and would therefore appear larger than much of the body. Following McCoid and McDermott’s hypothesis, we would expect the arms to be represented as some of the largest parts on the figure, but yet they are not.) The hypothesis also does not explain why, in some figurines, such as the “Venus of Hohle Fels,” the woman seems to be intentionally lifting up her breasts as though trying to draw greater attention to them.
Finally, the self-portrait explanation does not explain why Paleolithic people kept making figurines of this exact same kind for literally thousands of years. If the unusual proportions of the figurines were solely the result of individual women looking down at their own bodies and carving exactly what they saw, with foreshortening and everything, then one would expect that, eventually, some woman or another would figure out—either from seeing her reflection in a puddle, looking at other women, or talking to other people—that her own proportions as she sees them by looking down are distorted.
Whatever one makes of them, the fact that people kept making these figurines with more-or-less the exact same proportions for thousands of years implies that the proportions of the figurines are not only intentional, but also crucial to the purpose these figurines were meant to serve.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the “Venus of Laussel,” a limestone bas-relief carving dating to around 25,000 years ago depicting a nude woman with “Venus” proportions
The mysterious “Sorcerer” and “Dancing Shaman” of the Cave of the Trois-Frères
As we have seen, surviving artistic representations of figures who might be deities of some kind exist from the Upper Paleolithic. The period after the Upper Paleolithic is the Mesolithic, which began around 20,000 years ago in West Asia and around 15,000 years ago in Europe. This period has produced some of the most mysterious cave paintings ever discovered, which may depict divine beings of some variety.
In the French department of Ariège, located in the most southwestern part of France, right next to the border with Spain, lies the Cave of the Trois-Frères, which is full of paintings dated to the Magdalenian culture (lasted c. 17,000 – c. 12,000 years ago), the vast majority of which are paintings of animals.
Deep within the cave, though, lies a series of small caverns known as the “Sanctuary,” the walls of which are decorated with something like 280 painted and/or engraved figures, many of them superimposed. At the height of the chamber, above all the other figures, is the image from the cave that has become the most famous and that remains possibly the most enigmatic: the so-called “Sorcerer” of the Cave of Trois-Frères.
The French Catholic priest and anthropologist Henri Breuil published the first illustration of the “Sorcerer” in his book Un dessin de la grotte des Trois frères, published in 1930. Breuil depicted the “Sorcerer” as a bizarre therianthropic being with the legs, feet, and hands of a human being, but the rear, tail, penis, and testicles of a horse, the face of an owl, the ears, antlers, and neck of a deer, and the beard of a bison.
Photographs of the painting taken since Breuil’s illustration was published, however, show far fewer details than appear in Breuil’s illustration. Notably, no photograph shows any trace of the deer antlers Breuil depicted, leading many to conclude that Breuil embellished his illustration, either consciously or unconsciously.
As you might expect, scholars hotly debate what exactly the “Sorcerer” figure actually represents. Breuil himself believed that it depicts a shaman in the act of shape-shifting between human and animal forms. Others think the figure may represent a spirit or a deity of some kind. Whatever the case may be, the fact that the “Sorcerer” occupies the position of greatest prominence within the most heavily decorated part of the cave indicates that whoever painted it considered this figure a being of great importance.
ABOVE: Modern photograph of the “Sorcerer” cave painting (left) and illustration of the cave painting by Henri Breuil originally published in 1930 in the book Un dessin de la grotte des Trois frères (right)
Another less famous, but no less enigmatic figure appears in another scene in the “Sanctuary” of the Cave of the Trois-Frères. In one of the lower scenes beneath the “Sorcerer,” there is a deer and a bison with another figure standing behind them: a therianthropic being standing upright with the feet, legs, and penis of a human, but the upper body of a bison. This figure is lifting his left leg. Meanwhile, with the cloven hooves of his arms, he holds a flute-like musical instrument to his mouth. He therefore appears to be playing the pipe and dancing in a half-human, half-animal form. For this reason, this figure is popularly known as the “Dancing Shaman.”
Once again, no one is really sure what to make of this little dancing bison dude. As the name “Dancing Shaman” suggests, the most popular interpretation is that he represents some sort of shaman with the ability to shift between human and animal forms, but he could just as easily represent some mythic spirit or deity. We will probably never know who or what the original artist who painted this scene intended him to be.
ABOVE: Illustration by Henri Breuil, originally published in 1930 in the book Un dessin de la grotte des Trois frères, depicting the so-called “Dancing Shaman” of the Cave of the Trois-Frères
The “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük”: a Neolithic Anatolian mother goddess?
Around 10,000 BCE, humans in West Asia invented agriculture for the first time anywhere on earth, marking the end of the Mesolithic in that region and the beginning of the Neolithic, the final period of the Stone Age. The Neolithic began and ended at different times in different places; in West Asia, it lasted from around 10,000 BCE until around 4500 BCE, but, in Europe, it lasted from around 7000 BCE until around 1700 BCE.
With the spread of agriculture in West Asia came tremendous growth in settled, communal habitation, resulting in the rise of the very first proto-cities. In 1961, a team of archaeologists led by James Mellaart excavated a Neolithic proto-city located at the site of Çatalhöyük in what is now south-central Turkey.
This proto-city was inhabited for something like a millennium and a half from around 7500 BCE until around 6000 BCE. At its height, it is estimated to have had a population of somewhere between 3,500 and 8,000 people, making it the largest known settlement of its time anywhere on earth. Archaeologists have excavated at least 160 buildings, all packed tightly together in a rather haphazard fashion.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a deep trench that archaeologists have dug at Çatalhöyük
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a part of the excavation at the south shelter at Çatalhöyük as it appeared in 2006
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a part of the excavation at Çatalhöyük as it appeared in 2019
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a part of the excavation at Çatalhöyük as it appeared in 2019
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a model showing what the proto-city of Çatalhöyük might have looked like at its height
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a reconstruction of what archaeologists think the interior of a typical house in Çatalhöyük at its height would have originally looked like
Amid the ruins of this sprawling proto-city, Mellaart’s team discovered (along with an array of iconographically similar depictions) a baked-clay statuette of a corpulent nude female figure seated on a throne with hand rests carved to look like the heads of two large felines with her legs spread apart, apparently in the act of giving birth. This statuette dates to sometime around 6000 BCE, near the very end of the period when Çatalhöyük was inhabited. Today, it is held in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara and is known around the world as the “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük.”
Some aspects of the statuette (such as the figure being a “mother,” her being depicted seated on a throne, and her being associated with large felines) recall the later goddess Matar Kubileya, whose cult is well attested in the region of Phrygia in northwest Asia Minor from the Early Iron Age (lasted c. 1200 – c. 750 BCE) onward and who was often represented seated on a throne with at least one lion by her side.
The cult of Matar Kubileya was introduced to the Greek world by at least the sixth century BCE and the goddess became known among the Greeks by names such as Κυβέλη (Kybélē), Μήτηρ Μεγάλη (“Great Mother”), and Μήτηρ Θεῶν (“Mother of Deities”). The Romans later officially adopted her into their pantheon in 205 BCE as Cybelē or Magna Māter (“Great Mother”).
Mellaart was not at all hesitant to claim that the “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük” statuette represents a Neolithic Anatolian mother goddess who is the direct ancestor of Kybele. Many scholars of ancient religion after Mellaart accepted this identification, including the very eminent German scholar of ancient Greek religion Walter Burkert. More recent scholars, however, such as Lynn E. Roller in her book In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (published in 1999 by the University of California Press) on pages 27–39, have evinced greater skepticism toward it.
Roller points out the vast period of time that separates Çatalhöyük from the historically attested cult of Kybele; Çatalhöyük was most likely abandoned sometime around 6000 BCE and Kybele is not attested as a goddess until many millennia later. Roller further questions whether the statuette is even really meant to depict a goddess at all, pointing out that no one knows who made the statuette, why they made it, or what it was used for.
I personally agree with Roller that Mellaart, Burkert, and others have been far too hasty in identifying the “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük” as a Neolithic precursor to Kybele, given the vast expanse of time that lies between the two. Nonetheless, I personally think that the statuette does most likely represent a goddess figure of some kind, mainly because the statuette is very carefully and intricately formed and the woman is shown as seated on such an ornate throne in a manner that is so closely reminiscent of later Anatolian deities.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the famous “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük,” found at the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, dating to the sixth millennium BCE
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a naïskos, or miniature temple, containing a relief of the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele holding a drum and a bowl while seated on a throne with a lion beside her right leg, carved from Hymettan marble, dating to the late fourth century BCE, found in the Athenian Agora, now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens
The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deities of the Chalcolithic
Thus, by around 6000 BCE, there is at least one artistic depiction of a being who I think can most likely be identified as a deity. Scholars also know about the worship of some other extremely ancient deities whose names are not directly attested and of whom no artistic depictions survive. I am speaking, of course, about the deities worshipped by the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, who, according to the currently most widely accepted hypothesis, lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia from around 4500 BCE until around 2500 BCE during the Chalcolithic Age (i.e., the very last period of the Neolithic).
The language these people spoke and the deities they worshipped are not directly attested; there are no surviving examples of Proto-Indo-European writing. Nonetheless, by comparing the deities worshipped in later ancient cultures that spoke languages derived from Proto-Indo-European, scholars can reconstruct some of the deities the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European during the Chalcolithic worshipped. In some cases, they can even reconstruct those deities’ names.
You can find in-depth discussion of the various Proto-Indo-European deities scholars over the years have proposed in works such as the book The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams (published by Oxford University Press in 2006) in the chapters “Religion” (pages 408–414) and “Comparative Mythology” (pages 423–441) and in the book Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M. L. West (published by Oxford University Press in 2007). Those two books are the main sources for everything I am about to say.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons illustrating the spread of early Indo-European languages, according to the most widely accepted version of the Kurgan hypothesis
The most solidly reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deity is *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr, whose name means “Sky Father” and seems to have been regarded as the god of the daylit sky. His name is the source for the names of the Luwian god Tātis Tiwaz (“Papa Tiwaz”), the Palaic god Tiyaz Pāpaz (“Papa Tiyaz”), the Vedic god Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́, the Phrygian god Tiy-, the Greek god Zeús Patḗr (“Father Zeus”), the Roman god Iūpiter (“Jupiter”), the Oscan god Dípatír, the Illyrian god Deipáturos, the Norse god Týr, the Old English god Tīw (after whom our day of the week Tuesday is named), the Lithuanian god Diēvas, and the Latvian god Dievs.
*Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr’s most securely attested attribute is that he was regarded as the father or ancestor of all the other deities. He was most likely paired with an earth goddess as his consort, but attempts to reconstruct the name of this earth goddess consort are more disputed than the reconstruction of *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr’s own name, which is widely accepted. One proposed reconstruction of her name is *Dʰéǵʰōm Méh₂tēr (”Earth Mother”), but the linguistic evidence to support this reconstruction is not particularly strong.
M. L. West argues in his Indo-European Poetry and Myth (pages 181–183) that the Proto-Indo-Europeans envisioned the sky and the earth as a male-female couple having sex, with the sky god on top (in what ancient people saw as the dominant, masculine position) and the earth goddess underneath him (in what they saw as the submissive, feminine position). They imagined the rain that falls from the sky as the sky god’s semen impregnating the earth and the agricultural produce that the earth bears as the offspring to whom she gives birth.
This trope occurs in, among other places, the Ṛgveda, the oldest surviving text in the Sanskrit language, a collection of hymns generally agreed to date between c. 1500 and c. 1200 BCE, in two different places (1.100.3 and 5.17.3) and in Fragment 44 of the tragedy The Danaïdes by the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BCE).
The Proto-Indo-Europeans seem to have regarded *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr as all-seeing and all-knowing, since, as the sky, he could easily look down and see everything that happens on the earth. The Ṛgveda describes Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ as “viśvávedas-,” which means “all-knowing.” In the Homeric epics, a pair of Greek epic poems in dactylic hexameter which most likely became fixed in the forms we know today in around the mid-seventh century BCE, one of Zeus’s common epithets is εὐρύοπα (eurýopa), which means “wide-seeing.” The Greek poet Hesiodos of Askre, who flourished in around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, says in his Works and Days 267–269: “πάντα ἰδὼν Διὸς ὀφθαλμὸς καὶ πάντα νοήσας” (“The eye of Zeus sees all things and perceives all things.”)
It is unclear whether the Proto-Indo-Europeans regarded *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr as the actual ruler of their pantheon or as merely a distant ancestor from whom the other deities are descended. On the one hand, the Greek god Zeus and the Roman god Iūpiter were both certainly the rulers of their respective pantheons and the Illyrian god Deipáturos, although he is poorly attested, seems to have been a head god also.
On the other hand, though, Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ appears in the Ṛgveda as no more than a minor ancestor god. No significant myths about him are attested and, of the 1028 hymns in the Ṛgveda, none of them are addressed to Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ alone and only six are addressed to him and his consort Pṛthvī Mātā (“Earth Mother”) together. The Norse god Týr is also a relatively minor god; he is best known for a single myth recounted in several different works of Old Norse literature in which the wolf Fenrir bites off his right hand. The other reflexes of *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr are all too poorly attested to say anything definitive about their positions within their respective pantheons.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Artemision Bronze, a Greek bronze statue dating to c. 460 BCE most likely depicting Zeus preparing to hurl a thunderbolt (left), photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble statue dating to the late first century CE depicting the god Iūpiter (center), and illustration of the Norse god Týr in the Icelandic manuscript ÍB 299 4to dating to the eighteenth century CE (right)
Another reasonably solidly reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deity is *H₂éusōs, the daughter of *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr and goddess of the dawn. Her name, which is the Proto-Indo-European word for “Dawn,” is generally thought to be the source for the names of the Vedic goddess Uṣás, the Greek goddess Ēṓs, the Roman goddess Aurōra, the Old English goddess Ēostre (from whom the Christian holiday of Easter most likely takes its English-language name), the Lithuanian goddess Aušrinė, and the Latvian goddess Auseklis. Of these, Uṣás and Eos are attested the earliest and most thoroughly and are therefore the most important for reconstructing *H₂éusōs.
*H₂éusōs was most likely closely associated with beauty and sexual attraction, since both Uṣás and Eos are closely associated with these attributes. The hymns in the Ṛgveda repeatedly characterize Uṣás as wantonly flirtatious. The Ṛgveda 1.124.7 describes her as going before men “like a girl with no brothers,” like a woman going onto a stage, and proudly displaying her bare breasts like a courtesan. Meanwhile, 1.123.10 describes her as follows, in M. L. West’s translation:
“Like a girl proud of her body you go, goddess, to the god who desires (you);
a smiling young woman, shining forth from the east you bare your breasts.
Good-looking, like a young woman adorned by her mother, you bare your body for beholding.”
*H₂éusōs was most likely also thought to have had many divine and mortal lovers, since both Uṣás and Eos are said to have had them. The Ṛgveda 7.9.1 describes the sun god Sūrya as Uṣás’s lover and 1.30.20 implies that she has at least one mortal lover as well. In Greek myth, Eos is said to have had sex with Ares, the god of war, which led Ares’s lover Aphrodite to curse her with uncontrollable and insatiable lust for mortal men. Her mortal lovers are said to have included Orion, Kleitos, Tithonos, and Kephalos. Her affair with Tithonos is referenced in a formulaic passage that is repeated in both the Iliad 11.1–2 and the Odyssey 5.1–2. The early Greek lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) describes the affair as well in her famous “Tithonos Poem,” lines 9–12:
“καὶ γάρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων,
ἔρωι δε̣δ̣άθ̣εισαν, βάμεν’ εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,
ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ’ αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ο̣ν̣ γῆρας, ἔχ̣ [ο]ν̣τ̣’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.”
This means, in my own translation:
“For even, at one time, they were saying that rosy-armed Eos,
taught by Eros, went to carry Tithonos to the ends of the earth,
him being beautiful and young, but still it lay hold of him,
in time, gray-haired old age, despite him having a deathless bed partner.”
Aphrodite herself, who originates from the Phoenician goddess ʿAštart and seems to have entered the Greek pantheon relatively late, during the Early Iron Age (lasted c. 1200 – c. 750 BCE), may have subsumed some aspects of *H₂éusōs.
ABOVE: Attic red-figure oinochoë by the Achilles Painter dating to between c. 470 and c. 460 BCE depicting the goddess Eos (left), The Gates of Dawn painted by the English painter Herbert James Draper in around 1900 (second from left), Eos painted in 1895 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn De Morgan (center), painting of the Vedic goddess Uṣás by an unknown artist, probably late nineteenth or early twentieth-century (second from right), and imaginative illustration of the Old English goddess Ēostre made by Johannes Gehrts in 1884 (right)
The Proto-Indo-Europeans also believed that *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr had a pair of twin sons who were closely associated with horses and who would miraculously rescue people in danger who called out to them. The Proto-Indo-European name for these “Divine Twins” cannot be securely reconstructed, but they are well attested in a wide array of Indo-European mythical traditions and their basic attributes are consistent across all the different traditions that are well attested. Reflexes of the Divine Twins include the Vedic Aśvins, the Greek Dióskouroi (i.e., the “Youths of Zeus,” Kastor and Polydeukes), the Lithuanian Diẽvo Sunẽliai, the Latvian Dieva Dēli, and possibly the Old English Hengist and Horsa. Of these, the Vedic and Greek traditions are again attested the earliest and most completely.
All the traditions indicate that the Divine Twins were closely associated with horses. In the Vedic tradition, the name Aśvins itself means “Possessors of Horses.” In Greek poems, Kastor (one of the Dioskouroi) regularly receives the epithet ἱππόδαμος (hippódamos), which means “horse-taming.” The Homeric Hymns are a collection of Greek hymns addressed to various deities, most of which were composed during the Archaic Period of Greek history. Two of these hymns are addressed to the Dioskouroi as a pair. Both hymns call them (at 17.5 and 33.18) “ταχέων ἐπιβήτορες ἵππων” (“riders of swift horses”).
In the Baltic tradition, both the Lithuanian Diẽvo Sunẽliai and the Latvian Dieva Dēli are regularly associated with horses. In the Germanic tradition, the names Hengist and Horsa mean “Stallion” and “Horse” respectively. In Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, the names Hengist and Horsa were also applied to horse-headed gables on farmhouses, further supporting the connection to horses.
Both the Vedic Aśvins and the Greek Dioskouroi are said to rescue people in danger who call out to them, especially those who are in peril at sea or in battle. The Ṛgveda recounts numerous instances of the Aśvins rescuing people. (See, for instance, Ṛgveda 1.112.5–8, 1.116.3–24, 1.117.3–18, 1.119.4, 1.182.5–7.) The Homeric Hymn 33 describes how sailors caught in a storm at sea who know they are about to face certain death call out the Disokouroi, promising that, if the twins save them, then they will sacrifice white lambs to them when they come back to land. The hymn then describes how the twins come to the rescue, in lines 13–17:
“ξουθῇσι πτερύγεσσι δι᾽ αἰθέρος ἀίξαντες,
αὐτίκα δ᾽ ἀργαλέων ἀνέμων κατέπαυσαν ἀέλλας,
κύματα δ᾽ ἐστόρεσαν λευκῆς ἁλὸς ἐν πελάγεσσι,
σήματα καλά, πόνου ἀπονόσφισιν: οἳ δὲ ἰδόντες
γήθησαν, παύσαντο δ᾽ ὀιζυροῖο πόνοιο.”
Or, in my own translation:
“Then, darting on nimble wings through the air,
straightaway they [i.e., the Dioskouroi] halt the blasts of the devastating winds
and put down the swells on the surface of the white sea.
They are beautiful omens, deliverance from suffering; seeing them,
[sailors] rejoice and they cease from miserable suffering.”
This reputation for miraculously rescuing sailors caught in storms is the reason why the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 28:11 describes the prow of the ship that takes Paul to Rome as having a figurehead of the Dioskouroi.
M. L. West notes in Indo-European Poetry and Myth (on page 191) that the Proto-Indo-European language had a word for “ship” (*nāwes) and that Proto-Indo-European sailors in the Sea of Azov or northern Black Sea might well have prayed to the Divine Twins for protection and rescue in the same way that later followers of the Vedic religion are known to have prayed to the Aśvins and followers of Hellenic religion to the Dioskouroi.
ABOVE: Greek relief carving currently held in the British Museum dating to the fourth century BCE depicting the Dioskouroi (i.e., Kastor and Polydeukes) riding together on horseback (left), Thai illustration of the horse-headed Aśvins in a chariot (center), and engraving by Richard Rowlands for the book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence by Richard Verstegan (published in 1605) showing the legendary arrival of Hengist and Horsa in Britain (right)
M. L. West argues in Indo-European Poetry and Myth (on pages 280–303) that the Proto-Indo-Europeans most likely believed that a wide array of minor deities and spirits inhabited the natural world, since similar kinds of nature spirits are well attested throughout the extant Indo-European mythologies.
These most likely included female nature spirits who were thought to inhabit lakes, rivers, streams, trees, meadows, caves, and mountains. They probably believed that these female spirits are always young and extraordinarily beautiful, but not necessarily immortal, that they can sometimes be caught dancing and/or singing in wild places, and that they sometimes abduct or seduce handsome young mortal men in isolated places to have sex with them.
These female nature spirits are most likely the source for the later Indian apsarás; the Avestan Ahurānīš; the Lykian Eliyãna; the Greek and Roman nýmphai or “nymphs”; the Armenian Parik, the Germanic nixies and elf women; the French Dames vertes; the Breton korrigans; the Manx lhiannan-shee; the Slavic sjenovite drveta and víly or rusalky; the Baltic Deiváitės, Laũmės, and Jūŗas meitas; the Albanian Jashtēshme, Peris, and Shtojzvalet; and the Ossetian daughters of Donbettyr.
ABOVE: Mosaic from Roman Gaul dating to the third century CE depicting nymphs abducting the handsome young man Hylas (left), photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a sandstone statue of an apsarás dating to the twelfth century CE (second from left), detail of a 1906 illustration by Paja Jovanović showing a Slavic vila (center), detail of the painting Meadow Elves painted by Nils Blommér in 1850 (second from right), and The Nymph in the Forest painted by Guillaume Seignac (right)
The Proto-Indo-Europeans most likely also believed in hairy male nature spirits with horse-like or goat-like features who inhabit forests, woodlands, pastures, and hills, who often engage in dancing and other forms of revelry in woodland clearings and other remote wilderness places, and who are often known to be devious tricksters and makers of mischief. West argues that these are probably the ultimate source for the Indian Kiṃpuruṣas or Kiṃnaras who are mentioned in the epic poem Rāmāyaṇa; the Greek sátyroi or “satyrs,” Seilēnoí or “silens,” kéntauroi or “centaurs,” kóbaloi, and Kérkōpes; the Germanic elves; the Gallic dusii; the Breton duzik; the Manx goayr heddagh; the Scottish ùruisg and glaistig; and the Slavic lešiy.
Although there is enormous variance in the features that the beings West describes are said to possess, the beings themselves are pervasive enough throughout Indo-European mythologies and they have enough features consistently in common to indicate that the Proto-Indo-Europeans most likely believed in some sort of beings of this general variety.
ABOVE: Attic red-figure plate found at Vulci in Etruria depicting a satyr with pointed ears, a horselike tail, and an erect penis (left), 1908 illustration by Arthur Rackham showing how he imagined the elves portrayed in William Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream (center), and 1906 magazine illustration of a lešiy (right)
The oldest Sumerian deities whose names are directly attested in writing
Sometime around 4000 BCE, the Sumerian culture began to emerge in southern Mesopotamia (i.e., what is now southern Iraq). The earliest period of Sumerian history is known as the Uruk Period. It is generally said to have lasted from around 4000 BCE until around 3100 BCE, but some sources include the following Jemdet Nasr Period (lasted c. 3100 – c. 2900 BCE) as part of the Uruk Period. It is sometimes also known as the “Archaic Period” of Mesopotamia.
Over the course of this period, Sumerian urban communities grew into the very first true cities anywhere on earth. The preeminent city in Sumer during this time was the city of Uruk, located on the Euphrates River in what is now the Al Muthannā Governorate of Iraq. By the end of the Uruk Period, Uruk itself may have had a population of as many as 40,000 people, with perhaps as many as between 80,000 and 90,000 people living in the areas around it, making it the largest human settlement anywhere on earth at the time, vastly dwarfing what Çatalhöyük had been millennia prior.
The Sumerians did not have writing during the first part of the Uruk Period, but, during the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE), they developed proto-cuneiform writing, the very first writing system ever developed anywhere on earth. They wrote mainly on clay tablets. Some surviving clay tablets written in proto-cuneiform during the Late Uruk Period include the names of Sumerian deities. These are the very first deities whose names are directly attested in writing anywhere on earth.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons taken in September 2013 showing the ruins of the Sumerian city of Uruk with the Anu Ziggurat, dating to around 4000 BCE, in the background
One Sumerian deity who is possibly attested in proto-cuneiform tablets from the Late Uruk Period is An, whom the Sumerians regarded as the sky god and ruler of all the other deities. In later times and possibly during the Uruk Period as well, the Sumerians regarded An as the father or ancestor of most or all the other deities. He was considered a patron god of Uruk. There is scholarly debate over whether An is really attested in tablets from the Uruk Period because, although the symbol that was later used to write his name certainly appears in these tablets, this same symbol could also simply mean “sky” or be used to refer to deities in general. In any case, though, An is certainly attested as a specific god by the Early Dynastic Period (lasted c. 2900 – c. 2350 BCE).
Tablets from the Late Uruk Period may also attest the god Enlil, who was associated with wind, air, and storms. His main cult center was the Ekur temple in the city-state of Nippur and he eventually supplanted An as the supreme ruler of the Sumerian pantheon.
As was the case with An, there is also scholarly debate over whether Enlil is really attested in the Late Uruk Period. Although the signs that would later become used to write his name certainly appear in multiple proto-cuneiform texts from this period, these signs were originally used exclusively to write the name of the city of Nippur and not the name of any deity. The ancient historian Xianhua Wang, however, argues in his monograph The Metamorphosis of Enlil in Early Mesopotamia, published in 2011 by Ugarit-Verlag, that these signs began being used to write the name of the god Enlil sometime between c. 3200 and c. 2800 BCE, during the transition from the Late Uruk Period to the Jemdet Nasr Period and then to the Early Dynastic Period. If this is the case, then it is possible that Enlil may be attested in texts from the very end of the Late Uruk Period.
Of all the Sumerian deities who are attested in these very early proto-cuneiform tablets from the Late Uruk Period, the one who is most certainly attested and who is mentioned the most frequently is Inanna, a goddess associated with a variety of domains, including war, erotic desire, sex, retribution, and political power. Like An, Inanna was regarded as a patron and protector of Uruk and a major sanctuary there, the Eanna, was dedicated to her. She is referenced in texts from the Late Uruk Period in a variety of independent forms.
The Sumerians regarded Inanna astrologically as the planet Venus. Offering texts from the Late Uruk Period record people making offerings to “Inanna-ḫud2” (which means “Inanna the Morning”) and “Inanna-sig” (which means “Inanna the Evening”), indicating that two separate cults existed during this period to Inanna as the morning star and Inanna as the evening star.
Inanna’s main symbol during the Uruk Period was a ring-post made of a pair of twisted reeds, but, in later periods, the lion and the eight-pointed star became important aspects of her iconography. (For more on this, you can read this post I wrote two years ago in which I discuss Inanna’s iconography extensively.)
The Uruk Vase, an alabaster vessel discovered in Uruk dating to between c. 3200 and c. 3000 BCE, bears in the uppermost register a relief carving of a nude male worshipper presenting offerings to Inanna, who is depicted in anthropomorphic form as a woman wearing a dress and headdress with two reed ring-posts behind her. This is possibly the oldest surviving depiction of a specific deity who can be identified by name with a high degree of confidence from anywhere on earth. The vase is currently held in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a relief carving in the top register of the Uruk Vase, an alabaster vessel discovered in the Sumerian city of Uruk dating to between c. 3200 and c. 3000 BCE, depicting a nude male worshipper (left) presenting offerings to the goddess Inanna (right)
Other Sumerian deities who are attested by name in texts from the Late Uruk Period include Utu (the sun god who was also seen as an enforcer of justice and moral order and who, at least in later times, was sometimes regarded as Inanna’s brother), Nanna (the moon god, who, at least in later times, was sometimes regarded as the father of Inanna and Utu), Nisaba (a goddess associated with farming and writing), Ezina (a goddess associated with grain and farming), and Nanše (a goddess associated with a variety of domains, including fish and waterfowl and the protection of orphans and widows).
Surviving texts from the Late Uruk Period also attest a certain “birthing goddess.” No source from this period ever mentions this birthing goddess’s name, but she evidently belongs to the same type as the goddesses Ninḫursaĝ and Ninmah, who are attested in later periods. The storm god Iškur is indirectly attested in this period through a mention of his cult center Karkar in a list of cities.
For more information about Sumerian goddesses in particular during the Late Uruk Period, see the book Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources by Julia M. Asher-Greve and Joan Goodnick Westenholz, published in 2013, which is available open-access as a PDF through the University of Zürich, specifically the section “Goddesses and Their Cities in the Late Uruk Period (ca. 3300-2900)” (pages 39–44).
(NOTE: This post is adapted from an answer I originally wrote in response to a question in r/AskHistorians. I have also posted a version of this article on Quora as an answer to the question “Who was the first god?”)
Very interesting! From the historical and archaeological point of view, which is what is primarily discussed here. In the broader perspective, we must rely on poets, artists, mystics, and musicians for input, of course. The question at its core involves the super-natural elements and I am pleased to see SM giving these some due in this excellent post.
To be very clear, I don’t personally believe that deities exist as real, supernatural beings; this article is strictly about the early evidence for deities as a social concept. What I’m looking at is not evidence for which deity existed first (since I don’t believe that there is good evidence for deities existing at all), but rather evidence for humans believing in and worshipping deities.
Hi there Spencer,
This was a very interesting article – thank you for posting. I was wondering if you have any plans to post an article about the gradual end of slavery as an institution in the post-Roman Mediterranean/European worlds? The transition from widespread slavery to serfdom seems like a momentous shift that is not widely written about (at least to my non-historian self).
Cheers!
Good idea, I also think this would be an interesting topic for a blog post! Though I must say that serfdom did not entirely replace slavery. It continued in the Middle Ages, and Italian cities like Venice were major centres for the slave trade. In most of Europe it was illegal only to enslave Christians, so in places near non-Christian peoples slavery remained
Early medieval European social history is not really my area of expertise. I mainly specialize in ancient Greek history of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Periods and, once you start going past roughly the fifth century CE, my knowledge starts becoming less comprehensive.
Medieval serfdom actually has its origins in the Roman Empire, starting in the third century CE, and I am reasonably well informed on that aspect of it, but I would most likely have to do quite a bit of research to say more about the later history of it. It’s not a topic I currently have an overwhelming interest in and there are other things I am more interested in writing about, but, if my readers are really interested in that topic, I could certainly do more research on it.
In either case, I am happy to read any of your articles! Congrats on your acceptance to Brandeis, and may the rest of your semester go smoothly.
Thank you so much!
“Followers of Abrahamic religions … have, of course, long believed that their God is the original God of all humanity and therefore the God whom humans have worshipped the longest.”
I’m sorry, that paragraph is so clumsily misexpressed as to be wrong. Such religions hold that the God of Abraham is the true God, but that is very different from believing that God is the original God. Most readers of the Tanakh would see a transition from regarding the object of worship of the Jews as a tribal god to being the exclusive God of monotheism. Even the most benighted fundamentalist has it in their minds that the God of the Abrahamic traditions is revealed, and so was not the original object of worship. Some followers of these faiths believe that early worship was a confused movement towards the worship of the true God; others believe that non-Abrahamic “gods” were actually demonic figures.
For about 1800 years, male members of the Christian elite, and some females, were educated in the culture(s) of Ancient Greece and Rome, and so would have been well aware of earlier gods very hard to reconcile with the God of monotheism. Many of these people would have had a greater or lesser degree of attraction to the old gods, as presenting aspects of the sacred different from those foregrounded in the worship of the Christian God, without ceasing to be Christians.
I find your work interesting and informative, but Christianity (and by extension, all the Abrahamic faiths) is not co-extensive with American Conservative White Evangelicalism, just as a matter of fact.
Generally speaking, followers of Abrahamic religions have believed that the very first humans (who are, of course, traditionally held to have been Adam and Eve) believed in and worshipped the Abrahamic God, but then, in very early times, humans fell into idolatry and began worshipping other deities.
In order to reject the view that humans originally worshipped the Abrahamic God before any other deities, one also has to reject the view that the story of Adam and Eve as it is told in the Book of Genesis and the Quran is historically factual. There have been various devout followers of Abrahamic religions throughout history who have done this, such as the early Christian theologian Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 185 – c. 253 CE), who adamantly rejects the view that the story of Adam and Eve is historically true in his On First Principles 4.16, instead interpreting it as a theological allegory.
Historically, though, even most of the followers of Abrahamic religions who have rejected the view that the Adam and Eve story is historically true have still maintained that humans originally worshipped the Abrahamic God in some fashion. Origenes, for instance, maintains that God originally created humans as immortal, incorporeal souls. At first, he holds that these souls were utterly devoted to the contemplation of God, but, gradually, they became weighed down by sin and fell away from God to varying degrees, so God created the material world and mortal bodies to house them.
Oh good heavens, yes, I hadn’t thought about people who believe that one or both Genesis creation stories is/are literal fact. I try not to think about that as much as I can.
Also, given the historical scope of what you count as Abrahamic, including Baha’i, I was thinking of more modern believers.
Given that I misunderstood what you intended, I’d still say that’s not entirely my fault and you might reshape the para.
I have slightly reworded the paragraph, but have kept it mostly the same.
Sometimes I wonder when exactly monotheism became the normative belief in early Judaism. I know there are early examples of Jews holding monotheistic belief like the author who wrote Isaiah 45, but it seems like it wasn’t til the Hellenistic period that it became standard.
Hi Spencer,
The French legend under the Dancing Shaman describes him as a “masked man” (homme masque) so a bison mask rather than a bison head.
The exaggerated vulva may indicate a swollen vulva ready and receptive for successful reproductive impregnation. Likewise the large breasts indicate the ability /capacity for successful breastfeeding. Offspring has always been a major preoccupation of all beings…
Likewise, statues of males with massive erections obviously indicate genitals ready and capable of successful reproduction.
It is said (though I do not have any references handy) that back in paleolithic times all this imagery/statuary was halfway between religion and sorcery, as in the human creating it was wishing/praying for it to so happen and be… but then again it has been said that religion is but institutional sorcery…🙂
The many gods of polytheistic religions allow for a more accurate/detailed explanation of Nature, OTOH, a single God is much more economical with regard to offerings, sacrifices etc… I also believe the Loewenmensch to be a tacky souvenir of somebody’s holiday in Egypt back then… 😛🤣🤣
Concerning the Norse god Tyr, it’s important to keep in mind that our most detailed sources about him are the Poetic and Prose Edda, works in Old Icelandic that were produced in the Middle Ages and thus are relatively late (though some poems in the Poetic Edda are dated to a couple centuries earlier). There’s a good chance Tyr (or more accurately his Proto-Germanic predecessor *Tīwaz) held a more dominant and important role in Germanic myth, but by the Viking period he was displaced by Odin and his attributes given to the one eyed king of the Æsir.
Concerning Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́, I’m not really an expert (not even in the amateur sense) in Vedic/Hindu religious history, but it’s not hard to suppose he undergone a similar process. Today, unlike other Vedic deities who are still worshipped in modern Hinduism (albeit in a much reduced role than in the Vedic period), Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ appears to no longer be worshipped by modern Hindus, and whatever important role he held seems to have been taken up by later gods like Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva.
This was interesting: I learned a lot that I did not know of before! I wonder, how do you know so much about these topics? Of course you are an expert, both by university education and by autodidactical reading, on Ancient Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean in general, but how did you find the references to for example cave paintings and the Rigveda? Did you look it up for answering this question or did you know it beforehand?
I originally learned about the Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel in an anthropology course I took the first semester of my freshman year of university that was titled “Becoming Human.” For the most part, it was a physical anthropology course about human evolution. Toward the end of the semester, though, the professor taught us about how early anatomically modern humans began developing more complex art and culture. She taught us about the Löwenmensch and showed a photo of it as one of the earliest surviving undisputed examples of figurative art. Naturally, I researched the figure again before writing about it.
I believe the professor in that course also briefly taught us about the “Venus” figurines, but I already knew about them long before that because I had read about them on my own many years previously. Naturally, I made sure to do a little bit of research on them and include them in my post.
I first learned about the “Sorcerer” cave painting through some documentary I watched probably at least ten years ago now when I was in late elementary or middle school that was about cave paintings. I cannot remember the name of the documentary and, honestly, the main thing that I remember is that I found most of it fairly boring at the time, but they talked about the “Sorcerer” and I found that part fascinating, so it is one of the few parts of the documentary that have actually stuck with me. Again, I made sure to research it before I wrote this post and, in the course of researching it, I found out about the “Dancing Shaman” painting from the same cave.
I already knew about Çatalhöyük from having read about it somewhere many years ago, but, of course, I looked up the information about it to make sure I got all my facts right. I also already knew quite a lot about the controversy surrounding the “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük,” mainly because I am writing my honors thesis about the Galloi, who were devotees of Kybele, and, in the process of researching the thesis, I read Lynn E. Roller’s book In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Roller devotes an entire chapter of her book to the discussion of possible prehistoric evidence for the cult of Kybele, in which she discusses the “Seated Woman” statuette in some detail.
I found references to all the verses in the Ṛgveda that I cite in the post above in M. L. West’s book Proto-Indo-European Poetry and Myth. As you may have noticed, I cite that book several times. I did, of course, look up every passage that I cite before citing it to make sure West’s references were correct.
Now that you explain it, I think we are quite similar in some ways (I also have a lot of odd pieces of knowledge I have read somewhere on my own), but you are certainly much more educated than me. I hope your thesis about the Galli is going well (though I guess it is nigh finished by now?), I am myself writing a small paper on Bagoas the Younger in Curtius’ biography of Alexander. Thank you!
Yes, my thesis is going well! I’m planning to submit it sometime before Saturday night.
“The most solidly reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deity is *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr, whose name means “Sky Father” and seems to have been regarded as the god of the daylit sky.”
I’m curious, does the Indian word “Devas”, used to refer to a group of deities, have the same etymology as Dyeus?
Yes! It does actually! The Hittite word sius, the Sanskrit word devá, the Avestan word daēva-, the Latin word deus, and the Lithuanian word diẽvas all come from the same Proto-Indo-European word *deiwós, meaning “deity,” which comes from the older Proto-Indo-European root *dyeu-, meaning “daytime sky,” which is the same root that makes the first part of *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr‘s name.
Information like that in this essay is one reason Evangelicals oppose education over their indoctrination.
It also shows that cats have been at least semi-divine pretty much since day 1.
This was such an interesting article Spence! As an atheist myself, I find the origin of the concept of god fascinating. But just out of curiosity, how do you personally think that the concept of god originated. Do you think people made it up, or just tried to understand the world but couldn’t because science at least, modern science didn’t exist in the Stone Age. Personally, I think it’s kind of both, but I’m leaning towards the latter.
Regarding the purpose of the Venus statuettes, I’m amazed about why scholars overlook what it’s pretty obvious to me: overly-sexualized, anonymous representations of women are porn. These figurines are portable, primitive pieces of porn.
I personally think it is very unlikely that the “Venus” figurines were purely pornography with no religious purpose. For one thing, as I have noted in the article above, people kept making “Venus” figurines following more-or-less the exact same pattern for many thousands of years.
In general, porn demands novelty. Generally speaking, people who want erotic images they can get off to are constantly looking for new and different things; they want new images of people with different kinds of hot body types in different positions, often participating in different kinds of sex acts. If we imagine the “Venus” figurines as Paleolithic porn, then we must imagine that people were exclusively getting off to more-or-less the same image of a woman with the same body type and general appearance in the exact same position, reproduced hundreds if not thousands of times with little fundamental variation, for thousands of years.
Ritual, by contrast, demands sameness. If a statuette with a certain iconography has some important religious or ritual purpose, then humans will reproduce that iconography again and again for thousands of years. This strongly suggests to me that the iconography of the “Venus” figurines held religious or ritual significance for Upper Paleolithic Europeans.
Of course, I suppose there is always the possibility that the “Venus” figurines are both ritual objects and porn, in some sense. I could easily imagine an Upper Paleolithic ritual in which someone is expected to masturbate to a specific sacred image to promote fertility or something.
Well said Spencer.
If you ‘d allow me, I ‘d like to add that pornography is based on the desire to see something that is otherwise forbidden.
For the ancient non-abrahamic religious people, images of nakedness and even the explicit sexual act are not of the forbidden but of the desirable and necessary in the pursuit of happiness.
The countless vase paintings of the greeks and romans as well as the very explicit sculptures (or the Kama Sutra text) of south-eastt temples are definitely not pornography.
Africans were going about naked until the european missionaries got to them, so did south east asians even under islam.
As I ‘ve said before, one must not see the past under the distorting lights of present day, often very distorting religious/moral/etc comcepts.
This is completely off topic, but could you do some debunking against Lloyd DeMause?
Specifically his takes on ancient Mediterranean and medieval cultures?
For reference, the guy has a hyper-Whiggish philosophy and view on what history was like that makes Steven Pinker look positively moderate by comparison. Unlike Pinker however, everything he has ever written is available for free online, meaning he could very well end up being much more influential if he ever gets a lot of positive exposure for whatever reason.
Considering DeMause’s most prominent ideological postulate is the idea that child abuse has been the driving force behind all hitherto existing history, it’s only a matter of time before the Pizza-Gate type people discover and popularize him.
Like seriously, if Pinker is a Whig coca-leaf, DeMause is highly concentrated crack cocaine cut with battery acid.
I am under the impression that McCoid and McDermott did not mean to imply that Palaeolithic women were carving the “venus” figurines with these proportions because they could not see their faces or the bodies of other women and they were looking only at themselves but they were carving them this way because they had the conscious intention to represent the female body the way the woman who would wear or hold the figurine would see her own body, that is they wanted to create a “personal” talisman. The reason the hands are small and the vulva is exaggerated as you mention was because the figurines (if we follow that line of though) were symbols of fertility (or whatever) AND personal talismans at the same time (hence the top down point of view). Of course this whole assumption is just an assumption but I write this just to clarify that McCoid and McDermott did not say or imply that the creators of the figurines had no knowledge of the female body or face in general.