These ostensibly disparate movements had much in common. Suffering and death are central concerns. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that all devise methods for transcending suffering and death. Such transcendence, whether in this world or life or the next, becomes an ethical matter and moral issue.

Why did these related ideas appear in several places in such short order? Because these traditions arose in widely disparate places and originated among people who were not in contact with one another, we know it was not a matter of cultural diffusion or idea migration. There are several competing (and complementary) hypotheses, most of which revolve around change, dislocation, and anomie.

The few thousands of years preceding the Axial Age were an especially turbulent time in human history; warfare, urbanization, disease, and famine were operating full-tilt and on a scale never before seen. People everywhere were at a loss and legitimacy was in short supply. Under such conditions, it would be surprising if something like the Axial movements did not appear. During times of immense and protracted crisis, intellectuals will often generate new and paradigm shifting ideas.

But before such breakthroughs can occur, the ground must be prepared. Although Axial movements were innovative, they did not simply appear sua sponte. To the extent they were reformist or reactionary, they were backward looking and dependent on the past for comparative appeal. In “Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns,” renowned ancient historian Thorkild Jacobsen summarizes that past by dividing it into three thematic and millennial epochs:

Fourth Millennium BCE — Famine

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

The fear at the very roots of existence that long ago, down through the fourth millennium, gave to the religious response in Mesopotamia its major direction would seem to have been a simple one: fear of starvation. Early Mesopotamian economy was unquestionably a remarkable achievement, able for the first time to provide sufficient food so that large numbers of humans could congregate in cities. But it was also a precarious and uncertain economy, for it was based on artificial irrigation, the most touchy and tricky basis imaginable, nervously reacting to vagaries of nature and man alike.

And the character of their religion as we know it bears this out. The powers to whom they turned were powers in and behind their primary economics on which life depended: fishing, herding, agriculture, as even the briefest look at the character of the chief gods of their cities will show. [T]heir cults were to insure the presence of these essential powers for fertility, produce, and food.

Third Millenium BCE — War

“Preserve Us From Evil”

As the settled areas of the country grew and joined, the protection that had been afforded by relative isolation was no longer there and fear of enemy attack, death or slavery, became a part of life ever present in the depth of consciousness. The intensity of the danger and of the fear it engendered can be gauged by the great city-walls that arose around the towns in this period and the staggering amount of labor that must have gone into them.

For a shield against danger men looked to the now vitally important institutions of collective security, the great leagues and their officers, and particularly to the new institution of kingship as it took form and grew under the pressures of these years. The new concept opening up, as it did, a possibility of approach to the element of majesty in the divine, was early applied to the gods and it profoundly influenced the religious outlook. The gods, seen as kings and rulers, were no longer powers in nature only, they became powers in human affairs — in history.

Second Millennium BCE — Guilt

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses”

[W]ith the beginning second millennium the personal fortunes of the individual worshiper, his fears of personal misfortune, anxieties in illness and suffering, begin to be voiced adding a personal dimension to the relation with the divine. [Because of famine and war, it appears this personal] god has abandoned the worshiper and lost interest in him. He realizes that the blame lies with himself-pleading, however, that no man is perfect and asks to be shown his faults, his transgressions, that he may confess them before his god and be forgiven. And the god is moved by his contrition and takes him back into favor.

There is here the beginnings of a searching of the heart: the insight gained in the preceding millennium that the divine stands for, and upholds, a moral law is now bearing fruit in a realization of individual human responsibility, but also of innate human inability to live up to that responsibility. [T]he question of man’s acceptability before his god — the problem of the righteous sufferer — led on to realization of man’s finiteness and the altogether finite character of his insights and his moral judgments.

During the first millennium BCE Mesopotamian religions stagnated, perhaps because for thousands of years they had always been concerned with that which was immanent or present in this world. If the divine was present in the world, few (other than the rich and powerful) seemed to be feeling it. It was time for something new. The stage was thus set for Axial transcendence.

References:

Strathern, Alan (2009). Karen Armstrong’s Axial Age: Origins and Ethics The Heythrop Journal, 50 (2), 293-299 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00413.x

Jacobsen, Thorkild (1963). Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107 (6), 473-484

This, I suspect, is about as much as most people know about Mesopotamian religion. It certainly constituted the extent of my knowledge through the 1980s. But do we have good reason to learn more (e.g., that Gozer is a fictitious Mesopotamian deity)? If we heed Professor Alan Lenzi, the answer is yes.

In “Dead Religion and Contemporary Perspectives: Commending Mesopotamian Data to the Religious Studies Classroom,” Lenzi makes a compelling case for the study of Mesopotamian religion. He begins with a simple observation: religious people are reluctant to think about their religion in historical terms. Although all religions have histories, considering them in the context of human affairs is inevitably corrosive. Many resist.

We can overcome this resistance, at least in theory, by using “dead” religions to cast light on “living” ones. The past can be used to illuminate and think critically about the present. In his classroom, Lenzi uses Mesopotamian religion to illustrate three concepts applicable to all religions: (1) the social and cultural embeddedness of religion, (2) the role of mythmaking in politico-religious ideology, and (3) the insider versus outsider perspective.

Lenzi demonstrates the social and cultural embeddedness of Mesopotamian religion (and by extension, all religions) by discussing changing conceptions of deity:

The earliest form of Mesopotamian religion indicates that the people of this region imagined their gods as elements of the natural world. As human security increased against the forces of the natural world via technology (e.g., agricultural surplus) and as social organization was increasingly centralized around human leaders in order to protect society against threats from other humans, the gods began to be conceived in anthropomorphic terms and were given positions within a divine, cosmic government.

In other words, people’s ideas about the divine powers of the universe began to reflect the new configuration of human political powers in society. It is no surprise, therefore, to learn that about the time the human institution of kingship was created so too was the notion of the kingship of the gods.

Lenzi illustrates the second point with a discussion of the most widespread cultic celebration in Mesopotamia: the Akitu or New Year’s Festival. In its earliest form, the myth celebrated the Babylonian national god’s defeat of of Tiamat, a Gozer-like god who embodied the forces of chaos. When Assyria defeated Babylon, the myth was revised:

[Assyrian king] Sennacherib implemented an Akitu festival in his own capital city after he destroyed the city of Babylon in 689 BCE and replaced the Babylonian god Marduk, who was central to the Akitu in Babylon, with Assyria’s supreme god, Ashur.

In order to maintain continuity with the tradition, Sennacherib decided to create a new Akitu festival with a new divine hero. Moreover—and this is probably the real intention of the Assyrian Akitu—holding the Akitu in the Assyrian capital would exalt Assyria’s position to that of a New Babylon. Thus, the re-tooling of a traditional myth supported a political program.

Lenzi’s final point is that people who profess belief in a particular faith privilege their own views while denigrating conceptually identical views from other traditions. He presents students with Mesopotamian prophetic proclamations which purport to be divine messages, and then asks if they believe the Mesopotamian deity actually spoke those words. Of course none do (Gozer is after all a fictitious deity) but it forces them to think critically about prophetic texts and divine sayings from all religions.

These pedagogical points are well-taken. We can study Gozer, in other words, to learn about religion more generally. Or as Lenzi puts it:

Religion is fully entrenched in human activity; it is a product of human beings. As such, any particular religious activity or system may begin, evolve, develop, and cease like any other human phenomenon. [O]ne may study religion without the invocation of supernatural forces, revelation, or other ideas that privilege a particular view and place it outside the realm of human scrutiny and verification.

Reference:

Lenzi, A. (2007). Dead Religion and Contemporary Perspectives: Commending Mesopotamian Data to the Religious Studies Classroom Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 19 (1), 121-133 DOI: 10.1163/157006807X222550

In a recent (open access) paper, “Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies,” Sergey Gavrilets and colleagues mathematically modeled early complex societies using a number of variables that could affect the rise, fall, and duration of such societies. They predicted relatively rapid and “continuous stochastic cycling,” which is a polite way of saying there was much tumultuous (and bloody) change as early complex societies warred with one another for dominance. The model confirmed their predictions and identified two variables that were especially important: (1) the wealth/power of a given society, and (2) the chief’s expected time in power. From this, the authors concluded:

Our results demonstrate that the stability of large and complex polities is strongly promoted if the outcomes of the conflicts are mostly determined by the polities’ wealth/power, if there exist well-defined and accepted means of succession, and if control mechanisms are internally specialized.

The importance of succession and internal control mechanisms are of special interest because religion can be used to legitimate both succession and control. In fact, this is precisely what happened in early complex societies and was perhaps the raison d’etre for the earliest forms of organized religions. Before the rise of complex societies (i.e., before the Neolithic Revolution or agricultural transition), the primary form of supernaturalism was shamanic — individualized, fluid, and largely without rite or doctrine. As such, shamanic forms of supernaturalism do not lend themselves to the maintenance of power by elites. To justify stratification and dominance, something more systematic was needed.

The earliest forms of organized religion provided these justifications. Rulers and their kin were associated with deities or were themselves deities. The emergence of complex societies was accompanied by the emergence of a priestly class, usually comprised of the rulers and their kin or closely allied with them. Social complexity and religious complexity were tightly linked, one being essential for the other.

We know for a fact that the earliest complex societies  or city-states in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica developed in precisely this way. The newly emerged elite claimed supernatural sanction, and monopolized supernaturalism by developing the earliest organized religions. These were, of course, state religions that attempted to manage the critical issues of ruler succession and internal control. As Gavrilets and colleagues observe in their paper:

Creating and maintaining complex polities thus requires effective mechanisms to deal with both internal and external threats. In both cases, leaders (paramount chiefs) must solve collective action problems to overcome challenges.

What better way to solve collective action problems than to develop, organize, and promote a religion that serves the leaders’ and elites’ interests? The chief either has exclusive access to the gods or is a god; as such, the chief is the provider and protector. The chief’s children are successors and similar: their divine access or status supposedly guarantees future provisioning and protection.

It is a tidy arrangement for so long as it lasts. The problem apparently is that rarely lasts very long — it seems that lots of people and competing polities had the same ideas!

Reference:

Gavrilets, Sergey, Anderson, David G., & Turchin, Peter (2010). Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History, 1 (1), 59-80 : http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5536t55r

With this in mind, Hultkrantz suggests that we might find clues to First American supernaturalism by examining the supernatural beliefs and practices of extant Siberian hunter-gatherers — those who did not make the crossing and are genetically related to those who did (i.e., all Amerindians).  This has of course been done, and the considerable ethnographic materials have been ably synthesized by Mircea Eliade and Piers Vitebsky.  What emerges is a distinct shamanic complex that, while having parallels to shamanic practices in the Americas, also has unique characteristics not usually found in the New World.

Several obvious questions arise from this line of investigation.  Is the prototypical Siberian shamanic complex — typified by intense personal breakdowns during initiation and subsequent soul flights that are extremely dangerous — representative of the First Americans’ beliefs and practices at the time of their initial arrival (which we now know was much earlier than 12,500 years ago)?  Did those beliefs and practices morph into something different upon their arrival and dispersion throughout the Americas?

The answer to the first question is that it is unwise to assume that recent or extant Siberian shamanisms have remained static over the past 15,000 years or so.  Although shamanic complexes can be found throughout the world and described in very general terms, a primary characteristic of shamanic practice is fluidity — ideas come and go with individual shamans.  This means, of course, that any attempt to describe an essential or ideal form of shamanism — or to speak of “shamanism” in the singular — is doomed to failure; the materials are too disparate and change too often.

This essentially answers the second question: there can be little doubt that distinctive shamanic complexes arose and died out in the Americas after the arrival of the first immigrants.  Hultkrantz finds it intriguing — as do I, that the shamanic practices most closely resembling those in Siberia (i.e., intense personality breakdowns and dangerous soul flights) are most often found in South America and rarely seen in North America.  What might account for this fact?

One possible answer is that some groups in South America never became agriculturalists and that perhaps all groups in North America, at one time or another, practiced some form of agriculture and some of those groups later returned to a hunting and gathering way of life.  This is particularly true of the Plains Indians, nearly all of whom dispersed onto the Great Plains as horses became more widely available.

The areas from which many of them came — the Great Lakes regions and the eastern Woodlands, clearly were agricultural and heirs to the Mississippian mound building traditions.  This means, of course, that we cannot simply look at Plains Indians as pristine hunter-gatherers whose supernatural beliefs and practices hearken back — in a straight line of conceptual descent — to the shamanic complexes of the earliest Amerindians.

Another suggestion sprinkled throughout Hultkrantz’s book is that something like a “high god concept” was found among North and South Amerindians upon contact by Europeans, and that this idea might have originated in Mesopotamia, spread to Eurasia and Siberia, and then accompanied the earliest arrivals to the Americas.  I find this suggestion of “high god diffusion” untenable.

First, it is undisputed that the earliest migratory pulse into the Americas occurred earlier than 12,500 years ago.  In his classic article on the Peopling of North America, David Meltzer discusses the Monte Verde site in Chile which is firmly dated to 12,500 years ago.  Given the incredible distance from Siberia to Monte Verde — 10,000 miles — it is obvious that the First Americans arrived much earlier, perhaps 15,000 to 18,000 years ago.  In accordance with this thinking, most archaeologists now accept that the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania dates to 16,000 years ago.

At this time in Mesopotamia (i.e., 15,000-18,000 years ago), we have no evidence that anyone had made the transition to agriculture or that the hunting and gathering peoples in the area harbored beliefs in a high god.  The earliest evidence of high gods comes only after the domestication of plants and animals (i.e., the Neolithic Revolution) and the establishment of the first city-states in Sumer, some 6,500 years ago.  By this time, the Americas were completely occupied and any notions of high gods that developed did so independently of anything which occurred in the Old World.

The only diffusion of high god concepts from the Old World to the New came with European contact.  Anxious to discover that even “primitive peoples” perceived the reality of a high god — in other words, that the Christian God was universal — our earliest informants (usually soldiers, missionaries, and explorers) queried the natives in what lawyers would object to as leading fashion.  By the time more neutral chroniclers arrived to document native beliefs, European ideas about a high god had spread far and wide among Amerindians, many of whom could easily accommodate and confirm the cherished and fictitious notion of an Urmonotheismus.

Furthermore, fish from sites exposed to the ceremony had a significantly higher tolerance. Consequently, the annual ceremony may not only affect population structure and gene flow among habitat types, but the increased tolerance in exposed fish may indicate adaptation to human cultural practices in a natural population on a very small spatial scale.

These results parallel those from another recent study, appearing in the journal Evolution, which found a strong correlation between urbanization history and human pathogen resistance:

A link between urban living and disease is seen in recent and historical records, but the presence of this association in prehistory has been difficult to assess. If the transition to urbanisation does result in an increase in disease-based mortality, we might expect to see evidence of increased disease resistance in longer-term urbanised populations, as the result of natural selection. To test this, we determined the frequency of an allele associated with natural resistance to pathogens such as tuberculosis and leprosy.

We found a highly significantly correlation with duration of urban settlement – populations with a long history of living in towns are better adapted to resisting these infections. Our results therefore support the interpretation that infectious disease loads became an increasingly important cause of human mortality after the advent of urbanisation.

Because the oldest urban environments arose in conjunction with the earliest forms of organized religions, we might expect certain religious groups to have higher pathogen resistance.  But alas, these early religions — from Mesopotamia and Egypt — are no longer practiced or have been swamped by newer religions, making any such study impossible.

One thing is certain, the hunting and gathering groups who resisted urbanization (and its concomitant, agriculture) largely lacked resistance to many kinds of pathogens and paid a horrendous price for it.

“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

Science and religion — neither of which exist as entities that have agency (i.e., they are abstract concepts) — are not in a contest.  Therefore, neither science nor religion can “win” anything.

What Sawyer should have asked was whether positivist inquiry can explain or account for religion.  What Hawking should have said is: “Yes.  We are already able to explain the brain-mind functions that result in supernatural thinking.  Humans have created bodies of belief and practice — which today we call religion — that depend on these brain-mind functions.”  Neither Sawyer nor Hawking seems to understand that science and history, working together, are largely capable of explaining religion.

With this in mind, let us look at this excerpt from Heussner’s report:

“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

Here is where Hawking’s ignorance of religious history comes into play.  Not all peoples at all times have conceived of a singular God who is human-like.  In fact, we can trace the genealogy of this idea or particular concept of God.

Few if any hunter-gatherers or foragers believe in anthropomorphic or human-like gods and spirits.  Instead, they tend to perceive the entire world and everything in it as being animated by spirit or spirits.  Because all humans were hunter-gatherers until approximately 10,000 years ago, it is fairly safe to assume that anthropomorphic gods-spirits are a more recent development.  And indeed, we find this to be the case.

The idea of anthropomorphic or human-like gods originates in the earliest city-states located in Mesopotamia and the Levant.  This was no accident.  The elites and rulers of those city-states found it useful to conceive of gods in human terms — the earliest theologians (who always served earthly kings and rulers) reasoned that the earthly order was a reflection of the spiritual order.  Because there were kings and rulers on earth, there must be kings and rulers in the spirit realm.  And because kings and rulers on earth were humans, they thought that the kings and rulers of the spirit world must be like humans.

It was in this milieu that some groups, the Hebrews in particular, began to conceive of a high god who ruled over other gods.  The Babylonians had a similar idea about the supremacy of their high god.  Over time, the Hebrews extended this idea and began to claim that there was only one God whose name was Yahweh.  For those interested in this history and progression, I recommend Roy Rosenberg’s superb article, “Yahweh Becomes King.”

In the meantime, it would be helpful if physicists kept their mystical and religious ideas to themselves.  They always seem to be commenting on things that have nothing to do with space, time, and the cosmos.

The first recorded reference to sodomy, however, comes from the Assyrian Empire (circa 1500 BCE), where we find a fragmentary cuneiform inscription prohibiting sodomy among or between Assyrian soldiers.  This prohibition applied only to the military and was not stated in moral or religious terms.  Although the reasons for this regulation are unknown, we know that in Assyrian society at large there was no prohibition against homosexuality and it was widely accepted — as it was in all other Mesopotamian city-states.

Given the widespread acceptance and practice of homosexuality in the ancient Levant and elsewhere in Mesopotamia, what might account for the Hebrew treatment of homosexuality as a “sin against God”?  Why did they make this a moral and religious issue?

The answer probably stems from the fact that the Hebrews always were a smaller group buffeted by the large-scale societies and empires that were continually warring with one another throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt.  It is of course well-known that the Hebrews suffered several catastrophic military defeats, some of which ended in enslavement (the Egyptian and Babylonian captivities) and some of which resulted in loss of lands and emigration (the famous “Lost Tribes of Judah” and Jewish diaspora).

In this setting, the Jewish-Hebrew tribes would have been demographically challenged — they needed more tribe members to defend themselves and war for territory.  This challenge would have led to an emphasis on fertility and procreation — two things not often associated with homosexuality.  Making sodomy a sin and prohibiting homosexuality would have served these procreative goals and the interests of the group.

Early Christianity suffered under similar circumstances: Christians were small in number and heavily persecuted.  Adopting the Jewish prohibition against homosexuality, treating sodomy as a sin, and encouraging marriage-based reproduction served the interests of small Christian communities.  Increasing group size through reproduction is often an effective method of defense, and creating laws and rituals encouraging reproduction is one way of accomplishing this goal.

In more recent times, we see a similar example among the Mormons — who are famous for encouraging marriage (often plural) and having large families.  The Mormons also suffered from heavy persecution during their early history, and one way of increasing their group size was to do so through reproduction.  It was, over time, a highly effective strategy.

Religious laws and ritual regulations often have a basis in social ecology, a fact well demonstrated by Marvin Harris in his studies of the sacred cow of India and the Jewish-Muslim proscription on pork eating.  Michael Harner made a similar showing regarding Aztec ritual sacrifice.  Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner treated this issue at length in their book, The Social Ecology of Religion.

These killings have a purpose, but one that did not emerge until after Ngogo chimps’ patrols had been tracked and cataloged for 10 years. The Ngogo group has about 150 chimps and is particularly large, about three times the usual size. And its size makes it unusually aggressive. Its males directed most of their patrols against a chimp group that lived in a region to the northeast of their territory. Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped patrolling the region and annexed it outright, increasing their home territory by 22 percent.

The Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, continues with an interesting observation and comparison:

Warfare among human groups that still live by hunting and gathering resembles chimp warfare in several ways. Foragers emphasize raids and ambushes in which few people are killed, yet casualties can mount up with incessant skirmishes.

Why do chimps incur the risk and time costs of patrolling into enemy territory when the advantage accrues most evidently to the group? Dr. Mitani invokes the idea of group-level selection — the idea that natural selection can work on groups and favor behaviors, like altruism and cooperation, that benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Selection usually depends only on whether an individual, not a group, leaves more surviving children.

Many biologists are skeptical of group-level selection, saying it could be effective only in cases where there is intense warfare between groups, a reduced rate of selection on individuals, and little interchange of genes between groups.

Although Wade is not a biologist, he is not skeptical of group level selection — indeed, he is an ardent advocate.  In his recent book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures, Wade contends that religion was an adaptation specifically targeted by selection because it made groups more cohesive and cooperative.  This, in turn, enabled religious groups to better compete against other groups.  A major aspect of this enhanced ability to compete, so the argument goes, is that religious groups are better able to war against non-religious groups.  Wade is not alone in believing this; the anthropologist David Sloan Wilson and evolutionary psychologist Matt Rossano make similar arguments.

The recent chimp study — “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees” — bears on this hypothesis.  The aggressive Kibale group is exceptionally large because it occupies particularly fertile territory.  This fertile territory sustains larger numbers of chimps, who in turn cooperate and use this numerical advantage to further enlarge their territory.  No one has ever suggested that chimps are spiritual or religious, so these activities — cooperation and warfare — are not being driven by these abstractions.  Kinship is the primary factor holding the males of these groups together, and which causes them to cooperate.

This is quite similar to the ethnohistoric situation on the Great Plains.  From 1680 to 1880, Plains Indian tribes such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa-Apache, Shoshoni, Blackfoot, Cree, Gros Ventre, Flathead, and Sarsi constantly warred against one another for territory, horses, and booty.  These hunting and gathering groups were held together first and foremost by extended kinship ties; shamans neither organized nor lead war parties.  These tribes neither invoked nor relied on religious differences as a justification for war or raiding.  In fact, it would have been impossible to do so given that these tribes had substantially similar types of beliefs and rituals.  The most successful of these tribes — the Lakota — enlarged their numbers and expanded their territory not because they were more spiritual or religious than the other tribes, or had more effective group rituals.  Instead, they had various material, geographic, and economic advantages which enabled them to succeed.

This is not to say that in certain places and at certain times some groups used religion to bind them together and justify war.  It occurred many times and in many places, but this is fairly recent behavior that corresponds to the rise of the first city-states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Near East.  Because this is modern behavior that is the product of rulers and elites marrying religion to power, I cannot see how it has anything to do with the evolutionary origins of religion.

The first distinctively Sumerian villages and small cities appeared around 4,500 BCE.  At lower stratigraphic levels (i.e., before 4,500 BCE), archaeologists have discovered evidence of smaller-scale agricultural communities known generally as the Ubaidian (we do not know what they called themselves because they did not yet have writing).

As these small settlements grew or were conquered by outsiders, they eventually acquired their Sumerian characteristics.  By 3,500 BCE, several Sumerian villages had grown into city-states with populations in the tens of thousands; these city-states began building the first monumental architecture, usually in the form of ziggurats that were part temple complexes and part royal quarters.  These were impressive structures:

The Sumerians were the authors of many “firsts.”  They were the first to engage in large-scale irrigation agriculture; the first to live in populous urban settings that we call city-states; the first to develop stratified societies with specialized occupations; the first to organize and maintain standing armies; the first to develop mathematics and writing; the first to propagate laws and formulate the concept of property.  They were also the first to engage in systematic and organized spiritual practices that fit the definition of what we today call “religion.”

This latter point is critical to the historian of religion.  As Samuel Noah Kramer (1963:112) observed in his classic The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character:

In the course of the third millenium B.C., the Sumerians developed religious ideas and spiritual concepts which have left an indelible impress on the modern world, especially by way of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  On the intellectual level Sumerian thinkers and sages, as a result of their their speculations on the origin and nature of the universe and its modus operandi, developed a cosmology and theology which carried such high conviction that they became the basic creed and dogma of much of the ancient near East.

One can, in other words, find much of Sumerian religion in all near eastern religions that followed: Akkadian, Babylonian, Judaic, Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.  None of these religions sprouted sui generis from new revelations or prophets — all simply built upon and revised the Sumerians’ original formulations.

Sumerian theologians and priests developed several concepts that became key components of these later religions.  First, they conceived of the gods in anthropomorphic terms — the gods were like humans but divine.  Second, the cosmological or heavenly order was modeled on the earthly order.  Here I paraphrase Kramer:

Sumerian theologians took their cue from human society as they knew it and reasoned from the known to the unknown.  They noted that lands and cities, and palaces and temples, fields and farms — in short, all imaginable institutions and enterprises — are tended and supervised, guided and controlled by living human beings; without them lands and cities became desolate, temples and palaces crumbled, fields and farms turned to desert and wilderness.  Surely, therefore, the cosmos and all its manifold phenomena must also be tended and supervised, guided and controlled by living beings in human form.

Then, too, on the analogy with the political organization of the Sumerian city-state, it was natural to assume that at the head of of the pantheon was a deity recognized by all the others as their king and ruler.

As for the technique of creation attributed to these deities, Sumerian theologians developed a doctrine which became dogma throughout the Near East, the doctrine of creative power of the divine word.  All that the creating deity had to do, according to this doctrine, was to lay the plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.

Although the Sumerians were polytheistic and had a pantheon of deities, there were already hints of an emergent monotheism:

The four most important deities were the heaven-god An, the air-god Enlil, the water-god Enki, and the great mother goddess Ninhursag.  By far the most important deity in the Sumerian pantheon, one who played a dominant role throughout Sumer in rite, myth, and prayer, was the air-god Enlil.

In addition to the idea of human-like deities who interacted with people and responded to supplication or prayer, the Sumerians developed elaborate doctrines, rites, myths, creeds, and temples.  I will be discussing these in future posts which will clearly demonstrate the profound and enduring influence Sumerian religion had on later developing faiths that today are known as “world religions.”

This what prompted me to buy and read Samuel Noah Kramer’s The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character.  Suffice it to say that 125 years of Sumerian archaeology has not revealed any alien technology or evidence of alien contact, and the pre-Sumerian culture sequence is just what one would expect.  Smaller agrarian villages that constitute a culture known to archaeologists as the Ubaidians preceded the rise of Sumerian city-states.  In this post, I reviewed Sumerian religion — which was entirely anthropomorphic, highly organized, and in many ways foreshadowed future organized religions, including the monotheistic ones.  It does not appear to be “alien” in any way.

I mention all this because last night, I watched two separate programs on the History Channel, each two hours in length, addressing the possibility that contact with ancient astronauts (this is the “fourth” kind of contact as the schema goes) contributed to the rise of complex societies across the world, and that this contact resulted in advanced technologies and megalithic structures.  Proponents of this idea also assert that humans mistook these ancient astronauts for gods, and that many religions originated from this contact and are reflected in various creation myths.

I have to admit that all this makes for fascinating (and sometimes thought provoking) story telling.  Although there are many holes in the ancient astronaut hypotheses, I do think that archaeologists as a whole need to do a better job explaining culture sequences, culture similarities, and admitting there are certain things we simply do not understand.  Of the many examples proffered during the two programs last night, I was particularly intrigued by these items:

• The precisely scored granite drill found in the Great Pyramid at Giza — modern machinists and stone workers have not been able to create a similar drill without using diamond-carbide machine technology.
• The large, long cuts in granite blocks found in Egypt; these cuts are perfectly straight and of even depth, suggesting that the Egyptians were using large saws and diamond-based technology.

Neither of these items, however, requires belief in ancient astronauts.  It simply means that archaeologists have yet to find the tools responsible for these items and should be looking for them.

Other intriguing pieces of ancient astronaut “evidence” include the Piri Reis map and the sarcophagus lid of Pakal the Great (the Mayan god-king of Palenque), which supposedly depicts him in an astronaut suit and space capsule.  You be the judge:

The final items of interest include the descriptions of flying machines described in the ancient Sanskrit Vedic literature.  These supposed “rockets” are called Vimanas.  If such machines existed, surely they would have left archaeological traces.  To date, no traces have been found.  The same can be said of the old Columbian gold carvings which appear to depict modern jets; these may actually depict flying fish.

As I was watching these shows last night with a friend, I commented that if all this is true and that fourth kind contact with alien astronauts accounts for the origins of early modern religions, my dissertation and book will become considerably shorter.  The genealogy becomes quite simple: (1) the evolution of a mind prone to supernaturalism; (2) a shamanic phase associated with hunting-gathering; and (3) the modern religions which arose from humans mistaking aliens for gods.   I am sure my committee would be impressed.

While simple explanations have great appeal and are quite useful to science, simple explanations that invoke the extraordinary require a good deal of evidence.  I find it curious that these ancient astronauts left behind so little of their technology and that archaeologists across the world have not discovered more evidence of their existence and presence.