Between 800 and 200 BCE, a remarkable series of sages, mystics, and thinkers gave rise to the transcendental traditions that are known today as “world religions.” In 1949, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers identified several themes common to these traditions and described this six hundred year period as the Axial Age: “These movements were ‘axial’ [...]
Tags:Akkadia·Alan Strathern·Assyria·axial age·Buddha·Confucius·Daoism·death·ethics·Hinduism·immanence·Jainism·Jaspers·Judaism·Karen Armstrong·Karl·Mesopotamia·monotheism·morals·Plato·Platonism·Socrates·suffering·Sumerian·Thorkild Jacobsen·transcendence·world rejection
There was a time when Western classicists and metaphysicians searched high and low for the primordial or original religion: Ur-monotheismus. The thinking was that the original religion was monotheistic and that all non-monotheistic religions had degenerated from the pristine original.
This is of course precisely backwards but it has not stopped the search. While Ur-religionists chase [...]
Tags:Abraham·monotheism·original religion·polytheism·primordial religion·Sumerian·Ur·Urmonotheismus·ziggurat
It was with great sadness that I read a recent article in the New York Times documenting the pillaging and destruction of Mesopotamian archaeological sites in Iraq. Although these Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian sites — and previous excavations — receive scant attention outside small groups of antiquities scholars, they are of critical importance to our [...]
Tags:Akkad·Akkadian·anthropomorphic deities·anthropomorphism·Babylon·Babylonian·Christianity·city-states·cosmology·earliest religion·Enlil·heavenly order·Iraq·Islam·Judaic·Judaism·Mesopotamia·Mesopotamian·monotheism·Muslim·polytheism·Samuel Noah Kramer·Sumer·Sumerian·Sumerian pantheon·temples·The Sumerians·Ubaid·Ubaidian·Ur·ziggurats
