Page 204 - A Historical Lie: The Stone Age

A HISTORICAL LIE: THE STONE AGE

In addition to their more tangible results, our excavations have estab-
lished a novel fact, which the student of Babylonian religions will have
henceforth to take into account. We have obtained, to the best of our
knowledge for the first time, religious material complete in its social
setting.

We possess a coherent mass of evidence, derived in almost equal
quantity from a temple and from the houses inhabited by those who
worshiped in that temple. We are thus able to draw conclusions,
which the finds studied by themselves would not have made possible.

For instance, we discover that the representations on cylinder seals,
which are usually connected with various gods, can all be fitted into a
consistent picture in which a single god worshiped in this temple
forms the central figure. It seems, therefore, that at this early period
his various aspects were not considered separate deities in the
Sumero-Accadian pantheon. 75

Frankfort's discoveries reveal very important facts about how a
superstitious, polytheist system comes into being. The theory of the
evolution of religions claims that polytheism arose when people
started to worship evil spirits representing the
powers of nature. But it was not so. In the
course of time, people developed differ-
ent understandings of the various at-
tributes of the one God, which
eventually led to distortions in belief
in one God. The various attributes of

When Sumerian tablets were trans-
lated, it emerged that the large number
of false deities in the Babylonian pan-
theon emerged as a result of the grad-
ual misinterpretation of the various
names and titles of a single Deity.

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