Egyptian CultureIncludes Religionby Bill Lazarus |
The Sumerians believed all living creations arose from the sea, an idea supported by scientists today. They also thought people were created by gods who looked human. Sumerians assigned their gods to thunder, lightning, earthquakes and other natural events. They built temples to them and named patron gods to the various cities in their countries. Some of their stepped temples, called ziggurats, still survive. Their societies featured people devoted to their religion, priests who cared for the religious buildings, made sure proper human and animal sacrifices were made, and collected donations from worshippers. Some of our earliest surviving records, now about 6,000 years old, report how much was tithed to a particular temple. In fact, priests may have been at least partly responsible for the development of written communication. |
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In the previous newsletter, we saw how religion branched away from magic. Magic is great -- when it works. However, cultural leaders quickly realized that magic had its drawbacks. Magic had to work to guarantee crops flourished, the rains came and that the people prospered. When it didn't, the leaders were in trouble. So they began to seek a different solution to the whims of daily existence. They decided that great beings in the distance were responsible for good and bad that befell everyone. They instituted rituals to obtain the blessings of these beings, carved statues of what they thought these wonderful creatures looked like, and erected great temples to them. No ancient society has captured modern imagination more than the Egyptians, but they did not originate these religious ideas. The oldest known Middle Eastern civilization belonged to a group we call the Sumerians. The country, Sumer, was located in what was to be better known later as Babylonia and is now Iraq. Although Sumer existed from about 3500 B.C. to about 2200 B.C., its religious ideas filtered through the Babylonians and Assyrians into modern times. For example, the Sumerian creation story, called the Enuma Elish, supplied some of the framework for the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. Sumerians described a Garden of Eden and Tree of Life, long before those concepts seeped into Jewish thinking.
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