One was to reject his empiricist principles concerning the origin of all our ideas and argue that our idea of God is either innate or derived from reason. About 30 million people visit the site every year, making it one of the world’s most visited religious sites. The prehistoric cultural stages of Ḥassūna-Sāmarrāʿ and Ḥalaf (named after the sites of archaeological excavations) succeeded each other here before there is evidence of settlement in the south (the area that was later called Sumer). Several Islamic sites in Mali were destroyed or damaged by vigilante activists linked to Al Qaeda, claiming that “idol worship” characterized the sites. In primitive culture: Herding societiesThey also add to their religious organization a hierarchical principle together with the content known as ancestor worship. The worship of female goddesses by the Vietnamese dates back to prehistory. Human occupation of Mesopotamia-“the land between the rivers” (i.e., the Tigris and Euphrates)-seems to reach back farthest in time in the north (Assyria), where the earliest settlers built their small villages some time around 6000 bce. From the 1st millennium bce onward, Assyria built an empire comprising, for a short time, all of the ancient Middle East.

The Roman historian Livy wrote many descriptions of religious rites of the ancient Middle East. The writings of Herodotus, the 5th-century-bc Greek historian, remain an indispensable source for the cultural history and religion of the ancient Middle East. Today, Islam has grown to be a major world religion with many followers in Asia, the Middle East and North of Africa. The same distinction between technical divination and charismatic prophecy is to be found in those cultures as in the ancient Middle East. Notably, anthropologists distinguish magic from witchcraft, defining the former as the manipulation of an external power by mechanical or behavioral means to affect others and the latter as an inherent personal quality that allows the witch to achieve the same ends. Magic continues to be widely perceived as an archaic worldview, a form of superstition lacking the intrinsic spiritual value of religion or the rational logic of science. The Greek satirist Lucian’s De Dea Syra (“Concerning the Syrian Goddess”) is of enduring value for an understanding of Canaanite religion. As the only available intellectual framework that could provide a comprehensive understanding of the forces governing existence and also guidance for right conduct in life, religion ineluctably conditioned all aspects of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.

They grieved for another dead leader, another corpse bound for the grave — a tale as old as civilization. There are various phases and aspects of the dream and as it is such a long dream, it is bound to be organized. Moreover, dichotomies that define magic in relation to other phenomena are reductionist, often ignoring the meaningful structures and beliefs that inform these practices in their native context. Scholars also distinguish between magic and divination, whose purpose is not to influence events but to predict or understand them. In the end, distinctions between magic and religion or science are harder to make in practice than in theory; scholars therefore use labels such as magico-religious to describe activities or persons who cross this artificial dividing line. The connectome, it’s believed, is responsible for the things that make you who you are. Sumerian in origin, Mesopotamian religion was added to and subtly modified by the Akkadians (Semites who emigrated into Mesopotamia from the west at the end of the 4th millennium bce), whose own beliefs were in large measure assimilated to, and integrated with, those of their new environment. A fragment (dating from about 1400 bc) of that Babylonian epic has been found at Megiddo in Israel, showing that the Mesopotamian version was current in Palestine before the Hebrews, under Joshua, conquered the land about 1200 bc.

This type of mask was often associated with secret societies, especially in Africa, where the greatest range of types and functions can be found. Biblical studies have been revolutionized by the tablets (1400-1200 bc) found from 1929 onward at Ugarit. Waits (minstrels) were on the borough payroll in the late 1360s and early 1370s, which suggests a date for the group of ordinances in the “Custumal”; in 1456 they were assigned a borough tenement in which to live while in office, but seem not to have had a salary as such. I call this group “mecca Muslims.” The fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts. The problem with all of these arguments is that what constitutes simplicity is subjective. I’m not an expert, but I know a little about them. There is very little in the Old Testament that does not follow the types of religious literatures in the older Middle East: psalms, hymns, laws, rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types. Classical literature remains an important source for ancient Middle Eastern religion.