New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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Author(s): Westh, Peter
Title: Iluminator of the wide earth; Unbribable judge; Strong weapon of the
Gods: Intuitive ontology and divine epithets in Assyro-Babylonian religious
texts
Category: manuscript
Length: 30
Keywords: Boyer; anthropomorphism; counter-intuitive; culture; gods; history;
intuitive ontology; religious language; literacy; superhuman agents.

Abstract: A characteristic feature of Assyro-Babylonian religion was the
repeated use of conventionalized phrases to address and describe the gods.
Often, religious texts such as prayers and ritual incantations consisted of
little more than the heaping up of such epithets. If the gods were indeed
culturally postulated superhuman agents, divine epithets were the actual
cultural postulates being made regarding them.

This paper presents the results from a survey of divine epithets applied to the
deity Shamash in a large corpus of Assyro-Babylonian religious texts. The
epithets are categorized according to their conceptual content and underlying
ontology, and a quantitative analysis of their use and distribution within the
corpus is performed. On this background, some of the predictions made by Pascal
Boyer regarding the role of evolved, intuitive ontologies in the formation and
transmission of religious concepts, are discussed. It is concluded that while
Assyro-Babylonian concepts of the divine do seem to fall rather neatly into the
basic ontological domains proposed by Boyer, violations of intutive ontological
assumptions do not seem to play the prominent role that his theory predicts.

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