No wonder, then, that Anat was often depicted completely naked, to emphasize her sexual attributes - as in this seal impression, which illustrates a helmeted Baal battling another god.
Like the Greek religion and its direct forerunners, the Canaanite pantheon included a Mother Goddess, official consort of the
chief deity. They called her Ashera; she paralleled the Greek Hera. Astarte (the biblical Ashtoreth) paralleled Aphrodite; her
frequent consort was Athtar, who was associated with a bright planet, and who probably paralleled Ares, Aphrodite's brother.
There were other young deities, male and female, whose astral or Greek parallels can easily be surmised.
But besides these young deities there were the "olden gods," aloof from mundane affairs but available when the gods
themselves ran into serious trouble. Some of their sculptures, even in a partly damaged state, show them with commanding
features, gods recognizable by their horned headgear.
Whence had the Canaanites, for their part, drawn their culture and religion?
The Old Testament considered them a part of the Hamitic family of nations, with roots in the hot (for that is what ham meant) lands of Africa, brothers of the Egyptians. The artifacts and written records unearthed by archaeologists confirm the close affinity between the two, as well as the many similarities between the Canaanite and Egyptian deities.
The many national and local gods, the multitude of their names and epithets, the diversity of their roles, emblems, and animal mascots at first cast the gods of Egypt as an unfathomable crowd of actors upon a strange stage. But a closer look reveals that they were essentially no different from those of the other lands of the ancient world.
The Egyptians believed in Gods of Heaven arid Earth, Great Gods that were clearly distinguished from the multitudes of lesser deities. G. A. Wainwright (The Sky-Religion in Egypt) summed up the evidence, showing that the Egyptian belief in Gods of Heaven who descended to Earth from the skies was "extremely ancient." Some of the epithets of these Great Gods - Greatest God, Bull of Heaven, Lord/Lady of the Mountains - sound familiar.
Although the Egyptians counted by the decimal system, their religious affairs were governed by the Sumerian sexagesimal sixty, and celestial matters were subject to the divine number twelve. The heavens were divided into three parts, each comprising twelve celestial bodies. The afterworld was divided into twelve parts. Day and night were each divided into twelve hours. And all these divisions were paralleled by "companies" of gods, which in turn consisted of twelve gods each.
The head of the Egyptian pantheon was Ra ("creator"), who presided over an Assembly of the Gods that numbered twelve. He performed his wondrous works of creation in primeval times, bringing forth Geb ("Earth") and Nut ("sky"). Then he caused the plants to grow on Earth, and the creeping creatures - and, finally, Man. Ra was an unseen celestial god who manifested himself only periodically. His manifestation was the Aten - the Celestial Disc, depicted as a Winged Globe.
The appearance and activities of Ra on Earth were, according to Egyptian tradition, directly connected with kingship in Egypt. According to that tradition, the first rulers of Egypt were not men but gods, and the first god to rule over Egypt was Ra. He then divided the kingdom, giving Lower Egypt to his son Osiris and Upper Egypt to his son Seth. But Seth schemed to overthrow Osiris and eventually had Osiris drowned. Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris, retrieved the mutilated body of Osiris and resurrected him. Thereafter, he went through "the secret gates" and joined Ra in his celestial path; his place on the throne of Egypt was taken over by his son Horus, who was sometimes depicted as a winged and horned deity.
Though Ra was the loftiest in the heavens, upon Earth he was the son of the god Ptah ("developer," "one who fashioned things"). The Egyptians believed that Ptah actually raised the land of Egypt from under floodwaters by building dike works at the point where the Nile rises. This Great God, they said, had come to Egypt from elsewhere; he established not only Egypt but also "the mountain land and the far foreign land." Indeed, the Egyptians acknowledged, all their "olden gods" had come by boat from the south; and many prehistoric rock drawings have been found that show these olden gods - distinguished by their horned headdress - arriving in Egypt by boat.
The only sea route leading to Egypt from the south is the Red Sea, and it is significant that the Egyptian name for it was the Sea of Ur. Hieroglyphically, the sign for Ur meant "the far-foreign [land] in the east"; that it actually may also have referred to -he Sumerian Ur, lying in that very direction, cannot be ruled out.
The Egyptian word for "divine being" or "god" was NTR, which meant "one who watches." Significantly, that is exactly the meaning of the name Shumer: the land of the "ones who watch."
The earlier notion that civilization may have begun in Egypt has been discarded by now. There is ample evidence now showing that the Egyptian-organized society and civilization, which began half a millennium and more after the Sumerian one, drew its culture, architecture, technology, art of writing, and many other aspects of a high civilization from Sumer. The weight of evidence also shows that the gods of Egypt originated in Sumer.
Cultural and blood kinsmen of the Egyptians, the Canaanites shared the same gods with them. But, situated in the land strip that was the bridge between Asia and Africa from time immemorial, the Canaanites also came under strong Semitic or Mesopotamian influences. Like the Hittites to the north, the Humans to the northeast, the Egyptians to the south, the Canaanites could not boast of an original pantheon. They, too, acquired their cosmogony, deities, and legendary tales from elsewhere. Their direct contacts with the Sumerian sources were the Amorites.
The land of the Amorites lay between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean lands of western Asia. Their name derives from the Akkadian amurru and Sumerian martu ("westerners"). They were not treated as aliens but as related people who dwelt in the
western provinces of Sumer and Akkad.
Persons bearing Amorite names were listed as temple functionaries in Sumer. When Ur fell to Elamite invaders circa 2000 B.C., a Martu named Ishbi-Irra reestablished Sumerian kingship at Larsa and made his first task the
recapture of Ur and the restoration there of the great shrine to the god Sin. Amorite "chieftains" established the first independent dynasty in Assyria circa 1900 B.C. And Hammurabi, who brought greatness to Babylon circa 1800 B.C., was the sixth successor of the first dynasty of Babylon, which was Amorite.
In the 1930s archaeologists came upon the center and capital city of the Amorites, known as Mari. At a bend of the Euphrates, where the Syrian border now cuts the river, the diggers uncovered a major city whose buildings were erected and continuously reerected, between 3000 and 2000 B.C., on foundations that date to centuries earlier. These earliest remains included a step pyramid and temples to the Sumerian deities Inanna, Ninhursag, and Enlil.
The palace of Mari alone occupied some five acres and included a throne room painted with most striking murals, three hundred various rooms, scribal chambers, and (most important to the historian) well over twenty thousand tablets in the cuneiform script, dealing with the economy, trade, politics, and social life of those times, with state and military matters, and, of course, with the religion of the land and its people. One of the wall paintings at the great palace of Mari depicts the investiture of the king Zimri- Lim by the goddess Inanna (whom the Amorites called Ishtar).
As in the other pantheons, the chief deity physically present among the Amurru was a weather or storm god. They called him Adad - the equivalent of the Canaanite Baal ("lord") - and they nicknamed him Hadad. His symbol, as might be expected, was fork lightning.