Thursday, May 18, 2017

G0d and Mankind 4,000 Years Ago Part V Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Native American Indians

Nadene Goldfoot                                        
This is a replica of Noah's Ark as described in the Bible
and is sitting on top of Mt. Ararat today.  
        Remains of a religious practice is found in today's Turkey at the sites called Gobekli Tepe and Nevali Cori.  that go back to the 10th  millennium BCE between 9130-7370 BCE, surely the oldest found so far.  One of the male Jewish haplogroups is  Q, and they originated from Mongolia, Siberia and parts of Turkey going back 15,000 to 20,000 years ago according to their DNA. They were a group who migrated to Ur in Iraq by 2,000 BCE.   Turkey's Mt. Ararat was also the scene of Noah and the Flood, where mankind is said to have started over with a fresh start again with those saved by Noah in his ark.
                                                                             
 Gobekli is an archaeological site atop a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of modern-day Turkey,  In 1994, Klaus Schmidt, of the German Archaeological Institute, who had previously been working at Nevalı Çori, was looking for another site to lead a dig.
                                                                      
                 As excavator Klaus Schmidt put it, "First came the temple, then the city.
                                                                       

Schmidt engaged in some speculation regarding the belief systems of the groups that created Göbekli Tepe, based on comparisons with other shrines and settlements. He assumed shamanic practices (shaman which has access to, and influence in, the world of benevolent and malevolent spirits, who typically enters into a trance state during a ritual, and practices divination and healing.) and suggested that the T-shaped pillars represent human forms, perhaps ancestors, whereas he saw a fully articulated belief in gods only developing later in Mesopotamia, associated with extensive temples and palaces.

 This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry, and weaving were brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Ekur, which was inhabited by Annuna deities, very ancient gods without individual names. Schmidt identified this story as a primeval oriental myth that preserves a partial memory of the emerging Neolithic.  It is also apparent that the animal and other images give no indication of organized violence, i.e. there are no depictions of hunting raids or wounded animals, and the pillar carvings generally ignore game on which the society depended, such as deer, in favor of formidable creatures such as lions, snakes, spiders, and scorpions.  The animals pictured are mainly predators.   The stones may have been intended to stave off evils through some form of magic representation.  
Alternatively, they could have served as totems.

Expanding on Schmidt's interpretation that round enclosures could represent sanctuaries, Gheorghiu's semiotic interpretation reads Göbekli Tepe's iconography as a cosmogonic map which would have related the local community to the surrounding landscape and the cosmos.".

Professor of Archaeology Steven Mithen, suggests that in the early Neolithic culture of Anatolia and the Near East the deceased were deliberately exposed in order to be excarnated by vultures and other carrion birds. (The head of the deceased was sometimes removed and preserved — possibly a sign of ancestor worship.) ] This, then, would represent an early form of sky burial, as still practiced by Tibetan Buddhists and by Zoroastrians in Iran and India. 
                                                                       
Statue of Ishtar, also worshipped by Hittites
In the  Büyük Taşlık village in Turkey was found a cuneiform tablet in a dig after laying there for 4000 years (2,000 B.C.) The cuneiform tablet in the Sorgun district of Yozgat shows symbols of Ishtar, known as the Hittite goddess of love, war, fertility and sexuality. Ishtar or “the queen of harlots” goddess was found mentioned more clearly in this cuneiform than those on any other unearthed tablets. 
                                                            
Noah played by Russell Crowe

The The Epic of Atrahasis, also called Gilgamesh,  is the Mesopotamian account of the Great Flood-Noah's flood , which was a corruption of the biblical account in Genesis where Satan rebelled against Yahweh (G-d). In Judaism, Satan was an angel with the function of being an accuser.  This differs from the Christian understanding of Satan being the devil. 

 The amazing epic translated by archeologists who did not cover up the name “Allah” at the beginning of the epic where all of the gods are laboring in slavery for the head deity, Enlil, and then one rebellious deity named “Allah” then revolts against Enlil where Enlil crushes the rebellion and then defeats Allah who was also called Tammuz in Sumerian mythology.

“The Epic of Gilgamesh” is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq)  and among the earliest known literary writings in the world. It originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems in cuneiform script dating back to the early 3rd or late 2nd millenium BCE, which were later gathered into a longer Akkadian poem (the most complete version existing today, preserved on 12 clay tablets, dates from the 12th to 10th Century BCE). It follows the story of Gilgamesh, the mythological hero-king of Uruk, and his half-wild friend, Enkidu, as they undertake a series of dangerous quests and adventures, and then Gilgamesh’s search for the secret of immortality after the death of his friend.
                                                                             
Noah searching for land to appear with help of dove
The bird will return with a twig off a tree. 
 It also includes the story of a great flood very similar to the story of Noah in "The Bible" and elsewhere.

Ishtar/Allah was originally a male deity of Venus for the Akkadian Arabs, and after settling into Mesopotamia from Yemen, became Athtar with the Sumerian goddess of Venus Inanna, and would become the Babylonian Ishtar. [3] Ishtar was the Arabian Allat, [4] the female consort of Allah who was so revered by the Mesopotamians that they had called her Um-Uruk, or “the mother of the town of Erech,” [5] an infamous city of ancient Iraq.

SAUDI ARABIA        
                                              

Arab polytheism, the dominant belief system, was based on the belief in deities and other supernatural beings such as djinn. Gods and goddesses were worshipped at local shrines, such as the Kaaba in Mecca.     "The South Arabians before Islam were polytheists and revered a large number of deities. Most of these were astral in concept but the significance of only a few is known. It was essentially a planetary system in which the moon as a masculine deity prevailed. This, combined with the use of a star calendar by the agriculturists of certain parts, particularly in the Hadramaut, indicates that there was an early reverence for the night sky. 
                                                           
 
Amongst the South Arabians the worship of the moon continued, and it is almost certain that their religious calendar was also lunar and that their years were calculated by the position of the moon.  The Jews also had the lunar calendar.  The national god of each of the kingdoms or states was the Moon-god known by various names: 'Ilumquh by the Sabaeans. Sabea was  a country in Southern Arabia, home of  a rich culture and  a powerful kingdom from the first half of the last millennium BCE (500 BCE)  to c500 CE.  Their language was semitic.  Jewish women of Israel today have an all female party every full moon that I enjoyed.  They did not worship the moon, but used it in telling time.  

 The moon god was also known as 'Amm and 'Anbay by the Qatabanians, Wadd (love) by the Minaeans, and Sin by the Hadramis". The term 'God is Love' is characteristic of Wadd (Briffault 3/85). 'the Merciful' ascribed to Allah is also South Arabian (Pritchard).

The sun-goddess was the moon's consort; she was perhaps best known in South Arabia as Dhat Hamym, 'she who sends forth strong rays of benevolence'. Another dominant deity was the male god known as Athtar corresponding to Phoenician Astarte (Doe 25). Pritchard (61) claims their pantheon included the the moon god Sin etc., Shams (Shamash) and Athtar or Astarte as in the Semitic trinity, however it would appear that the sun was female as the Canaanite Shapash who figures in Ugarit myth alongside Athtar (Driver 110).                     

            The Kaaba, also referred as Al Kaaba Al Musharrafah, is a building at the center of Islam's most sacred mosque, Al-Masjid al-Haram, in Mecca, al-Hejaz, Saudi Arabia. It is the most sacred site in Islam.   
It is considered the "House of Allah (God)" and has a similar role to the Tabernacle and Holy of Holies in Judaism.  The Kaaba was thought to be at the center of the world, with the Gate of Heaven directly above it. The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred world intersected with the profane; the embedded Black Stone was a further symbol of this as a meteorite that had fallen from the sky and linked heaven and earth.    Prior to the spread of Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula, the Kaaba was a holy site for the various Bedouin tribes of the area. Once every lunar year, the Bedouin tribes would make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Setting aside any tribal feuds, they would worship their pagan gods in the Kaaba and trade with each other in the city. Islam would later adopt the established traditions of the Bedouin tribes, such as encouragement of trade during the Hajj, but replacing the worship of their pagan gods with Allah.

Islam teaches that Allah is the same god worshipped by the members of other Abrahamic religions such as Christianity and Judaism (29:46)[1] and Islamic commentators have refuted the idea as "insulting".  

"The oldest name for a god used in the Semitic world consists of but two letters, the consonant 'L' preceded by a smooth breathing, which was pronounced 'IL' in ancient Babylonia, 'El' (Eloh,Elohim) in ancient Israel. The relation of this name, which in Babylonia and Assyria (Alaha,Eloah) in Aramaic Syriac became a generic term simply meaning ‘god’, to the Arabian Ilah familiar to us in the form Allah, which is compounded of al, the definite article, and Ilah by eliding the vowel ‘i’, is not clear."
                                                                  
jinn, one of a class of spirits that inhabit the earth,
a male geni is one class. They have supernatural power.  The geni
serves his summoner. A Muslim belief held today from the past. 

Mainstream Islamic thought  holds that worship of Allah was passed down through Abraham and other prophets, but that it became corrupted by pagan traditions in pre-Islamic Arabia.  Before Muhammad, Allah was not considered the sole divinity by Meccans; however, Allah was considered the creator of the world and the giver of rain. The notion of the term may have been vague in the Meccan religion.  Allah was associated with companions, whom pre-Islamic Arabs considered as subordinate deities. Meccans held that a kind of kinship existed between Allah and the jinn.  Allah was thought to have had sons and that the local deities of al-ʿUzzāManāt and al-Lāt were His daughters] The Meccans possibly associated angels with Allah.   Allah was invoked in times of distress.  Muhammad's father's name was ʿAbd-Allāh meaning "the slave of Allāh". 
Indian Shaman in Prayer

Native Americans, or Indians, also practiced a religion involving Shamans.  Native American religions are the spiritual practices of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Traditional Native American ceremonial ways can vary widely, and are based on the differing histories and beliefs of individual tribes, clans and bands.  Many also carry the Y haplogroup of Q like 5% of the Jews do.  They had split off from each other like branches on trees to be as they are today.  The native Americans covered much of North America and also are found in South America with this DNA.  The  first humans reached North America some 15,000 years ago when the massive glaciers of the last ice age locked up enough water to lower sea levels and expose a 1,000-mile-wide land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. We can safely say that their religious beliefs can go back at least 4,000 years ago, then. 

They are unique.  Native American people themselves often claim that their traditional ways of life do not include “religion.” They find the term difficult, often impossible, to translate into their own languages.  However, they had a pantheon of gods, but they were spiritual. 

.   Traditional beliefs are usually passed down in the forms of oral histories, stories, allegories and principles, and rely on face to face teaching in one's family and community.

They have been found to have arrived on this continent in 3 stages at different times, and some had returned where they had come from, so it's understandable that they would consist of a mixture of tribes to start with.
                                                                           
Hopi storytelling; spiritual awareness and balance in the world
To the American Indians, "Plants and animals, clouds and mountains carry and embody revelation. Even where native tradition conceives of a realm or world apart from the terrestrial one and not normally visible from it, as in the case of the Iroquois Sky World or the several underworlds of Pueblo cosmologies, the boundaries between these worlds are permeable. The ontological distance between land and sky or between land and underworld is short and is traversed in both directions.                                       
Buffalo; every part of it was used by Indians,
nothing was wasted

The Native American peoples had (and still have) a huge respect for nature. Animal spirits in particular were very powerful and it was necessary to thank them and placate them if you wanted to make a meal of them.

Western tradition, on the other hand,  distinguishes religious thought and action as that whose ultimate authority is supernatural—which is to say, beyond, above, or outside both phenomenal nature and human reason.  
                                                         

A religious ceremony is "The sun dance.  It is a religious ceremony practiced by a number of Native American and First Nations Peoples, primarily those of the Plains Nations. Each tribe that has some type of sun dance ceremony has their own distinct practices and ceremonial protocols. In many cases, the ceremony is held in a private and is not open to the public. Most details of the ceremony are kept from public knowledge out of great respect for, and the desire for protection of, the traditional ways. Many of the ceremonies have features in common, such as specific dances and songs passed down through many generations, the use of traditional drums, the sacred pipe, praying, fasting and, in some cases, the piercing of skin.
                                                                      

The Pueblo and Hopi are a more modern native American.  A pantheon of gods is part of their  belief. " A vast collection of myths, particularly well developed among the Hopi, defines the relationships between man and nature and plants and animals. The archetypal deities appear as visionary beings who bring blessings and receive love. Man depended on the blessings of the gods, who in turn depended on prayers and ceremonies. Anthropologist Hermann Baumann documented male-to-female transsexual priestesses among the Pueblo.
Pueblo prayer included substances as well as words; one common prayer material was ground-up maize—white cornmeal. Thus a man might bless his son, or some land, or the town itself by sprinkling a handful of meal as he uttered a blessing. Once, after the 1692 re-conquest, the Spanish were prevented from entering a town when they were met by a handful of men who uttered imprecations and cast a single pinch of a sacred substance.
The Puebloans employed prayer sticks, which were colorfully decorated with beads, fur, and feathers; these prayer sticks (or talking sticks) were also used by other nations."                                                    The latest popular Native American deities:
                                                                     
Abraham and the altar he built 
The world contained a pantheon of gods 4,000 years ago, but one man,
Abraham, broke the mold by believing in only one G-d.  Everyone else believed in multiple gods.  Being that Abraham's father was Terah, an idol maker, this is amazing.  Yet it took the son of an idol maker to see that they were made out of clay and could break, and that kept his father in business.  Everyone else thought they had magical powers that could protect the family.  So idols were found, big and little throughout the world.  
                                                                     
Odin, god of war
Other religions were yet to come, such as Odin who was worshipped by both the Germans and the Vikings who were also in a pantheon of gods.  As the gods were spoken of among different people, the names changed, but the habits didn't very much.  I think Hinduism and Judaism actually tie in when they began.  Each had their own beginnings.  I count Judaism starting with Abraham, being he was the first monotheist, and Judaism is strictly monotheism.  The development of Judaism started with Moses and the Laws he gave his people through G-d.  We saw that Hinduism had a pre-beginning as well.  All the rest listed below came much later, like Islam after 632 when Mohammad died.  




Resource:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
http://www.stavacademy.co.uk/mimir/religionscandinavia.htm
http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/religion101/2012/10/how-old-are-the-religions.html
http://shoebat.com/2015/08/21/archeologists-discover-a-4000-year-old-archeological-find-linking-allah-to-lucifer-and-the-harlot-religion/
http://www.ancient-literature.com/other_gilgamesh.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism
Tanakh , Genesis 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_religion
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/07/mystery-of-native-americans-arrival/
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pueblo_Indians
http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/native-american-mythology.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah_as_Moon-god
http://sakina.wikidot.com/arabian-deities

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