Request for Help in Compiling Some Lists

[dagan]

This is a message I wrote one user here who had been active somewhat recently (in the hope that they may be able to respond and be available to help). This is a call to anyone at all who may be able to help me with this task, I've over the years messaged numerous academics, professors, specialists, and very few have been able to provide me with much of any information or assistance on this matter. Looking at the content that has been posted here, I think that people who are part of this website, were part of this website, or may visit this website, may finally be able to help me complete this research or at least add to it so that I might finally have something more of a complete set of lists. My email is [e-mail] and please don't hesitate to email me these lists in their entirety if you have them or can put such together. This is my message which I wrote in the private messages to one member so far, but this is a public request to absolutely anyone at all who might be able to help with this thoroughly:

"Hello there! I'm not sure if you're still active on this website, but I was wondering if you could help me or direct me to some others who may be able to help me with a task that has been really quite difficult for me so far.



I've been trying, for some years now (and I don't know why it is so difficult to come by this information) to have a list of all the names of deities and then also demons or various entries in lists considered to be the names of spirits that were either prayed to or against by various people like those of Ugarit and Ebla and the Levant. Every list I seem to find is incomplete seeming with very few entries, but many others have mentioned that there should be 234, 260, even 460 and more names which I can't seem to find listed anywhere.



I've even purchased things in order to help me with this research, signed up to academic libraries, I don't know why this hasn't simply been put together and made widely available, it doesn't even seem like that enormous of a number or anything.



Often, when I ask for help online, I'm met with rude remarks or insults, so this whole thing has been really quite frustrating for me. I don't think it is impossible. I've kept at it for years and years now and continue to meet with a lot of disappointment.



So I'm wondering if you could help in finding, or compiling this list which finally puts together all identified or suspected or otherwise known names of deities, demons, spirits, heroes, or whatever else that might have been called upon or asked for protection from or against in the entire region, what people might called the "Semitic" pantheon to its greatest extent from all the various regions.



There are a few more lists which I've had a lot of trouble finding complete information on or listings, so I'll mention them here in case you can help me with these as well or might know anyone or any source that has them listed completely (also, if you can access these sources and create the list, that would be a tremendously useful and important thing which I think should be made widely available).



1. So the first list are all the "Semitic" or "Ugaritic" Gods and "Gods of Ebla" and whatever else in the region and whatever types such as demons or spirits and heroes included, that people list the numbers for but never seem to list out or mention, and the meanings of their names as far as the ones people think they have understood the meanings for.



2. The next list I've been looking for is a complete listing of all Constellations, their names and the meanings of the names or what they were imagined as looking like symbolically or associated with.



3. A complete listing of all Stars (including the planets) that were counted as worth mentioning and important enough to record, their names and meanings and associated symbols.



4. A complete listing of all known "City-States" in the region or listed in documents, their names and the meanings of the names, and if it is known or suspected as to what their chief local deity or "City God" or patron was for each.



5. A complete listing of all known "Tribes" and ethnic groups that may have been mentioned.



Also there are some further things which seem to also be mentioned in the Bible as well,



6. The 70 "Sons of Asherah" or El, which were seemingly assigned to 70 or 72 cities and people groups or tribes with one deity which may have also been associated to a star or constellation each, even the number is 69 or something close, this list would be greatly helpful (and no one seems to have put anything like it together).



7. The 70 or 72 or some number around there of Nations or Peoples considered important, listed, surrounding the area or part of it, considered the earliest or first or whatever is being spoken of by these people.



8. This may be beyond the scope of your own interest or research, but things in Jewish Angelology which may act as clues, for example in Jewish Angelology they associated "Dubhiel" or something, which means Bear El, to the Persians as the Angelic "Prince" of Persia, and that seems to link Ursa Major to Persia or Babylonia, which is more than likely to be something considered important to the people in the region since it is so near the Pole in the sky so many things appear to be rotating around this central axis.



Anyway, any help at all with these lists, most importantly a complete and thorough list of all the suspected Gods or Spirits identified in listings from places like Ugarit, Ebla, and across the whole region which use the Semitic language and may have had associations or have been syncretized with other languages and Gods from neighbors or conquerors or anything like that is the first and most important collection I have been trying to have a copy of for some years now. I don't know why it has been so difficult for me to find these listed, as they are casually mentioned as if there is a list somewhere but I can't find the list. I only find a few names mentioned repeatedly and then all the others mainly go unmentioned (I understand this may be due to their being no further information on them besides their name, and even their names might not have been understood yet or the etymology remains mysterious as well, but I still think the whole list should be put together if possible).



9. Once I have these lists collected, I want to see if there might be any information available (and if you know anything about this, that would help me greatly as well) which would help put together a matching of these:

1. Names of Spiritual Entities to

2. City-States they each represent or have as holdings or domains they are associated with to

3. Certain Founders and Ethnic Groups or Peoples associated to those cities, nations, tribes to

4. Trades and resources each may have been associated with and famed for to

5. Constellations and Particular Stars and Planets

6. Heraldry or "Totems" of certain symbols, objects, animals, and natural resources such as

Stones or Minerals, Dyes, Colors, Products, Activities which each were famed for or associated



So that one may be able to create at least a rough list that has each of those listed (even if they overlap) so as to provide some possible idea of how the people at the time may have organized their thinking regarding some of these things through sets of relations, themes, and correspondences that they may have mentioned in collected writings.



The lists that I have come by seem to be considered "hierarchal" in how they enumerate things, so I would also like to try to maintain that structure as well, even if multiple lists are used with overlapping entries.



So hopefully you can help me finally get a hold of all these names, their suspected meanings, their assumed pronunciation, and associations if any are known for each, whether its symbols through epithets, resources or trades a certain city is famed for, animal or object or profession associations with constellations, or whatever at all, anything may be helpful, and hopefully you have access to the information or know someone who might and could just finally end this long search by listing whatever at all you've come by and know of and directing me to anyone else who might have any of this or all of it. Thank you so much for reading and I really hope you'll be able to help somehow!"

[sheshki]

Hi Dagan,

the only list i´m aware of that covers your question, at least partially, is a list i am compiling since a couple of years now. When it is finished it will contain all the entries from the Reallexikon der Assyriologie for all things divine mentioned there. This includes normal divinities, demons and deified objects.
I started this list because i had no place to go where i could find god names and their cuneiform writing.
The lists contain the transliteration, the signs, a small note and the source for each entry. It also contains alternative writing forms if existing. 
List

Also interesting would be the link to the online edition of Reallexikon der Assyriologie
RlA

You could also have a look here for information about divinities 
link
or here
Deities of Ancient Mesopotamia

Maybe this is of some help to you...

Greetings
Sheshki

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello Dagan:

The requests you make here are, in fact, for information that is going to be very difficult to obtain and, in some cases, probably will not be available at all. The laundry list of data which you would like to acquire sounds to me as though it would be tailor made for religious reconstructionism i.e. modern neo-pagan practice. If that is the case, that is all well and good, but there are some key issues you would find: i) ancient records do not necessarily record a manual or handbook of how to practice an ancient religion (they tend to record information that acts as an aide memoire, recording abbreviated information but assuming the reader knows a great deal of the rest already); ii) the state of preservation of the texts and progress with archaeology at a certain site may be insufficient for a modern reconstruction (for example, Celtic reconstructionism has almost nothing to go on); and iii) only a portion of the smaller number of scholars focusing on Ebla or Ugaritic are concerned with the religion, many focus instead on problems of language, economy, and so on.


Your chosen cultures, such as Ebla and Ugarit, are problematic. Basically, these are two sites which can be referred to under the umbrella term 'Canaanite culture' or proto-Canaanite culture. As I mention above, the experts who work with material and languages from these two sites are tiny in number. To clarify that, we aren't talking hundreds, or even 10s. Less than 20 world wide have significant involvement with Eblaite studies. Yet, when you spread this number of scholars working for over 5 decades, even a tiny sub-field like this has over 60 pages of bibliography. Most of that bibliography pertains to study of the language itself and other basic concerns.

Ebla was excavated in the late 1960s by Italian archaeologists and for this reason much of the important work done on Ebla is available only in Italian. Few Universities outside Italy have ever offered courses on Eblaite, there are a small number of exceptions in Germany. The University of Jena offers Eblaite as taught by Prof. Manfred Krebernik. So, English is not the primary languages of publication (although some specialists have published in English for the sake of greater distribution), and it becomes apparent why there is almost nothing on the English speaking web. Even if you were to engage the findings of this field by reading what there is in Italian or German, even that scholarship is an at a rudimentary stage, still examining core evidence and struggling with issues of comprehension. This is because the texts are extremely difficult. Eblaite is written in a cuneiform borrowed directly from its Sumerian neighbors, but Eblaite is an East Semitic language and the script was not designed to represent a Semitic language. Because the writing system uses a large proportion of logograms / pictograms and few syllable signs, the writing system effectively obscures the finer points of how Eblaite works as a language. Consequently, scholarly grasp of Eblaite remains shakey. To put it simply, scholarship isn't approaching the opportunity to write handbooks of Eblaite religion - it is more at the stage of occasionally producing a good translation of one surprisingly readable text and taking notes of a few hints at the bigger religious picture, I would say. That said there have been a few scholars who have produced discussions of the Eblaite pantheon. Occasional discussions with more ambition occasionally occur - these would generally be buried in specialty journals such as Eblaitica. When scholars do write about an Eblaite god, it is usually a specialty study trying to make a focused comparison with another field of interest - i.e. was there the Yahwistic element -ya in so and so Eblaite divine name, or was the name Enki/Ea found at Ebla and so on. For some scholars, Eblaite religion is of interest for its comparative value with the Biblical world or Mesopotamian religion.

That said there have been a few scholars who have produced discussions of the Eblaite pantheon. For Example, Robert Stieglitz' chapter in Eblaitica 2 from 1986:
"Ebla and the Gods of Canaan." In: Eblaitica 2, 79-89. Stieglitz provides an overview of what is known about the pantheon as well as comments on a dozen or so deities. His most important statement is this on p.80:

"In his pioneering study of the Eblaite tablets, G. Pettinato estimated that the texts of Ebla enumerate some five hundred divine names. A close examination of the published texts, however, reveals that this number is highly exaggerated. The number of divine name attested thus far in the Ebla texts is, in fact, about one hundred. Of these, the majority are not truly proper names of deities, but divine epithets. When on actually elimanates all the titles and epithets, one is left with about forty names of gods and goddesses. This number corresponds remarkably well to the "official" pantheon lists of Ugarit, attest in both Akkadian and Ugaritic. These so-called canonical deity lists, which exclude divine epithets, enumerate a total of thirty-three major deities in the Canaanite pantheon. Numerically, then, the pantheon of Ebla may be seen as quite comparable to its Canaanite counterpart a millennium later. The differences are manifested not in the numbers, but in the names of the gods."


In Stieglitz' article you can see some of the long running problems with analyzing the Eblaite pantheon. For example, the name of the sun god ^dUTU this is the Sumerian logogram for the sun god. But because the scribes of Ebla always use this logogram, scholars don't know what the Eblaite name for the sun god was supposed to be (UTU stands in for some Semitic word that probably would have sounded like Šamaš). Another basic problem unsolved is the titular deity of the city, who was the city god of Ebla, Rasap? Dabir? On page 83 Stieglitz indicates they still do now know.

From the paragraph I quote above, you can see that estimations of the pantheon have varied wildly and that comes down to how the information is translated and interpreted. Whether a large number of epithets are taken as epithets or as names for separate deities and so forth. Stieglitz' line of interpretation seems to have the advantage that it reduces the Eblaite pantheon to a smaller number, but more particularly, to a pantheon which Stieglitz feels is in line and parallel with the a regional Canaanite pantheon - this allows for the intriguing possibility that there in fact was a regional Canaanite pantheon that can be marked in other Syrian sites such as Ugarite and so on. But again, I think the reason you don't see wide spread information on "the early Canaanite pantheon" as of today is that this line of scholarship has not achieved wide or uniform acceptance in the field. It is Stieglitz' take but not Pettinato's, for example.

And notice Stieglitz' last comment "Numerically, then, the pantheon of Ebla may be seen as quite comparable to its Canaanite counterpart a millennium later. The differences are manifested not in the numbers, but in the names of the gods". So, his interpretations reduce the Eblaite pantheon to a comparable number of deities with other Canaanite pantheons - who nonetheless don't have the same names as other Caananite pantheons in the region. Well, one might object that names are more important than numbers when comparing two separate pantheons, really. While Stieglitz had earlier indicated that the Eblaite pantheon is composed both of Sumerian deities who have been brought in, as well as deities of the Old Semitic pantheon which show good continuity across the Canaanite region, the article doesn't go so far as to explain how exactly to reconcile Ebla's Sumero-Semitic pantheon with later Canaanite pantheons (specifically).


I have added a few pdfs here which should be helpful - first the Stieglitz article is here. Secondly, a bibliography of all research on Ebla up until 2014 is here. From the bibiiography, which is over 60 pages, you would be able to get an good idea of what the field has been working on and where the research focus has been.