Near East

The Near East is a scholar's unit rather than anyone's homeland, and the atlas keeps it because a great deal of religious material only makes sense at that scale.

Take the flood. A version survives in Sumerian, another in the Akkadian Atrahasis, another inside the Gilgamesh epic, and another in Genesis, and they share a structure that includes a warned survivor, a boat, animals, a landing on a mountain and a sacrifice afterwards that the gods or God smell. Nobody reading only one of them would guess at the relationship. The same is true of the treaty form: the covenant language of Deuteronomy, with its historical preamble, stipulations, witnesses, blessings and curses, follows the shape of Hittite and later Assyrian vassal treaties closely enough that the borrowing is not seriously disputed.

Temple architecture and personnel move the same way. A tripartite plan with an increasingly restricted inner room, a resident deity fed and clothed daily, a landed estate supporting the establishment and a priesthood organised in shifts recurs from Sumer to Ugarit to Jerusalem with local variation.

The atlas holds Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, Persia and Arabia as separate regions because most material belongs to one of them. This entry exists for what belongs to the pattern rather than to any single place, and for the comparative arguments that pattern generates.

Almost everything the Near East contributes to the study of religion was unreadable two hundred years ago, and the sequence in which it became readable shaped the questions people asked.

Egyptian hieroglyphs came first, deciphered from the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s. Cuneiform followed, unlocked in the middle of the century largely through the trilingual Persian inscription at Behistun, and within a generation Assyrian and Babylonian libraries were being read. The immediate effect on religious scholarship was disruptive: in 1872 a flood narrative was identified in tablets from Nineveh that clearly predated the biblical one, and the discovery was reported to a public that had assumed Genesis was the earliest such account.

Ugaritic came later, from tablets found on the Syrian coast in 1929, and gave direct access to Canaanite mythology in a related language rather than through biblical polemic. Hittite archives from Anatolia supplied the treaty forms. The Dead Sea Scrolls, from 1947, pushed the manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible back by a thousand years.

The pattern in all of this is worth naming. The Near Eastern material was not preserved by anyone who valued it; it was buried, forgotten and dug up, and what survives is what happened to be written on clay or stone in places that were later abandoned. Whole traditions transmitted on papyrus or by mouth are simply gone, and the region's record is skewed toward states and temples that kept archives.