Originally posted by undo
reply to post by Harte
sooo then, what was sky? was sky a mountaintop in sumer? 
are you saying the sumerians who went on these mountaintops to track the movements of
planets and stars, thought they were just tracking some balls of light rolling around on other mountaintops? what about clouds? surely they had depth
perception.
Now you're just being silly.
The sky was a deity. He lived on the mountaintop.
Originally, as I understand it, the sky god was literally the sky. Just like with the Greeks. Eventually, again just like the Greeks, they began to
postulate that the sky was represented by An - like Zeus represented lightning. They both lived on mountaintops, or "heaven."
In Sumer (and in Greece,) "heaven" wasn't someplace you went to as some reward for a good life. You were rewarded for piety in this life. While
it was true that they had myths about humans eventually becoming immortal (or accidently refusing the gift of immortality,) those were a "favored"
few.
The Sumerian gods didn't provide much in the way of moral pronouncements. Not like Yahweh. It was more about how much you prayed to them and
sacrificed, etc.
Re the stars, they were
representative of the gods. The gods, in stories, sometimes dwelt among men so no, the stars themselves weren't
literally the gods. Again, like the Greeks. After all, the Greek constellations weren't thought (by the Greeks) to be the actual
people/animals/objects that they named them after.
Sumerian astronomers built their own mountains to observe from, which you already know, of course. They didn't know that the planets weren't the
same things as the stars. The important stars were depicted with a different iconography. Some of these were actual stars, some were, as I pointed
out with Venus (Inanna/Ishtar,) what we today know to be planets.
I assumed you were aware of all this. From reading your posts over the years, you seem to have done some homework in this area. Though you have
arrived at some really batsheet conclusions from doing so, at least you have appeared to have tried to learn about the subject. That's more than I
can say for a great many posters here, as (again) you know very well.
Harte
