The fertility of the word: The impact of the development of writing on the hierarchy of deities in early Mesopotamian and Mediterranean cultures.

摘要

This study explores the relationship between the development of writing and a change in conceptions about the deities in ancient cultures in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions. More specifically, it hypothesizes a link between writing and a cultural change from worshipping a goddess as the principal deity to worshipping a god as the principal deity.;The study begins by merging two bodies of twentieth century scholarship--Media Ecology and Social Constructivism. It is intended for this to clarify the intellectual influences that have guided this research.;Next, the historical evidence that supports the conclusion of widespread goddess worship and the subsequent change to god worship is presented. For the purpose of clarity, the region under study was divided into four sub-regions--the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, and the Aegean.;For those scholars who believe that this theological change did occur, the most frequently offered explanation is that it resulted from the influence of migrating people known today as the Indo-Europeans. This explanation is questioned in Chapter Three.;Chapter Four presents a brief overview of the history of writing. The focus is on the evolution of writing in the geographical area of this study. This geographical area was selected for this study because it was here that the phonetic alphabet evolved.;Media Ecologists theorize that the development of writing had impact far beyond a convenient change in the way people could communicate. Chapter Five presents the Media Ecologists' view that the introduction of writing into a previously oral culture eventually will have radical effects on the ways those cultures think and make sense out of their world.;Chapter Six is an exploration of a particular change in conceptualization that seems to have occurred during the time of the theological change under study here. The change from immanent deities to transcendent deities appears to be connected both to the development of writing and the change in primary deities from goddesses to gods.;Finally, Chapter Seven concludes that writing was an enabling mechanism that facilitated the change from immanent to transcendent thinking, which in turn facilitated the change from goddess worship to god worship.