"The werewolf is a staple of supernatural fiction, whether it be film, television, or literature. You might think this snarling creature is a creation of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, a result of the superstitions surrounding magic and witchcraft." Source: The Conversation.
"In reality, the werewolf is far older than that. The earliest surviving example of man-to-wolf transformation is found in The Epic of Gilgamesh from around 2,100 BC. However, the werewolf as we now know it first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome, in ethnographic, poetic and philosophical texts."
Note:The Werewolf in Ancient History came out in March of this year (2021). A full transcript of the World History Encyclopedia (formerly the Ancient History Encyclopedia) interview with Daniel Ogden can be found here.
"Sargon of Akkad ... also known as Sargon the Great, was the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire, known for his conquests of the Sumeriancity-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC. He is sometimes identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire." (Wikipedia)
Note:According to Wikipedia, "The claim that Sargon was the original founder of Akkad has been called into question with the discovery of an inscription mentioning the place and dated to the first year of Enshakushanna, who almost certainly preceded him." As far as I can tell, everything we know about Enshakushanna comes from the Sumerian King List, an ancient text which "blends prehistorical, presumably mythicalpredynastic rulers enjoying implausibly lengthy reigns with later, more plausibly historical dynasties."
"The Akkadian Empire was the first political entity to make extensive and efficient use of bureaucracy and administration on a large scale and set the standard for future rulers and kingdoms. [Sargon's] story was long known throughout Mesopotamia where, in time, he came to be considered the greatest man who had ever lived, celebrated in glorious tales down through the Persian Empire, along with his grand-son Naram-Sin." (World History Encyclopedia)
"The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, following the conquests by its founder Sargon of Akkad. Under Sargon and his successors, the Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam and Gutium. Akkad is sometimes regarded as the first empire in history, though the meaning of this term is not precise, and there are earlier Sumerian claimants." (Wikipedia)
"The empire of Akkad fell, perhaps in the 22nd century BC, within 180 years of its founding, ushering in a 'Dark Age' with no prominent imperial authority until the Third Dynasty of Ur. The region's political structure may have reverted to the status quo ante [the way things were before] of local governance by city-states." (Wikipedia)
"An imposing figure standing over 6ft, it seems clear Urfa man was a cult statue even though only one of his kind has been found to date. That he may have had connection with fertility is persuasive, but ‘fertility’ can be applied as an answer to everything from the ancient world. Turning our attention to the strange, vaguely unsettling appearance of the face, Urfa man’s voiceless image cast by a conspicuously absent mouth and gazing obsidian-filled eyes is hauntingly enigmatic, but offers a link with another class of ancient statuary known as the eye idol." Source: Ancient Origins.
The myth of Hell can be traced all the way back to the first civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm guessing that the concept of an "underworld of the dead" had its origins in the earliest funerary religions of the Stone Age. The dead were buried under the earth, so the land of the dead was also seen as being somewhere underground.
Hell wasn't called Hell in Mesopotamia and it wasn't a place of punishment for sinners. That's a much more modern idea. Originally, the place we call Hell was just a grim vision of the afterlife waiting for everyone. In other words, back around 3,000 BC or so, everybody went to "Hell" so I guess you could say that Hell was the original Heaven:
"The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue 'a shadowy version of life on earth'. This bleak domain was known as Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal. All souls went to the same afterlife, and a person's actions during life had no effect on how the person would be treated in the world to come." Source: Wikipedia.
Closed-captions helpful. Sort of.
The Old Testament Sheol, also known as Hades, is basically identical to the Mesopotamian Kur. According to Wikipedia, "Sheol is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God."
The concept of an underworld where sinners are punished after death seems to have evolved in ancient Egypt and Greece, but several different versions of the myth were floating around the Near East and Mediterranean world back then.
The Greeks, for instance, had a concept of the underworld (Hades) as a "deep, gloomy place" where everyone went after death, but the element of judgment was also present in their mythology. " In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus," a pit or cave in Hades that was used as a dungeon. (Wikipedia) "Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans."
The next clip is from the great 1997 miniseries, The Odyssey, with Armand Assante (highly recommended). It starts off with the scene where Odysseus travels to Hades to ask the blind prophet Tiresias how to get home. The Hades in this scene is more of an underworld of shades than a place of divine punishment.
Hades was not only a place, but the name of the god of the underworld. Originally, he appears to have been one of many anonymous chthonic deities and it was dangerous to mention his actual name:
"...Hades lacked a proper name; as in the case of other nameless chthonians, his anonymity was a precaution. He was referred to by descriptive circumlocutions as 'chthonian Zeus' ... 'the chthonian god,' 'king of those below,' 'Zeus of the departed' ... 'the other Zeus,' 'the god below,' or simply 'lord.' As the Lord of the Dead, he was dark and sinister, a god to be feared and kept at a distance." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).
The history of Hell and its demons is too long and complex to describe in detail here, but our modern concept of Hell apparently originated with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. From what I've read, Judaism sees Hell as a state of shame and atonement rather than a physical place. The full-blown description of Hell as a literal pit of fire and brimstone and eternal torment seems to be an invention of the medieval Christian church.
Interestingly enough, "[t]he Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom (1)." So the Hell of the New Testament has clear roots in the underworld of the dead as described by the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians.
(1) The word Gehinnom derives from Gehenna, a reference to the "Valley of Hinnom," a garbage dump outside of Jersualem where people burned their trash. According to Wikipedia, "[b]odies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed. Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection."
The valley is said to be cursed because some of the early kings of Judah sacrificed children to Moloch there.
These days, a majority of Americans still believe in Hell and a 2007 Harris poll revealed that more Americans believe in a literal Hell and Devil than they do in the theory of evolution. Some Christian denominations reject the concept of Hell altogether, while others still embrace the literal version of Hell famously described by Jonathan Edwards in his notorious 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
The full text of this sermon is a classic well worth reading.
Back in 2018, Pope Francis created a storm of controversy when he supposedly said that Hell doesn't exist and that condemned souls just disappear, though it's possible that his actual words were misreported. If Francis doesn't believe in Hell, he apparently still believes in demons, however, because the Vatican announced in the same year that it would hold a "training course for priests in exorcism ... amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world."
"The gods of the Mesopotamian region were by no means uniform in name, power, provenance or status in the hierarchy. Mesopotamian culture varied from region to region, from city-state to city-state and, because of this, Marduk should not be regarded as King of the Gods in the same way Zeus ruled in Greece. While Marduk was venerated highly in Babylon, Enlil held that place in Sumer. It should also be noted that the English word 'demon', understood as an evil spirit, derives from the Greek word 'daimon' which meant, simply, 'spirit' and that many of the supernatural entities of the Mesopotamian pantheon designated as 'demons' were not necessarily evil." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.
List of demons starts at 1:45.
Note: Mesopotamian demons have crept their way into popular culture. In The Exorcist, for instance, the 12-year-old girl, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), was possessed by the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu, "the king of the demons of the wind, brother of Humbaba and son of the god Hanbi." Pazuzu was frightening, but he wasn't too bright. If he had kept a low profile nobody would have known Regan was possessed, but he had to make a big spectacle of himself and got exorcised by a couple of priests who wound up their ritual by shouting "The power of Christ compels you!" over and over until I wanted to slap them around.
"Ashurbanipal's Library gives modern historians information regarding people of the ancient Near East. In his Outline of History, H. G. Wells calls the library 'the most precious source of historical material in the world.'"
Ashurbanipal was an unusual character, to say the least. The last great king of Assyria, he was a literate intellectual, a scribe and a "passionate collector of texts and tablets" (Wikipedia). He was also a particularly ferocious military commander who used war loot in part to stock his impressive library and boasted about his victories and bloody massacres in various inscriptions:
"Like the onset of a terrible hurricane I overwhelmed Elam in its entirety. I cut off the head of Teumann, their king, – the haughty one, who plotted evil. Countless of his warriors I slew. Alive, with my hands, I seized his fighters. With their corpses I filled the plain about Susa as with baltu and ashagu [probably types of thorny shrubs]. Their blood I let run down the Ulai; its water I dyed red like wool."
In another inscription, Ashurbanipal goes into some detail describing the way he treated his vanquished foes and you can practically hear him gloating over their grisly fates:
"Those of them who fled before the murderous iron dagger, famine, want and flaming fire, and found a refuge, – the net of the great gods, my lords, which cannot be eluded, brought them low. Not one escaped; not one sinner slipped through my hands, of those whom the gods had counted for my hands. The chariots, coaches, palanquins, his concubines, the goods of his palace, they brought before me. As for those men and their vulgar mouths, who uttered vulgarity against Assur, my god, and plotted evil against me, the prince who fears him, – I slit their tongues and brought them low. The rest of the people, alive, by the colossi, between which they had cut down Sennacherib, the father of the father who begot me, – at that time, I cut down those people there, as an offering to his shade. Their dismembered bodies I fed to the dogs, swine, wolves and eagles, to the birds of heaven and the fish of the deep."
Ashurbanipal was my kind of intellectual. We could use more like him in our modern universities.
Gobekli Tepe is a prehistoric site in southeastern Turkey, "a series of circular and oval-shaped structures set on top of a hill." (Gobeklitepe.info) "What makes Gobekli Tepe unique in its class is the date it was built, which is roughly twelve thousand years ago, circa 10,000 BC."
Note: The age of Gobekli Tepe varies from source to source, sometimes by as much as a thousand years or so, but everybody agrees that it is extremely ancient.
This animation is supposed to be based on site maps, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.
"There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe. It’s estimated to be eleven thousand years old—six and a half thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure." Source: The New Yorker (2011)
Whatever its exact age, Gobekli Tepe is one of the oldest megalithic sites in the world, if not the oldest. It was apparently built during "two phases of use, believed to be of a social or ritual nature by site discoverer and excavator Klaus Schmidt, dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE. During the first phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected – the world's oldest known megaliths." (Wikipedia)
"More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known through geophysical surveys. Each pillar has a height of up to 6 m (20 ft) and weighs up to 10 tons [1]. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock. In the second phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime. The site was abandoned after the PPNB. Younger structures date to classical times."
[1] Some sources describe stones weighing up to 60 tons. I have no idea how reliable any of these numbers are.
Stone tools, at least one cave inscription and the ruins of what is thought to have been a Roman watchtower have been found on the site.
The site covers an area of around 1000 feet, I think, but it could be much larger than that (?) According to Wikipedia, only about five percent of the complex has been excavated. I don't know how accurate that is now, but new structures are still being discovered. Note: I'm not sure if the Wikipedia article on Gobekli Tepe reflects the finds described in the next video.
Video from 2018.
The purpose of the site is still unclear. Schmidt, the German archaeologist who led the excavations at Gobekli Tepe (1996 - 2014), argued that the megalithic complex was a "Stone Age mountain sanctuary," possibly for some kind of prehistoric cult of the dead, a pilgrimage site that drew people from all over the region. "Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse from food hunted and cooked or otherwise prepared for the congregants." (Wikipedia)
Most of the sources I've seen echo Schmidt's conclusions, describing Gobekli Tepe as a temple. I'm not sure if this has ever been proven conclusively, however. Wikipedia states that "[t]he details of the structure's function remain a mystery."
Almost everything about Gobekli Tepe is a mystery. For example, it's still unclear who built the complex. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he inhabitants are presumed to have been hunters and gatherers who nevertheless lived in villages for at least part of the year," but if that's accurate they obviously weren't ordinary hunter-gatherers who were just starting to shift into a more settled existence. It would have required a lot of engineering knowledge to quarry, shape, transport and position these massive stones.
"Construction techniques vary but in the most elaborate there is a ring of T-shaped monolithic columns with a pair of larger, carved T-columns at the centre up to five metres tall. These not only supported a roof (for at least some of their life) but also represented abstracted human figures that were part of a belief system that is not yet understood. They are sculptural as well as structural, with animal figures in relief. " Source: The Art Newspaper.
Ordinary hunter-gatherers wouldn't have had the skills required to construct Gobekli Tepe. Whoever they were, they obviously had previous experience building megaliths. According to Wikipedia, " [i]f indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups, which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization, or, as excavator Klaus Schmidt put it, 'First came the temple, then the city.'"
The next video describes one researcher's theory that Australian aborigines (or a people descended from them) built the complex.
Video from 2017.
This is an interesting theory, though not exactly mainstream. If Australian aborigines or their descendants built Gobekli Tepe, why aren't similar megalithic structures found in Australia? As it turns out, this is an extremely murky question. There are a few stone circles and alignments in Australia (on a much smaller scale) -- see the Megalithic Portal for details -- and one site has been called "Australia's Stonehenge," but it was apparently "all but destroyed" around 1940 and "the exact location has never been disclosed for fear the little that remains could be trashed," according to news.com.au (2015). That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that the site actually exists, to say the least. Ancient Origins made a short documentary about "Australia's Stonehenge," mostly notable for the fact that the video doesn't actually show any standing stones. Their 2017 article about the alleged site seems to fall into the "lost ancient exotic high technology" category.
We may never know who built Gobekli Tepe or why. The site is so mysterious that it acts like a magnet, attracting all kinds of speculation. According to Wikipedia, this fantastic megalithic complex "appears to raise more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers," but if nothing else it proves that prehistoric humans were a lot more advanced than commonly believed.
"Urfa Man, known formally as the Balikligöl statue, is the oldest human-size statue of a man yet discovered in the world. He is currently housed in Şanliurfa’s Archeology Museum, Southeast Turkey. Urfa man was discovered in the Old Town section of Şanliurfa, but in antiquity belongs to the same thought world of Göbekli Tepe, a site half an hour away from the museum by car." Source: Ancient Origins (2015).
Notes: Gobekli Tepe, a very ancient complex of monumental stone shrines decorated with bizarre statues and animal relief carvings, is especially mysterious because it was built during the Neolithic, apparently by Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
According to Ancient Origins, the Urfa Man cultic (?) statue may be similar to the "Eye Idols"--figurines with huge staring eyes that have been discovered at Tell Brak, one of the oldest cities in the world which dates back to the 7th millenium BC:
"Urfa man’s voiceless image cast by a conspicuously absent mouth and gazing obsidian-filled eyes is hauntingly enigmatic, but offers a link with another class of ancient statuary known as the eye idol."
Urfa Man idol shown at 11:19.
According to Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the missing mouths of these eye idols were meant to "enhance more hypnotically the hallucination of the dead (kings, priests, ancestors, etc) continuing to speak to the living." Jaynes argued that early humans weren't conscious in the modern sense of the word, but heard auditory hallucinations that they considered to be the voices of the gods.
"Jaynes perceived eye idols not as ornamental, but as speaking statues containing voices of the dead - as figurines assisting as aids in the production of hallucinated voices. Some types of eye idol were placed near elements such as running water to increase their speaking power, while others were located in temple areas and feature markings that symbolise gods." (Ancient Origins)
The speculation here is that the Urfa Man statue may be one of Jayne's "bicameral idols." If true, then the Neolithic people of the time may have actually heard the statue speak to them.
"During the later part of the Early Dynastic period, the inhabitants of Ur expended considerable energy to construct tombs for their deceased elites," according to the Penn Museum. "Though we do not know their identities with certainty, written evidence suggests that these elites were the city-state’s kings and queens, who may have fulfilled a number of important roles in life. We do not know whether the burial pits were dug and tomb chambers constructed before the death of their occupants or whether they were hastily prepared afterwards, the more likely alternative. But the considerable wealth in the tombs, including the animals and attendants buried with Ur’s kings and queens, testify to the power or pretensions to power of these elites and their ability to intimidate."
"Excavations from 1922 to 1934 were funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania and led by the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley. A total of about 1,850 burials were uncovered, including 16 that were described as 'royal tombs' containing many valuable artifacts, including the Standard of Ur [see next video]. Most of the royal tombs were dated to about 2600 BC. The finds included the unlooted tomb of a queen thought to be Queen Puabi—the name is known from a cylinder seal found in the tomb, although there were two other different and unnamed seals found in the tomb. Many other people had been buried with her, in a form of human sacrifice." (Wikipedia)
"An ancient drawing of a demon blamed for epileptic seizures has been discovered on a 2,700-year-old Assyrian clay tablet." Source: Live Science.
"University of Copenhagen Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll was examining a tablet of ancient writing at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin when he noticed the drawing of the demon — portrayed with horns, a tail and a snake-like forked tongue.
"The tablet came from the library of a family of exorcists who lived in about 650 B.C. in the city of Assur, now in northern Iraq, Arbøll said. But it's likely it was copied from a much older text."