Name: Pantheons of the Ancient Mediterranean: Crash Course Mythology #7
Uploaded: 2017-07-08T09:40:42.000Z
Duration: 13 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey there, I’m Mike Rugnetta and this is Crashcourse Mythology and today we’re going

Pantheons are families of gods, and those families are complicated.

A whole tangle of grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews

and a couple of children of mortal women who were raped and a pretty staggering amount

of violence and incest to just round everything off.

They have amazing feasts, but honestly, can you imagine Thanksgiving with these people?

I mean Thoth, you had a mistress and a wife and you somehow gave birth to yourself.

The pantheons we are going to examine are

families of deities from cultures that are usually considered polytheistic, meaning that

In most mythological traditions, the gods are seen as immortal, and according to David

Leeming, “they are personified projections of the human mythmaker’s dreams of overcoming

the inevitable effects of the physical laws that require death and disintegration.”

In creation stories and other myths, gods represent the creative force that brings and

In many myths, gods are “personifications of aspects of nature and of human nature – the

Pantheons, David Leeming argues, help us to explain how and why the world we know came

into being, and can tell us a lot about a culture.

Leeming writes: “All pantheons are ontological and teleological;

that is they are metaphors for the human attempt to make sense of existence itself and to assign

To “read” a pantheon is to read a culture’s sense of itself and of the nature of the cosmos.”

But can pantheons explain the naked mole rat?

If you thought that I was going to start with the Greeks, ha!

But we’re not starting with Egypt either.

We’re going to start with one of the oldest pantheons we have records for, the family

of Gods from ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia.

Sumer’s pantheon represents the most important natural forces in the lives of Ancient Mesopotamians,

and there are a lot of deities here, so strap in.

Try to pay attention to everyone’s responsibilities, and note what kinds of things don’t have

The first pair of deities are the earth goddess, Ki, and the sky god, called An.

An mates with Ki, AND Nammu, goddess of primal waters.

An and Nammu’s children are Enki, the trickster god, and his sister, Ningikuga the goddess

An and Ki, the more significant duo, begat Ninlil, the air goddess, and Enlil the air

Ninlil and Enlil give birth to Nanna, the Moon God.

Enki and his sister Ningikuga create Ningal, the Moon Goddess.

Ningal and Nanna then have three children.

Utu, the sun god, Inanna, the “Great Goddess of Heaven and Earth”, and Ereshkigal, the

Ereshkigal’s “husband” is Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven.

Dumuzi, it turns out, was the son of Enki, the trickster god, and his consort, the sheep

It may be worth nothing that yes: a sheep goddess DID give birth to a shepherd.

So that is the basic pantheon of Sumer, but what does all this tell us about Mesopotamia?

First it suggests that, at least in terms of their myths, natural phenomena--like the

earth and sky--take precedence over human actions and emotions--like love.

I mean, only two of the original Mesopotamian gods, Enki the trickster and Inanna, also

the goddess of love, are described as ruling over aspects of human nature.

Well, we tend to think agriculture when we talk about the Fertile Crescent, but the fact

that their pantheon features Sheep and a Bull rather than a harvest deity might recall an

Or perhaps the Bull is symbolic not only of masculinity but also of farming.

This is the fun part of pantheons specifically and mythology generally; you can read them

No, Thoth that’s not a joke about hieroglyphics.

But, it does get us to our next, significantly more complex family of gods, the Egyptian

Right off the bat I’m going to say that the Egyptian pantheon is even more confusing

But surprise, surprise, it’s also just as incestuous.

First off: There is no standard version of the Egyptian pantheon.

the myth changes depending upon who is writing it.

For example, in the story of Isis and Osiris, our most complete source isn’t even Egyptian,

it’s the Greek biographer Plutarch, who wrote in the first and second centuries CE,

well after Egypt had become Hellenized, and then Romanized.

In his version of the Isis and Osiris myths, he gives Egyptian gods Greek names.

For example, he refers to Thoth as Hermes, he does still give you credit for inventing

There are also different versions of the pantheon depending on where you are in Egypt.

For the most part we’ll be sticking with the group of gods worshipped at the city of

Heliopolis and headed by Atum or Ra, but we’ll give a nod to the fact that in Thebes the

And we can’t forget the attempted monotheism of Akhenaton.

But just to make this even trickier, a lot of the Egyptian sources we have for myths

are fragmentary and spread out over thousands of years.

So, for simplicity, we’re going to settle on the Nine-God pantheon that forms the core

of Egyptian religious belief, and it … doesn’t include Thoth.

Anyway, the Ennead, or Nine Gods, was in place in Heliopolis by 2700 BCE and is the one found

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Pantheons of the Ancient Mediterranean: Crash Course Mythology #7

stick

tricky

ancient

version