Welcome to the History of the World Podcast. My name is Chris Hasler.

And you're listening to volume 2, The Ancient World

This is episode 10 the religion of Canaan and Phoenicia And the Our first job this week in one of the more difficult podcasts that I've had to write is to explain L. L spelt E L, is a deity.

Dieties have been mentioned many times in relation to near east worship.

Over the course of these volume two episodes

we can recognize that many ancient world cultures had a number of gods and each of these gods would represent an

aspect of the world. In each culture there may be a god of crop fertility there may be a goddess of pregnancy

there may be a god of craftsmanship. There may be goddesses of fruit or love. There may be gods of the

moon and the sun. This was the typical polytheistic nature of near-east worship.

Often in cities there would be a supreme deity.

For example in Babylon the supreme deity was Marduk and we know of Marduk. And we know of Marduk, because any time that Babylon was conquered,

the aggressors would take the statue of Marduk,

which was a sacrilegious act designed to spiritually weaken the city, at least in the minds of the

second millennium B.C. E. Near East population. In Or we find the Supreme Deity called Inanna, who was worshipped

especially by a sargon of a cad's daughter, Enheaduana, after Sargon had conquered the city of

or in the late 3rd millennium BCE.

Ashore was the national god of the Assyrians and was the supreme deity of the

first capital city of Assyria, namely Assure. These are just some of the supreme deities that we have

stumbled across during our journey through the ancient Near East. But these cultures of Babylonia, Sumeria and Assyria

would have many other minor deities too. So the style of religion was very much their supreme deity, which means to worship multiple

gods.

El was the name that many cultures gave to their supreme deity.

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