what is even going on here

the whole "adonis is a direct mesopotamian import" thing is just a relic of the Golden Bough, right. the myth doesn't actually resemble anything Mesopotamian too closely and even if we take the name in Phoenicia as relevant, cf. all the dudes named Belos in Greek mythology

also: i'm sorry but it's physically impossible to cover any mythology well in the form of tweets

there's a megaten guy on the other site who basically seems convinced all big name kojiki kami "evolved" directly 1:1 from specific ainu figures and i feel that crosses multiple lines at once but also idk if i want to argue with teenagers

reshephling

this paper is good overall, but i don't really think this is true? she's the most major ally of baal through the yam section if the narrative (in which anat does next to nothing) and she has a solo myth (poorly preserved, but still). that's actually more than shapash or yarikh

seems it's not a mistransaltion - the hittite viceroy really called shapash "lady shimige" in a letter to niqmaddu of ugarit (not sure which one of the niqmaddus, though)

also ok does the search for female Shamash only go back to Roberts' The Earliest Semitic Pantheon from the 1970s? neither Krebernik nor Westenholz - who were my introduction to this idea - cite a specific source, and Woods (who questions this, imo rightfully) only brings up Roberts

I've also been reading Sarolta A. Takacs' Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World for the sake of an upcoming article. it holds up very well

the proposal that in the baal cycle shapash acts on own accord as a voice of reason rather than only as a bearer of el's messages is interesting though i feel like this matches a modern penchant for more elaborate character dynamics more than what a bronze age audience would've expected

of course, i think a problem is, in the first place, that anat is often treated as just ugaritic (or worse yet, abstractly "canaanite" deity), and that she's treated in isolation, with ashtart - who engages in the exact same pursuits - often dismissed or subsumed under her

i know i talked multiple times about day's puzzling comments on the phoenician bilingual from cyprus with anat and athena and about her own invented interpretatio graeca of anat but it keeps bugging me. i might have to just write a few k words about this next year

描く度に絵柄が変わってて一人アンソロみたいになってる

tl;dr not seeing any reason to doubt archi's conclusion that it seems most eblaite deities are local figures peculiar to nothern syria

the pure vibes school of scholarship strikes again, this time with Eblaites somehow being aware of a pairing rare before the Kassite period feat. a goddess not really attested before Ur III (the article consistently uses "Canaanite" when it means Ugarit, also, lol)

according to Smith, that Baal Cycle passage where someone says a god without a wife is unfit to rule might be Attar complaining about Yam and not Shapash rebuking Attar; will include this in the eventual critical blog post about Ayali-Darshan's Yam shipping discourse paper

don't care + didn't ask + cry + mad + get real + L + mald + cope harder + hoes mad + basic + skill issue + ratio + you fell off + surely he will overturn the throne of your kingship + surely he will break the sceptre of your rule

tbh i don't think the "shamash was originally female" proposal is viable, ultimately; in the end it feels like shapash's gender is an outlier with only the eblaite sun deity as a forerunner. perhaps it's more a northwestern syrian feature than anything?

Actually did this last year already but I kinda liked it, so heres another for this year's halloween (It's Ishmekarab and Lagamal going out as the Heibai Wuchang lol)

i talked about this before but i feel it remains understudied the deities egyptians imported from the north - esp. Resheph and Anat - were more popular well to the northeast of Byblos as opposed to in areas they actually controlled where they are hardly attested

possible article topics for 2026: -dissecting Ayali-Darshan's puzzling Yam paper (120% happening) -Damu and medicine goddesses (120% happening) -why i think referring to the Egyptian deity as "Astarte" should be reconsidered -against calling emesal "women's tongue"

ハロウィンなので気に入ってる過去絵の純ヘカを共有

pure vibes school of scholarship

shapash appears in more ritual texts and esp. theophoric names than athirat and it's not even close, really weird to try to present the latter as more major

workshopping a title for a 2026 Damu blog article. something like "he died, but he got better" or "they rebuilt him, they had the technology"

it's really hard to not conclude that the early efforts to make sure Ebla doesn't end up as Ugarit 2 were nothing short of heroic and are probably one of the key reasons why we're not stuck with monographs arguing Kura is actually El or something

the torment continues with "actually Anat is just a personified attribute of Baal" (an argument based on a single publication from 1969...) because clearly the fact she is attested since 1800 BCE-ish with own cult center doesn't matter much

i give up, what is even going on here.

two for one deal: goddess slurry AND bizarre ninisina downplaying

what's up with wyatt's need to minimize the number of deities, and on the level of those who even in literary texts (let alone cult) are clearly distinct from each other at that. he pushed yarikh = el at some point too

there's a bunch of really weird self published creationists on academia dot edu who obsessively hate alfonso archi and are convinced that he personally convinced the syrian bureau of antiquities to destroy "biblical evidence" from ebla

spoiler: the book doesn't answer the question because it just rehashes discussion about Ugarit, which, as the author even acknowledges, wasn't in Canaan. we do get the full repertoire of bible scholar smash hits including "sacred prostitution" though

i don't really have energy for wikipedia anymore tbh

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templat... the more you look at it, the worse it gets

yamayuandadu.tumblr.com/post/7979463... some notes about the Inanna/Ninshubur piece I've recently commissioned

do you think there would be a point in writing an article basically just critically reviewing Ayali-Darshan's "The bride of the sea" article paragraph by paragraph

cliche chuuni anime girl but she speaks like stardust the super-wizard

in retrospect the fact it's called "cattle raid of Cooley" should have prepared me for how fixated much of the cast is on stealing cattle or at least intervening in cattle raids in some way

tumblr is very clearly a dying platform, i don't even get stupid asks anymore and tags update very, very slowly but i have nowhere else to move to

waiting for something special that i after many considerations decided to get for my birthday two months in advance... might end up being a day late but i want to believe it's going to be possible to show it today

Day 7: Heavenly #atlusfaithful #atlusartober

i was honestly disappointed to learn there is endymion yaoi but not selene yuri ngl. might as well just rewrite the myth in every way possible to get the most mileage out of it

yamayuandadu.tumblr.com/post/7970356... First of the three short articles I wrote to make sure nothing cut from the Cybele deep dive goes to waste is now up on my blog. Find out why a god could be referred to as a tyrant, if Pythagoras was an alien, and what happens if the moon has cooties.

it's a shame the alleged sogdian moon goddess (xšwm, "growing moon") is basically just this single mural and a bunch of theophoric names because i can't really tinker with how her sphere of activity would intersect with nanaya's without any indication of her character