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Old 12-09-2016, 10:11 AM   #31
Icelander
 
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Default Re: Moon Priests/Priestesses

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
No idea which gods and goddesses the people sailing to Dilmun and Meluha worshipped. We probably know for the West Semites, but they had another set of gods.
The people who were abducted from Earth came from the area that would become Babylon in the period between the 22th century BCE and ca 1750 BCE, I seem to recall. Makes them mostly Akkadians, but with some mercenaries from nearby 'wilder' tribes and a substrata of professional clergy using Sumerian for liturgical purposes.

After many, many centuries of slavery, the people were led to freedom by incarnations of their gods, who could take physical form in the magical Realms. Earth was no longer home and they settled an area of the Realms that was inhabited only by hunter-gatherers. This led to a society self-consciously refounded in the mould of the Akkadian and Sumeric gods, the core of which has existed with astonishingly little change over millenia under undying God-Kings.

I don't have anything against surviving cultic traditions which venerate minor powers that originate with Assyrians, Amorites or even Phoenicans, but the vast majority of people have a worldview shaped by the clergy of the few politically powerful gods, all of them Akkadian (but some with Sumerian aspects).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
I would not do much with tides because there are not big tides anywhere that South Mesopotamians sailed (pretty sure that the Strait of Hormuz and the Chaldaean marshes have a similar effect to the Straits of Gibraltar). I seem to remember that the sea next to this country is an inland sea in the Realms?
The Sea of Fallen Stars (also known as the Inner Sea) is an inland sea and shouldn't really have powerful tides. On the other hand, there canonically exists an island in it with a sheltered inlet which pirates use for a hideaway, but which experiences powerful and dangerous tides once a month (the pirates believe a monster dwells there, but the sourcebook states that the explanation is natural).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
It was also common for the priests of a rising god to explain that a bunch of other falling gods were only aspect of their patron. There are some tablets laying out relationships like that.
Just so. I want each religion to have their own versions of divine myths and mutually contradictory views on the relationships between various gods.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
The genders in Sumerian are personal (gods, women, ...) and impersonal (rocks, slaves, cattle, ...) and its easy to write divine names logographically as "storm god, sun god, ..." so sexing deities is not always straightforward. The logograms also encouraged equating deities in different places with each other.
True.
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