So I just finished the English translation Konrad Schmid's Genesis and the Moses Story. I give it a strong recommendation to anyone who would see 6 untranslated ancient Hebrew words and 5 footnotes on page frickin' 1 and go "that's my idea of a good time." Not much of it is gameable unless your game is set somewhere between the 8th and 5th centuries BC. But the section on Hellenic reception of the Pentateuch had some nifty stuff about Moses and Abraham being identified by Greek scholars as wizard guys. Here's my favorite bit game-wise:
The idea of these double gods came from an episode of Cosmos. In a segment on the Library of Alexandria, Carl Sagan mentions the synthetic Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, who struck me as a sort of multiclassed Zeus/Osiris.
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I just like the idea of synthetic deities. ;)
ReplyDeleteSynthetic Deities made me think of synthetic drugs which made me think of designer drugs, so Designer Deities. From there it just got weird.
ReplyDeleteHuh. Haven’t heard of Hermes-Thor…usually I’ve seen Hermes-Thoth. And this seems doubly weird considering Hermes/Mercury is generally identified with Odin/Wotan while Zeus/Jupiter (the “thunderer”) is correlated with Thor.
ReplyDeleteThere’s a reason for the days of the week carry the names they do, after all.
are we sure Hermes-Thor isn't a typo? It seems really a crazy association.
ReplyDeleteYou might be on to something. I just check a 19th century translation of Eusebius and Hermes is only mentioned in connection with Egypt.
DeleteThoth, probably.
DeleteYeah, it must be a typo. The name of Thor didn't even exist until like a thousand years after Artapanus. Agree with Anon that Hermes-Thoth is probably intended.
DeleteThere were several synthetic deities in the later Egyptian Kingdom. When Alexander conquered it, he put his buddy Ptolemy on the throne, and Ptolemy tried to form a cultural bridge between the native Egyptians and the Greek immigrants by, among other things, forming an official synthetic mini-pantheon. Egyptian cities generally had three primary patron gods (Father-Mother-Child), and for his city Alexandria, he had Serapis (kind of an Apis/Osiris/Hades guy), Isis (of course), and Harpocrates (a kind of child-Horus). I've read there was a whole suite of other combo-gods of a Graeco-Egyptian synthetic variety, but there's not a lot of information available to the layman. I did find Hermanubis and Dionysus-Osiris, but they're not that interesting, sadly.
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