Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Slow progress on that, as I was on the last of my holidays from Friday to Monday - I managed to 'do' the Sumerians, Bablyonians and Ancient Egyptians.
Of interest to me was this:
"For the ancient Egyptian, the name was the thing; the real object we separate from its designation was identical with it... The Egyptians lived in symbolism as fishes do in water, taking it for granted, and we have to break through the assumptions of a profoundly unsymbolic culture to understand them... the ancient Egyptians show a remarkably uniform tendency to seek through religion a way of penetrating the variety of the flow of ordinary experiences so as to reach a changeless world most easily understood through the life of the dead lived there. Perhaps the pulse of the Nile is to be detected here, too; each year it swept away and made new, but its cycle was ever recurring, changeless, the embodiment of a cosmic rhythm."
Landscape and religion - the Sumerians, subject to endless disastrous floods (the Epic of Gilgamesh providing the prototype for Noah's Ark - and Adam & Eve, apparently), saw the Gods as indifferent to human suffering, at best.