u/TheIronzombie39

Ok so there are several older Egyptian terms that don’t have Coptic equivalents and are instead replaced with Greek loanwords (probably intentional due to their deeply pagan connotations). So I’m trying to reconstruct Coptic forms of those words based on their Late Egyptian/Demotic pronunciations.

So far, I have reconstructed the term Isfet as ⲁⲥⲟϥⲓ (Bohairic) or ⲁⲥⲟϥⲉ (Sahidic) based on the Late Egyptian pronunciation /ʔaˈsoːfə/.

So realistically what do you think would be the Coptic form of Ka based on the Late Egyptian pronunciation /koj/ or Ba based on the Late Egyptian pronunciation /βej/? I don’t think those two have Coptic equivalents, right?

What about other concepts who don’t have Coptic forms?

Thanks to Hollywood treating gods as people with superpowers, most people have a distorted understanding of how ancient people actually viewed their gods. Take Dionysus for example, people often misinterpret Dionysus and either see him as just a wine god or Jesus Christ but Greek, in reality he’s a god that makes you act insane, a god of spontaneous, irrational destruction of the social order. In the mind of a Greek, Dionysus makes you forget all the social norms with no regards for consequences. Herodotus has this story about a guy who was supposed to marry into some rich family, but during dinner got drunk and started dancing in a way that was so demeaning that the father of the bride told him he’s out, the would-be son-in-law just said he doesn’t care. That’s Dionysus in action.   

Why does he do it nobody knows, he’s beyond your comprehension. Maybe it’s about his personal amusement, maybe it’s part of some greater plan. You don’t know and you won’t know.

The fact of the matter is that gods aren’t simply people with superpowers, they’re more like personified forces of nature and therefore embody all aspects of that, both good and bad. Apollo for instance is the sun and medicine; he brings light and healing, but the heat of the sun can also cause droughts and spread deadly plagues. Yes the gods are depicted in mythology as anthropomorphic figures with personalities, but they’re still ultimately forces beyond our understanding that are to us as we are to ants.

Also, a lot of media seems to promote this belief that gods are dependent on human worship and if people stop praying to them, they die. This was never true, the idea of gods “starving” without worship comes from a literal reading of parts of the Mesopotamian flood myth where after the flood dries up, Noah’s Mesopotamian equivalent (Ziusudra, Atrahasis, or Utnapishtim depending on which version you're reading) lights a sacrifice and the text says the gods “gathered like flies over the offering.” But this relies on a literal view of the statement and ignores the earlier context of why humanity was created.

To summarize, the lower gods (the Igigi) originally had to do the hard, grueling labor to maintain the physical cosmos. Eventually they got tired of work and went on strike against the upper gods (the Anunnaki). To automate this, humanity was created to do those things in place of the gods. So when Enlil flooded the Earth, he unintentionally shut down the automated supply chain. The gods didn't start dying because of this, they realized they had to go back to making their own dinner and doing their own chores.

In my opinion, the idea of gods being dependent on human worship is absurd because it leads to a bunch of questions that destroy the framework entirely; how did the gods exist before humans, what happens if gods start praying to each other, what happens if humans start praying to each other, etc?

Also, everyone seems to assume that all pagans in the 3rd century AD held the same Homeric, literalist beliefs as their forefathers which isn't even true, philosophical paganism was a thing and it wasn't even a new phenomenon since it evolved out of earlier classical philosophy which itself claimed to have gotten its knowledge from pagan theologians of the Middle East like Egyptian priests, Chaldean astrologers, and Magi. Now obviously there’s nuance to this as only educated elites grasped Neoplatonism and a sizable chunk of the population still held Homeric, literalist beliefs. But they weren’t seen as separate systems competing with one another and in fact, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro outlined a tripartite framework of theology that went essentially like this:

• Mythical Theology: Basically mythology, the belief of the masses which was often detailed in poetry and plays.
• Civil Theology: The official state-mandated religious practices upheld by the government to maintain the social order.
• Natural Theology: The belief of philosophers who sought to understand the natural world and the true nature of the divine.

And again, none of these were in opposition to each other. Someone could adhere to a Platonist view of the gods while also engaging in state religious festivals/civic cults and watching a performance of the Bacchae.

All of this is also why fictional religions seem artificial since many of them attempt some form of polytheism yet treat the gods as people with superpowers dependent on human worship, use Christian terms like “church” and “heresy” even though they don’t apply to a polytheist context, ignore the possibility of allegorizing in-universe stories, etc.

Not the first to point this out, but the worldbuilding of Cars gets more and more nonsensical the more you look into it. Ask any question and you fall into a rabbit hole of insanity.

There’s always one detail people can’t help but focus on and for me, it’s the fact that they don’t have hands. So how do they build anything then? I guess forklifts could do it, but wouldn’t that make them a slave caste? What about the things too complicated for a forklift to do or the fact that handheld tools exist despite not being usable by anyone?

A cameo of the pope indicates that Christianity exists in this universe meaning that Jesus Chrysler died for our sins (which leads to the question of how you can crucify a car). An airplane TSA indicates that a car 9/11 happened which leads of the question of how it happened since planes are sentient in this universe; did the terrorists force the planes to crash into the twin towers against their will or were the planes themselves terrorists? WW2 also apparently happened indicating the existence of car Hitler and car Stalin.

Then theres the question of what even are cars in this universe and how are they born/manufactured? Even the creators aren’t entirely sure and have given multiple conflicting explanations. Some fans have tried to rationalize vehicles in this universe as organisms, but this falls apart because it’s explicitly shown that everyone in the Cars universe is infact a machine rather than an organism that looks like a machine.

Of course we can’t forget the utter insanity that is Cars 2. The dumb lovable sidekick “accidentally” becomes an international spy who exposes a conspiracy about big oil sabotaging alternative fuel to preserve their profits. Yes, that is the plot to a film whose predecessor was about racing and humility.

The only reasonable explanation I’ve seen for any of this is Alex Bale’s theory that Mater is actually a god who can rewrite reality and that this world where everyone is a car or vehicle of some kind is simply the latest iteration of Mater’s shenanigans. It certainly explains how Mater can make people relive a story he’s telling by saying “you was there too.”

Ok, so I’m trying to compile a list of Mesopotamian deities’ names in Aramaic. So far I have:

- Adad: ܐܕܕ
- Anu: ܐܢܘ
- Enlil: ܐܢܠܝܠ
- Ashur: ܐܫܘܪ
- Marduk: ܡܪܘܕܟ
- Nabu: ܢܒܘ
- Ninurta: ܢܝܢܘܪܬܐ
- Nergal: ܢܪܓܠ
- Sin: ܣܝܢ
- Ishtar: ܥܫܬܪ
- Shamash: ܫܡܫ
- Tammuz: ܬܡܘܙ

Right now, I’m trying to get the names of Ea and Ereshkigal. But I’m since unable to find them anywhere online, can you tell what the renderings of their names in Aramaic are?