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Religious Knowledge in light of the Big Data and Its Influence on the Political Power in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel

Dong-Young Yoon 1

1서울장신대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to find out the types of the religious knowledge portrayed in the ancient Near Eastern texts and to analyze how to use them in the process of political decisions and in maintaining their power. The rites and rituals in the ancient Near East functioned characteristically in their own boundaries. They were managed by the specialists with religious knowledge. Sociology names these specialists as religious specialists or religious intellectuals. In the ancient Near East, extispicy, astrology, and magic were categorized as bārûttu, skills of diviners, but they can be branded as religious knowledge from the sociological perspective. This religious knowledge can be regarded as the results of observations on the earthly and celestial phenomena, which are the basis of today’s mathematics and science. Religious specialists used this knowledge to interpret the divine will, while kings referred to them to make crucial political decisions. Kings executed and maintained their power efficiently with the religious knowledge. Just as today’s big data business considers the volume, variety, and velocity of data as important elements, so the ancient Near Eastern religious specialists rapidly circulated various vast data. The data were utilized to make political decisions and stored in royal archives to be retrieved and referred to in cases of necessity.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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