ham, Isaac, and Jacob in the God of their fathers as well as
belief in the Canaanite high god El.
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN COMPLEX UNITIES. Whole reli-
gions may be confronted with one another in processes of
acculturation and superposition. This happened when the
religion of the Greek city-state met local religions in Asia
Minor, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and Egypt. Ever since
scholars began to pay closer attention to the consequences
of Alexander’s expedition, the “syncretism of antiquity” has
been regarded as the classic instance of syncretism in the his-
tory of religions. It is to be noted, however, that the result
of the confrontation was not simply new, limited syncretic
religions along the whole line. Rather, the few institutional-
ized or organized religious systems of which this can be said
already presupposed partial and more diffuse areas of syncre-
tism. In many cases, the rise of such diffuse areas was pro-
moted when the Greek conviction of the oneness of truth en-
countered a type of thinking that was imprecise in its
concepts and tended to focus on the pictorial.
Between religions. In relations between the Sumerians
and the Akkadians, only the process just described above oc-
curred. On the other hand, the religio-political effort of Sar-
gon of Akkad (r. c. 2350–2294 BCE) and his daughter to
unite the Sumerian and Semitic religions was of a different
nature. Its thrust was to remove the distinction between orig-
inally different religious systems, in order that, contrary to
what happened in Israel, the opposition between the incom-
ing Semitic and native Sumerian religions, and thus their la-
tent or open competition, might disappear.
In tenth-century China, theological systems were creat-
ed out of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. There al-
ready existed a widespread popular conviction, which
impacted on everyday life, that these three religions comple-
mented each other and even intended the same thing.
Within religions. In Egypt the systems and mytholo-
gies of the gods that were represented by originally different
priesthoods underwent a variety of combinations when indi-
vidual districts were united, although the combinatory pro-
cess did not occur solely under these conditions. Theologians
among the priests felt impelled by the universalist claims of
their local gods to assimilate, for example, the cosmogonies
of Heliopolis and Hermopolis, Heliopolis and Memphis,
Hermopolis and Memphis, Memphis and Thebes. A similar
process occurred in the formation of the imperial cult of
Marduk at Babylon, but opportunities of this kind were far
more numerous in Egypt and lasted far longer. The Egyp-
tian-Hellenistic syncretism of the Ptolemaic period was
therefore perhaps the richest of the syncretisms that arose in
the confines of Alexander’s empire.
The example of Egypt has led scholars to speak of syn-
cretism also within Iranian and Greek religion. But the con-
cept is not appropriate here. On the other hand, there were
many instances of intrareligious syncretism in India: the
myths of the gods Savitr:i, Indra, Va ̄yu, Aryaman, Rudra,
Agni, Su ̄ rya, and Yama could be regarded as the same amid
numerous variations, while both Vais:n:avism and S ́aivism in-
corporated many other Hindu traditions.COMBINATION OF PARTICULAR ELEMENTS. The reference
here is to combinations established among, for example,
rites, ideas, symbols, divinities, persons, writings, and so on.
Either one element is enriched by other meanings or it con-
tinues to exist alongside other elements. But even this juxta-
position can take various forms and indicate either latent
competition or reciprocal completion.Addition. When the dividing line between diverse ele-
ments is removed (and with it the competition between
them), but one element does not absorb the other, the result
is a combination whose components not only are evident to
the modern student but must also have been recognizable by
the devotees of the time. That sort of thing happened both
within individual religions and between religions. In Egypt,
for example, one kind of eternity (nhh) was assigned to the
god Re, another (dt) to the god Atum. The result was the
god Re-Atum. Something comparable occurred frequently in
Hellenism. The addition of Baal of Doliche to a Jupiter al-
ready assimilated with Zeus produced Jupiter Dolichenus,
and so forth.Theocrasies—combinations of gods—presuppose addi-
tions. They occur when for practical purposes one god is
fused with another in the eyes of his worshipers, even though
there may be no identification at the conceptual level. In the
many half-theriomorphic gods of Egypt a tendency to blur
the borderlines between forms and concepts is already recog-
nizable. A number of the major Egyptian divinities arose in
this manner, but the names of many lesser gods were also
combined, and either kept their separate determinatives or
were written with a common determinative.Similar theocrasies occurred, though less frequently,
among all the peoples of the ancient Near East. The demon-
strable reason often was that polytheism caused difficulties
for the faithful. But politics may also have been present in
the background, especially in the encounter of different peo-
ples. At the instigation of the Egyptian magnate the Uza-
Hor-Resnet (a Persian collaborator) the Persian king Camby-
ses II (r. 528–522 BCE) prostrated himself before the image
of Neith of Sais and had sacrifices offered to her in her tem-
ple as mother of Re (and therefore of the living pharaoh), as
well as to Osiris (and therefore to the pharaoh after his
death). One might assume that in honoring these divinities
he actually intended to honor the corresponding Iranian di-
vinities: the goddess later promoted by Artaxerxes II (r. 405–
359 BCE) under the name Ana ̄hita ̄, and the fravashi of the
king. The Egyptian may also have composed the canal in-
scription in which Darius the Great (r. 521–486 BCE) de-
scribes himself as son of Neith and thus establishes a link
with this goddess that the Iranian king did not have with
Ana ̃hita ̃. As a result, the character of Ana ̃hita ̃ likewise
changed in the ensuing period.8930 SYNCRETISM [FIRST EDITION]