The Sumerians were not the only Neolithic civilization to create a sophisticated religion; they were probably not even the first to do so. But they were the first to write about it, and that made all the difference, not only because it allowed their religious ideas to spread across the region, but because, with the invention of writing, the compulsion to humanize the divine—a compulsion rooted in our cognitive processes and crudely expressed at Göbekli Tepe—became actualized. The act of writing about the gods, of being forced to describe in words what the gods are like, not only transformed
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