The Greek ones are older than the Roman ones. Jupiter = (Zeus + pater) * a couple of sound changes, where pater = father. It’s my favorite fact.
It’s conceivable that the Greeks also copy and pasted their cannon of deities from whatever was en vogue at the time. I doubt there was a process. A story was created, it somehow stuck in the zeitgeist, and a century later through a game of telephone, Bob was elevated to be god of hemorrhoids.
The Egyptians had a lot of gods for everything. Moses had to beat the poly-deity lifestyle out of the Israelites with stone tablets. The heathens in the North of Europe had concocted their own family of gods. If you go even further afield, you’ll find more and different gods.
They all kind of had a father big boss figure and then a complicated network of subs. If you have no printing press and no microwave ovens, humans naturally gravitated to stories like that to make sense of the world. The systems grew organically.
Couple more facts for you: 1) It’s not just conceivable, it’s incredibly likely that *dyéws-ph₂tḗr is older than both the Greek and Roman pantheons. He’s in the ancient Vedic (Hindi / Indian) religion under a very similar name and even made it into the Norse pantheon as Tiwaz, though it’s harder to tell how and when he ended up amongst Odin et al. He might have been a borrowing because all these other folks kept talking about him and how great he was. (But he is why we have a day called “Tuesday”, so he was still fairly highly regarded, borrowed or not.)
2) Moses probably didn’t exist (his name having the Egyptian ending -ses is apparently a big clue) and stories about him are allegories and/or amalgams of real people whose names had been long forgotten.
The Greek ones are older than the Roman ones. Jupiter = (Zeus + pater) * a couple of sound changes, where pater = father. It’s my favorite fact.
It’s conceivable that the Greeks also copy and pasted their cannon of deities from whatever was en vogue at the time. I doubt there was a process. A story was created, it somehow stuck in the zeitgeist, and a century later through a game of telephone, Bob was elevated to be god of hemorrhoids.
The Egyptians had a lot of gods for everything. Moses had to beat the poly-deity lifestyle out of the Israelites with stone tablets. The heathens in the North of Europe had concocted their own family of gods. If you go even further afield, you’ll find more and different gods.
They all kind of had a father big boss figure and then a complicated network of subs. If you have no printing press and no microwave ovens, humans naturally gravitated to stories like that to make sense of the world. The systems grew organically.
Couple more facts for you: 1) It’s not just conceivable, it’s incredibly likely that *dyéws-ph₂tḗr is older than both the Greek and Roman pantheons. He’s in the ancient Vedic (Hindi / Indian) religion under a very similar name and even made it into the Norse pantheon as Tiwaz, though it’s harder to tell how and when he ended up amongst Odin et al. He might have been a borrowing because all these other folks kept talking about him and how great he was. (But he is why we have a day called “Tuesday”, so he was still fairly highly regarded, borrowed or not.)
2) Moses probably didn’t exist (his name having the Egyptian ending -ses is apparently a big clue) and stories about him are allegories and/or amalgams of real people whose names had been long forgotten.