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08.01.2025

An empirical analysis of polytheism

verfasst von: Laurent Gauthier

Erschienen in: Quality & Quantity

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Abstract

The study of polytheism in sociology and anthropology is not a very well researched subject, apart from works that belong in historical anthropology, carried out by historians. One limitation in many of these is the lack of data, or any form of systematic survey that could inform quantitative analyses. In this paper, we examine acts of worship in polytheistic religion empirically and quantitatively on a large scale, which has not been done before. We study a large volume of ancient Greek epigraphic sources, and focus on the distribution of votive acs across divinities. Who had the most? Who was the least favored? We show that clear patterns emerge in the distributions of worship acts among gods, across city-states using a maximum likelihood estimator. They follow power laws with a high degree of regularity, and do not appear to be driven by particular characterizations of the polities, as various ordinary least-squares regressions indicate.

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Fußnoten
1
The translations are ours.
 
2
Note that a power law with exponential decay is also called a truncated power law, since the exponential term tapers off the distribution’s tail. Also, note that we use the convention whereby the power law’s parameter corresponds to the exponent in the cumulative distribution, not in the density.
 
3
The data also contains divine names associated to epicleses that could have appeared in the sources about a sanctuary or a celebration and hence do not match a precise votive act. We nevertheless keep these datapoints because they can account for the votive act associated to the sanctuary’s dedication or to the celebration in question.
 
4
This required a sustantial amount of manual mapping of the names, as they are not expressed in the same fashion: typically Greek or English for POLIS, and Greek or French for the BDEG.
 
5
The scandal of the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, as related in Livy 39.15, led the Roman Senate to legislate specifically to address problems caused by Dionysiac rituals, as was confirmed through epigraphic sources.
 
6
See Alstott et al. (2014) and also Gillespie (2020). In this instance and for other applications of this methodology we adjust the parameter \(\alpha\) to our convention of referencing the counter cumulative distribution, for consistency.
 
7
As we mentioned earlier, we have had to apply an approximation to capture the number of votive acts related to entries into the BDEG that referred to multiple observations. Distribution fits on the data excluding these observations exhibit the same patterns and lead to the same observations, with only slight changes to the slopes of these distributions.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
An empirical analysis of polytheism
verfasst von
Laurent Gauthier
Publikationsdatum
08.01.2025
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in
Quality & Quantity
Print ISSN: 0033-5177
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7845
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-024-02024-3

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