[thechao]

I'm not sure I've ever seen "literal mindedness" argued like this in recent works? Do you have any papers or books you could point to where an archeologist or historian argues this?

Most of the recent academic work I'm familiar with tends to emphasize the opposite case, tempered by the fact that ancient religion and culture tend to be very alien. Take, for instance, popular reviews by Irving Finkel in his "Noah" book, or Ed Barnhart's work on the Moche, etc.

[HuShifang]

Well, I am a working professional historian of the premodern world, and this is certainly my impression from years of reading Chinese-language primary sources about China during the Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties. Spend some time with the literature, and you'll read how Mohists coupled careful logic and quasi-scientistic reasoning with "ghosts who will punish you if you're bad," about how Han dynasty tomb exterior-door inscriptions talk extensively about how the decedent's family loves them but earnestly hopes to never, ever see them again, because if they did it would mean the decedent left their tomb to punish them for their unfilial conduct. (And you'll read how gingerly the subject of human sacrifice in the distant past, or emperors indulging itinerant "Daoist" rainmakers, to the considerable chagrin of more secular-minded officials, is handled.) I can't point to anything synoptic on the Chinese case -- early China scholars tend to make a lot (frankly too much) out of a little (we don't have that many texts -- but Herbert Fingarette's "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred" was formative for all the early China people I studied with on a more intellectual register. One controversy that gets lots of play: whether Confucius urged performing the rituals "as if" the dead were present, or if they were actually present. Linguistically, the phrasing is entirely open to the latter, even if people like to make the thinking presented in the "Analects" out to be more modern-seeming. At the risk of giving too much of a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, broadly speaking -- this being several decades since Foucault made his mark -- careers get made by either emphasizing the past's surprising lack of alterity or by finding some spectacular, flamboyantly surprising new form of alterity. And the former is rather easier to pull off than the latter.

But, I read about the piles of genitalia in Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and about the god-statues in Trevor Bryce's "Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction."

[thechao]

Sounds like I have reading to do! I guess I really just take exception with the claim that the currently living are any more (or less) literal than our (distant) ancestors. For instance: my wife wants to get two, adjacent, cemetary plots so that we can "be together after we die, and our kids can visit us easily." I want to be mulched. Where I'm living, now, the number of Biblical literalists isn't a "quirky few" its the bulk of the people; these aren't hicks, either: this is one if the wealthier exurbs in the country.