page_title: Deity
section_title: Prehistoric
hierarchical_section_title: Deity / Prehistoric
caption_attribution_description: English: Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey Italiano: Donna seduta: originariamente da Çatalhöyük è un reperto neolitico (6000-5500 a.C. ca.), oggi al Museo della Civilizzazione Anatolica, Ankara. Polski: Siedząca kobieta z Çatalhöyük (Turcja), neolit (ok. 6000-5500 pne.), obecnie w Muzeum Cywilizacji Anatolijskich w Ankarze.
context_page_description: A deity or god is a supernatural being considered divine or sacred. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines deity as "a god or goddess", or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness, beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life". A goddess is a female deity.
  Religions can be categorized by how many deities they worship. Monotheistic religions accept only one deity, polytheistic religions accept multiple deities. Henotheistic religions accept one supreme deity without denying other deities, considering them as aspects of the same divine principle; and nontheistic religions deny any supreme eternal creator deity but accept a pantheon of deities which live, die and may be reborn like any other being.
  Although most monotheistic religions traditionally envision their God as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and eternal, none of these qualities are essential to the definition of a "deity" and various cultures conceptualized their deities differently.
context_section_description: Scholars infer the probable existence of deities in the prehistoric period from inscriptions and prehistoric arts such as cave drawings, but it is unclear what these sketches and paintings are and why they were made. Some engravings or sketches show animals, hunters or rituals. It was once common for archaeologists to interpret virtually every prehistoric female figurine as a representation of a single, primordial goddess, the ancestor of historically attested goddesses such as Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Cybele, and Aphrodite; this approach has now generally been discredited. Modern archaeologists now generally recognize that it is impossible to conclusively identify any prehistoric figurines as representations of any kind of deities, let alone goddesses. Nonetheless, it is possible to evaluate ancient representations on a case-by-case basis and rate them on how likely they are to represent deities. The Venus of Willendorf, a female figurine found in Europe and dated to about 25,000 BCE has been interpreted by some as an exemplar of a prehistoric female deity. A number of probable representations of deities have been discovered at 'Ain Ghazal and the works of art uncovered at Çatalhöyük reveal references to what is probably a complex mythology.
caption: Statuette of a nude, corpulent, seated woman flanked by two felines from Çatalhöyük, dating to c. 6000 BCE, thought by most archaeologists to represent a goddess of some kind[72][73]
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