Is the word God (or it's equivalent) always as old as the civilization's earliest written texts?

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It's not really an answerable question.

A lot of people (particularly I suspect monolinguists) have the mistaken impression that all languages are equivalent, and can be translated to each other with a simple vocabulary matching operation. However, languages don't really work that way. Every word in that table (with the exception of "Allah") actually has meanings disjoint with the English word "God" that are being glossed over. For instance let's take the first word in your table, "Deva". When that word is said in Sanskrit, most of the time something very different is meant than what is meant in English by "God". Sometimes something completely different:

Deva (/ˈdeɪvə/; Sanskrit: देव, Deva) means "shiny", "exalted", "heavenly being", "divine being", "anything of excellence", and is also one of the Sanskrit terms used to indicate a deity in Hinduism. Deva is a masculine term; the feminine equivalent is Devi.

I'll give you another example I'm more familiar with, the Osage word "Wa-Kon-Da". This is a word they used to talk about the divine whole of everything. Everything is part of it and it is part of everything. Literal translations are typically something along the lines of "Great Mystery", or sometimes a shade less literally as "Great Spirit".

This is a concept we modern people would call animist. Anthropomorphizing it (such as giving it a "He" pronoun) makes no sense whatsoever. The best equivalent for the modern popular mind is probably The Force from Star Wars.

However, when the sons and daughters of Europe first encountered the Osage and their other Siouxan kin 2 or 3 centuries back, they were sadly not up on their Star Wars lore, and rather overly fond of their own Christian concepts of the trinitarian God. "Great Spirit" sounded a lot to them like their Holy Spirt, which is of course equivalent to God (... the Father), so naturally they preferred to translate it as God, or perhaps "Great Father". Since agreeing with the white people generally made everyone's lives much easier, the Native Americans largely went along with this. This is why you see supposed Native American sayings all over the USA where they say "Great Spirit" or "Great Father"

Here's one of many many examples I found on the internet. My Osage Grandfather had another framed on his wall when I was a kid.

Cherokee Prayer: Oh Great Spirit who made all races. Look kindly upon the whole human family and take away the arrogance and hatred which separates us from our brothers.

The point here being, the Osages didn't really have a word for God as a Chistian thinks of the term, because that's not how they thought about the divine. Its mostly Christians (including, I can personally attest to, many modern Osage people) who like to think of them as synonyms.

Are there any humans societies we know of that did not have such a concept at all? I did a quick search online, and there is a popular story going around that the Pirahã Peoples have no concept of God, and aren't very receptive to Christian ideas as a result. However, on further investigation, they do believe in sprits inhabiting objects, which is similar to a lot of Animist beliefs, such as Shinto. One could make a pretty good argument that they have no word that is anything whatsoever like "God", but given that pre-contact Siouxan beliefs probably had much more in common with theirs than with Christianity, it doesn't make much sense to put them off in their own category just because their spiritual concepts are tougher to mistranslate into English. Their word for those spirts could probably be translated into that Sanskrit word "Deva" just fine. Shinto or Hindu missionaries would probably have had much better luck with them.


All that being said, the Siouxans clearly did have some conception of a supernatural divinity, as did Sanskrit and the Piraha. So one could ask when that concept was first thought of?

The answer to that of course is we don't know, but it was probably at least as far back as Homo Neanderthalensis, since they have been shown to exhibit ritualized burial and artistic practices that have no practical function.

So it's probably much more accurate to think of spirituality as an inherent feature of our species, rather than as something that was invented by someone somewhere.

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