ABSTRACT
In principle, a workable theory anchored in insights into such a fundamental, panhuman level of cognitive representation carries great promise for the historical study of cultural material. It uses the Assyro-Babylonian 'sun god' ama as a test case, and presents a way of subjecting a body of religious texts from antiquity to a quantitative analysis based on Cognitive Optimum Theory. It follows from the logic of Boyer's scheme that violations of intuitive ontological assumptions come in two forms: As breaches of the assumptions associated with an ontological domain or its superordinate domains, or as transfers from a subordinate domain. The main argument for focusing on divine epithets in order to study conceptions of the divine is that they may give some indication of how the gods were conceptualized in everyday discourse. In the case of Assyro-Babylonian religion, these same mechanisms may have permitted god concepts to move in the other direction, away from the cognitive optimum toward the predominantly intuitive.
