Died of Forgotten

A name half-god, half-rite, demonized by scripture and remembered chiefly as a furnace for children.

The violent maiden who waded thigh-deep in the blood of warriors to avenge her brother Baal.

The remote sky-father at the very top of heaven, so far above that the prayers eventually stopped reaching him at all.

Grain-god of Mesopotamia turned Philistine patron, whose idol toppled before the Ark and never rose again.

The shepherd-god who died each year so the harvest could live, mourned for millennia and now mourned by no one.

The cunning god of fresh water and wisdom who saved humankind from the flood, now drowned in the silence of his own waters.

Lord of wind and command who once decreed the fates of gods and men, his word now scattered like the air he ruled.

Dread queen of the land of no return, who kept the dead behind seven gates and now keeps only silence.

The queen of love and war who descended into the underworld and returned, yet found no return from the silence that swallowed her temples.

The dragon-slayer who rose to king of all gods in Babylon, now silent under the desert that buried his city.

Death itself, with a lip to earth and a lip to sky, who swallowed Baal and was ground to dust for it.

Divine scribe who held the stylus that recorded every fate, his clay tablets now read by no worshipper.

God of plague, war and the scorching noon sun, who marched into the underworld to rule it, and there fell quiet.

The mountain mother who shaped humankind from clay, her nurturing name long since gone barren in memory.

The all-seeing sun who judged the deeds of every living thing, now blind to the worshippers who no longer look up.

The primordial salt-sea whose slain body became the sky and earth, now as voiceless as the chaos she once was.

Tyre's king-god who died and rose each spring, later mistaken for Heracles and then forgotten entirely.

Carthage's chief goddess, her sign still scratched on stelae long after Rome plowed salt into her city.

Goddess of love and war whose evening star outshone empires, until the cult of Mary inherited her light.

The storm-rider who slew the sea and the death-god, then watched his own worshippers turn to scripture's mockery.

Sidon's healer-god who castrated himself to flee a goddess and was reborn as her divine warmth.

The serpent-skirted mother of gods, killed by her own children, who conceived the sun-god from a ball of feathers.

The hummingbird of the south, born armed to slay his sister, who demanded hearts to keep the sun alive.

Lord of the lowest underworld, a blood-spattered skeleton who guarded the bones from which mankind was remade.

The feathered serpent who gave humanity maize and his own blood, mistaken at the end for the conqueror who killed him.

The smoking mirror who saw every heart, lost a foot to a sea-monster, and watched empires rise to fall at his whim.

The goggle-eyed rain-bringer whose paradise welcomed the drowned, fed by the tears of sacrificed children.

The flayed lord who wore the skin of the sacrificed as new spring growth wears the dead husk of seed.

The golden sun whose son ruled as Inca, his temple stripped of its plates to pay a captive emperor's ransom.

The creator who rose from Lake Titicaca to make the sun, moon, and men, then walked west across the sea and never returned.

The long-nosed rain-god who split the clouds with his lightning-axe, fed by the bodies cast into sacred sinkholes.

The aged creator who taught the Maya writing and the calendar, then was erased by the script of his conquerors.

The jaguar-clawed moon goddess of childbirth and weaving, whose island shrine drew pilgrims across the sea.

The Maya feathered serpent who slithers down the pyramid of Chichen Itza in light each equinox, his worshippers long gone.

Hunter-gatherers of Newfoundland who painted their bodies, canoes and tools with red ochre, gone as a distinct people by June 1829, when Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis in St. John's.

It designed the smartphone in 1994, shipped a device almost nobody could use, and dissolved in 2002 — leaving behind the people who later built the iPhone and Android.

When Marie Smith Jones died in 2008, a language that had been spoken on the Alaskan coast for centuries went silent inside a single human being.

A tongue of the Andaman Islands, perhaps tens of thousands of years old. Its last speaker, Boa Sr, spent her final years unable to speak it with anyone.

The southernmost language on Earth, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego. It gave the world 'mamihlapinatapai' and, in 2022, lost its last fluent speaker.