The ancient Near East included civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Sumer, Assyria, and Levant. Religions in the ancient Near East stem in part from the prehistory of Sumerian civilization in southern Iraq (ca. 5000 BCE), perhaps two millennia before writing or the foundation of urbanism. Thus, the earliest religious traditions reflect evidence of a rural and naturalistic context. The earliest Sumerian pantheon comprised a variety of gods of the heavenly realm (among them, sun, moon, and sky) and also earthly and chthonic (of the underworld) deities. The earliest iconographic evidence does not show the gods with vivid anthropomorphic features, nor is there evidence of a divine order of hierarchy.