An aretalogy (), from ἀρετή (aretḗ, “virtue”) + -logy,or aretology (from ancient Greek aretê, "excellence, virtue") in the strictest sense is a narrative about a divine figure's miraculous deeds where a deity's attributes are listed, in the form of poem or text, in the first person. The equivalent term in Sanskrit is ātmastuti. There is no evidence that these narratives constituted a clearly defined genre but there exists a body of literature that contained praise for divine miracles. These literary works were usually associated with eastern cults.
An aretalogy (), from ἀρετή (aretḗ, “virtue”) + -logy,or aretology (from ancient Greek aretê, "excellence, virtue") in the strictest sense is a narrative about a divine figure's miraculous deeds where a deity's attributes are listed, in the form of poem or text, in the first person. The equivalent term in Sanskrit is ātmastuti. There is no evidence that these narratives constituted a clearly defined genre but there exists a body of literature that contained praise for divine miracles. These literary works were usually associated with eastern cults.
==Usage== Often each line starts with the standard "I am …". Usually, aretalogies are self praising. They are found in the sacred texts of later Egypt, Mesopotamia and in Greco-Roman times. Aretalogies of Isis would be recited every day by an aretalogist who would have to memorise a huge list of attributes which they would have to recite (Priests and priestesses of Isis had equal rank in the temple). The aretalogies of ancient Egypt provide some the most complete information extant about their deities. Aretalogies are found as early as the Coffin Texts. In a Ptolemaic aretalogy, Isis says about herself:
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).