HANDBOOKS ON THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

EDITED BY
MORRIS JASTROW, Jr., PH.D.
Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Pennsylvania

VOLUME II

THE RELIGION OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA

BY

MORRIS JASTROW, Jr., PH.D.
(LEIPZIG)
PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

GINN & COMPANY

BOSTON · NEW YORK · CHICAGO · LONDON

COPYRIGHT, 1893
By MORRIS JASTROW, Jr.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

35.11

The Athenæum Press
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[Transcriber's Note: This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr.]

TO

H. B. J.

MY FAITHFUL COLLABORATOR

PREFACE.

It requires no profound knowledge to reach the conclusion that the time has not yet come for an exhaustive treatise on the religion of Babylonia and Assyria. But even if our knowledge of this religion were more advanced than it is, the utility of an exhaustive treatment might still be questioned. Exhaustive treatises are apt to be exhausting to both reader and author; and however exhaustive (or exhausting) such a treatise may be, it cannot be final except in the fond imagination of the writer. For as long as activity prevails in any branch of science, all results are provisional. Increasing knowledge leads necessarily to a change of perspective and to a readjustment of views. The chief reason for writing a book is to prepare the way for the next one on the same subject.

In accordance with the general plan of this Series[1] of Handbooks, it has been my chief aim to gather together in convenient arrangement and readable form what is at present known about the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians. The investigations of scholars are scattered through a large variety of periodicals and monographs. The time has come for focusing the results reached, for sifting the certain from the uncertain, and the uncertain from the false. This work of gathering the disjecta membra of Assyriological science is essential to future progress. If I have succeeded in my chief aim, I shall feel amply repaid for the labor involved.

In order that the book may serve as a guide to students, the names of those to whose researches our present knowledge of the subject is due have frequently been introduced, and it will be found, I trust, that I have been fair to all.[2] At the same time, I have naturally not hesitated to indicate my dissent from views advanced by this or that scholar, and it will also be found, I trust, that in the course of my studies I have advanced the interpretation of the general theme or of specific facts at various points. While, therefore, the book is only in a secondary degree sent forth as an original contribution, the discussion of mooted points will enhance its value, I hope, for the specialist, as well as for the general reader and student for whom, in the first place, the volumes of this series are intended.

The disposition of the subject requires a word of explanation. After the two introductory chapters (common to all the volumes of the series) I have taken up the pantheon as the natural means to a survey of the field. The pantheon is treated, on the basis of the historical texts, in four sections: (1) the old Babylonian period, (2) the middle period, or the pantheon in the days of Hammurabi, (3) the Assyrian pantheon, and (4) the latest or neo-Babylonian period. The most difficult phase has naturally been the old Babylonian pantheon. Much is uncertain here. Not to speak of the chronology which is still to a large extent guesswork, the identification of many of the gods occurring in the oldest inscriptions, with their later equivalents, must be postponed till future discoveries shall have cleared away the many obstacles which beset the path of the scholar. The discoveries at Telloh and Nippur have occasioned a recasting of our views, but new problems have arisen as rapidly as old ones have been solved. I have been especially careful in this section not to pass beyond the range of what is definitely known, or, at the most, what may be regarded as tolerably certain. Throughout the chapters on the pantheon, I have endeavored to preserve the attitude of being 'open to conviction'—an attitude on which at present too much stress can hardly be laid.

The second division of the subject is represented by the religious literature. With this literature as a guide, the views held by the Babylonians and Assyrians regarding magic and oracles, regarding the relationship to the gods, the creation of the world, and the views of life after death have been illustrated by copious translations, together with discussions of the specimens chosen. The translations, I may add, have been made direct from the original texts, and aim to be as literal as is consonant with presentation in idiomatic English.

The religious architecture, the history of the temples, and the cult form the subject of the third division. Here again there is much which is still uncertain, and this uncertainty accounts for the unequal subdivisions of the theme which will not escape the reader.

Following the general plan of the series, the last chapter of the book is devoted to a general estimate and to a consideration of the influence exerted by the religion of Babylonia and Assyria.

In the transliteration of proper names, I have followed conventional methods for well-known names (like Nebuchadnezzar), and the general usage of scholars in the case of others. In some cases I have furnished a transliteration of my own; and for the famous Assyrian king, to whom we owe so much of the material for the study of the Babylonian and Assyrian religion, Ashurbanabal, I have retained the older usage of writing it with a b, following in this respect Lehman, whose arguments[3] in favor of this pronunciation for the last element in the name I regard as on the whole acceptable.

I have reasons to regret the proportions to which the work has grown. These proportions were entirely unforeseen when I began the book, and have been occasioned mainly by the large amount of material that has been made available by numerous important publications that appeared after the actual writing of the book had begun. This constant increase of material necessitated constant revision of chapters; and such revision was inseparable from enlargement. I may conscientiously say that I have studied these recent publications thoroughly as they appeared, and have embodied at the proper place the results reached by others and which appeared to me acceptable. The work, therefore, as now given to the public may fairly be said to represent the state of present knowledge.

In a science that grows so rapidly as Assyriology, to which more than to many others the adage of dies diem docet is applicable, there is great danger of producing a piece of work that is antiquated before it leaves the press. At times a publication appeared too late to be utilized. So Delitzsch's important contribution to the origin of cuneiform writing[4] was published long after the introductory chapters had been printed. In this book he practically abandons his position on the Sumerian question (as set forth on p. [22] of this volume) and once more joins the opposite camp. As far as my own position is concerned, I do not feel called upon to make any changes from the statements found in [chapter i.], even after reading Weissbach's Die Sumerische Frage (Leipzig, 1898),—the latest contribution to the subject, which is valuable as a history of the controversy, but offers little that is new. Delitzsch's name must now be removed from the list of those who accept Halévy's thesis; but, on the other hand, Halévy has gained a strong ally in F. Thureau-Dangin, whose special studies in the old Babylonian inscriptions lend great weight to his utterances on the origin of the cuneiform script. Dr. Alfred Jeremias, of Leipzig, is likewise to be added to the adherents of Halévy. The Sumero-Akkadian controversy is not yet settled, and meanwhile it is well to bear in mind that not every Assyriologist is qualified to pronounce an opinion on the subject. A special study is required, and but few Assyriologists have made such a study. Accepting a view or a tradition from one's teacher does not constitute a person an authority, and one may be a very good Assyriologist without having views on the controversy that are of any particular value.

Lastly, I desire to call attention to the Bibliography, on which much time has been spent, and which will, I trust, be found satisfactory. In a list of addenda at the end of the book, I have noted some errors that slipped into the book, and I have also embodied a few additions. The copious index is the work of my student, Dr. S. Koppe, and it gives me pleasure to express my deep obligations to him for the able and painstaking manner in which he has carried out the work so kindly undertaken by him. The drawing for the map was made by Mr. J. Horace Frank of Philadelphia.

To my wife more thanks are due than I can convey in words for her share in the work. She copied almost all of the manuscript, and in doing so made many valuable suggestions. Without her constant aid and encouragement I would have shrunk from a task which at times seemed too formidable to be carried to a successful issue. As I lay down my pen after several years of devotion to this book, my last thought is one of gratitude to the beloved partner of my joys and sorrows.

MORRIS JASTROW, Jr.
University of Pennsylvania,
June, 1898.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Set forth in the announcement of the series at the back of the book and in the Editor's Prefatory Note to Volume I.

[2] In the Index, however, names of scholars have only been introduced where absolutely necessary to the subject.

[3] In his work, Shamassum-ukin König von Babylonien, pp. 16-21. Hence, I also write Ashurnasirbal.

[4] Die Entstehung des ältesten Schriftsystems (Leipzig, 1897).

CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS.

[Transcriber's Note: These changes and additions are printed only here; the main text is as it was in the original.]

Page, Line.

[22]. See Preface.

[35], 10. Isin or Nisin, see Lehmann's Shamash-shumukin, I. 77; Meissner's Beiträge zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht, p. 122.

[61]. Bau also appears as Nin-din-dug, i.e., 'the lady who restores life.' See Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, I. 2, Nos. 95, 106, 111.

[74]. On Ã, see Hommel, Journal of Transactions of Victoria Institute, XXVIII. 35-36.

[99], 24. Ur-shul-pa-uddu is a ruler of Kish.

[102], 13. For Ku-anna, see IIIR. 67, 32 c-d.

[102], 24. For another U-mu as a title of Adad, see Delitzsch, Das Babylonische Weltschöpfungsepos, p. 125, note.

[111], 2. Nisaba is mentioned in company with the great gods by Nebopolassar (Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, I. 1. Pl. 32, col. II. 15).

[165]. Note 2. On these proper names, see Delitzsch's "Assyriologische Miscellen" (Berichte der phil.-hist. Classe der kgl. sächs. Gesell. d. Wiss., 1893, pp. 183 seq.).

[488]. Note 1. See now Scheil's article "Recueil de Travaux," etc., XX. 55-59.

[529]. The form Di-ib-ba-ra has now been found. See Scheil's "Recueil de Travaux," etc., XX. 57.

[589]. Note 3. See now Hommel, Expository Times, VIII. 472, and Baudissin, ib. IX. 40-45.

CONTENTS.

[I. Introduction]
[II. The Land and the People]
[III. General Traits of the Old Babylonian Pantheon]
[IV. Babylonian Gods Prior to the Days of Hammurabi]
[V. The Consorts of the Gods]
[VI. Gudea's Pantheon]
[VII. Summary]
[VIII. The Pantheon in the Days of Hammurabi]
[IX. The Gods in the Temple Lists and in the Legal and Commercial Documents]
[X. The Minor Gods in the Period of Hammurabi]
[XI. Survivals of Animism in the Babylonian Religion]
[XII. The Assyrian Pantheon]
[XIII. The Triad and the Combined Invocation of Deities]
[XIV. The Neo-babylonian Period]
[XV. The Religious Literature of Babylonia]
[XVI. The Magical Texts]
[XVII. The Prayers and Hymns]
[XVIII. Penitential Psalms]
[XIX. Oracles and Omens]
[XX. Various Classes of Omens]
[XXI. The Cosmology of the Babylonians]
[XXII. The Zodiacal System of the Babylonians]
[XXIII. The Gilgamesh Epic]
[XXIV. Myths and Legends]
[XXV. The Views of Life After Death]
[XXVI. The Temples and the Cult]
[XXVII. Conclusion]

(From a drawing by Mr. J. HORACE FRANK.)]

THE RELIGION OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA.

CHAPTER I.—INTRODUCTION.

SOURCES AND METHODS OF STUDY.

I.

Until about the middle of the 19th century, our knowledge of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians was exceedingly scant. No records existed that were contemporaneous with the period covered by Babylonian-Assyrian history; no monuments of the past were preserved that might, in default of records, throw light upon the religious ideas and customs that once prevailed in Mesopotamia. The only sources at command were the incidental notices—insufficient and fragmentary in character—that occurred in the Old Testament, in Herodotus, in Eusebius, Syncellus, and Diodorus. Of these, again, only the two first-named, the Old Testament and Herodotus, can be termed direct sources; the rest simply reproduce extracts from other works, notably from Ctesias, the contemporary of Xenophon, from Berosus, a priest of the temple of Bel in Babylonia, who lived about the time of Alexander the Great, or shortly after, and from Apollodorus, Abydenus, Alexander Polyhistor, and Nicolas of Damascus, all of whom being subsequent to Berosus, either quote the latter or are dependent upon him.

Of all these sources it may be said, that what information they furnish of Babylonia and Assyria bears largely upon the political history, and only to a very small degree upon the religion. In the Old Testament, the two empires appear only as they enter into relations with the Hebrews, and since Hebrew history is not traced back beyond the appearance of the clans of Terah in Palestine, there is found previous to this period, barring the account of the migrations of the Terahites in Mesopotamia, only the mention of the Tigris and Euphrates among the streams watering the legendary Garden of Eden, the incidental reference to Nimrod and his empire, which is made to include the capitol cities of the Northern and Southern Mesopotamian districts, and the story of the founding of the city of Babylon, followed by the dispersion of mankind from their central habitation in the Euphrates Valley. The followers of Abram, becoming involved in the attempts of Palestinian chieftains to throw off the yoke of Babylonian supremacy, an occasion is found for introducing Mesopotamia again, and so the family history of the Hebrew tribes superinduces at odd times a reference to the old settlements on the Euphrates, but it is not until the political struggles of the two Hebrew kingdoms against the inevitable subjection to the superior force of Assyrian arms, and upon the fall of Assyria, to the Babylonian power, that Assyria and Babylonia engage the frequent attention of the chronicler's pen and of the prophet's word. Here, too, the political situation is always the chief factor, and it is only incidentally that the religion comes into play,—as when it is said that Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, was murdered while worshipping in the temple dedicated to a deity, Nisroch; or when a prophet, to intensify the picture of the degradation to which the proud king of Babylon is to be reduced, introduces Babylonian conceptions of the nether world into his discourse.[5] Little, too, is furnished by the Book of Daniel, despite the fact that Babylon is the center of action, and what little there is bearing on the religious status, such as the significance attached to dreams, and the implied contrast between the religion of Daniel and his companions, and that of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, loses some of its force by the late origin of the book. The same applies, only in a still stronger degree, to the Book of Judith, in which Nineveh is the center of the incidents described.

The rabbinical literature produced in Palestine and Babylonia is far richer in notices bearing on the religious practices of Mesopotamia, than is the Old Testament. The large settlements of Jews in Babylonia, which, beginning in the sixth century B.C., were constantly being increased by fresh accessions from Palestine, brought the professors of Judaism face to face with religious conditions abhorrent to their souls. In the regulations of the Rabbis to guard their followers from the influences surrounding them, there is frequent reference, open or implied, to Babylonish practices, to the festivals of the Babylonians, to the images of their gods, to their forms of incantations, and other things besides; but these notices are rendered obscure by their indirect character, and require a commentary that can only be furnished by that knowledge of the times which they take for granted. To this difficulty, there must be added the comparatively late date of the notices, which demands an exercise of care before applying them to the very early period to which the religion of the Babylonians may be traced.

Coming to Herodotus, it is a matter of great regret that the history of Assyria, which he declares it was his intention to write,[6] was either never produced, or if produced, lost. In accordance with the general usage of his times, Herodotus included under Assyria the whole of Mesopotamia, both Assyria proper in the north and Southern Mesopotamia. His history would therefore have been of extraordinary value, and since nothing escaped his observant eye and well-trained mind, the religious customs of the country would have come in for their full share of attention. As it is, we have only a few notices about Babylonia and Assyria, incidental to his history of Persia.[7] Of these, the majority are purely historical, chief among which is an epitome of the country's past—a curious medley of fact and legend—and the famous account of the capture of Babylon by Cyrus. Fortunately, however, there are four notices that treat of the religion of the inhabitants: the first, a description of an eight-storied tower, surmounted by a temple sacred to the god Bel; a second furnishing a rather detailed account of another temple, also sacred to Bel, and situated in the same precinct of the city of Babylon; a third notice speaks, though with provoking brevity, of the funeral customs of the Babylonians; while in a fourth he describes the rites connected with the worship of the chief goddess of the Babylonians, which impress Herodotus, who failed to appreciate their mystic significance, as shameful. We have no reason to believe that Ctesias' account of the Assyrian monarchy, under which he, like Herodotus, included Babylonia, contained any reference to the religion at all. What he says about Babylonia and Assyria served merely as an introduction to Persian history—the real purpose of his work—and the few fragments known chiefly through Diodorus and Eusebius, deal altogether with the succession of dynasties. As is well known, the lists of Ctesias have fallen into utter discredit by the side of the ever-growing confidence in the native traditions as reported by Berosus.

The loss of the latter's history of Babylon is deplorable indeed; its value would have been greater than the history of Herodotus, because it was based, as we know, on the records and documents preserved in Babylonian temples. How much of the history dealt with the religion of the people, it is difficult to determine, but the extracts of it found in various writers show that starting, like the Old Testament, with the beginning of things, Berosus gave a full account of the cosmogony of the Babylonians. Moreover, the early history of Babylonia being largely legendary, as that of every other nation, tales of the relations existing between the gods and mankind—relations that are always close in the earlier stages of a nation's history—must have abounded in the pages of Berosus, even if he did not include in his work a special section devoted to an account of the religion that still was practiced in his days. The quotations from Berosus in the works of Josephus are all of a historical character; those in Eusebius and Syncellus, on the contrary, deal with the religion and embrace the cosmogony of the Babylonians, the account of a deluge brought on by the gods, and the building of a tower. It is to be noted, moreover, that the quotations we have from Berosus are not direct, for while it is possible, though not at all certain, that Josephus was still able to consult the works of Berosus, Eusebius and Syncellus refer to Apollodorus, Abydenus, and Alexander Polyhistor as their authorities for the statements of Berosus. Passing in this way through several hands, the authoritative value of the comparatively paltry extracts preserved, is diminished, and a certain amount of inaccuracy, especially in details and in the reading of proper names,[8] becomes almost inevitable. Lastly, it is to be noted that the list of Babylonian kings found in the famous astronomical work of Claudius Ptolemaeus, valuable as it is for historical purposes, has no connection with the religion of the Babylonians.

II.

The sum total of the information thus to be gleaned from ancient sources for an elucidation of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion is exceedingly meagre, sufficing scarcely for determining its most general traits. Moreover, what there is, requires for the most part a control through confirmatory evidence which we seek for in vain, in biblical or classical literature.

This control has now been furnished by the remarkable discoveries made beneath the soil of Mesopotamia since the year 1842. In that year the French consul at Mosul, P. E. Botta, aided by a government grant, began a series of excavations in the mounds that line the banks of the Tigris opposite Mosul. The artificial character of these mounds had for some time been recognized. Botta's first finds of a pronounced character were made at a village known as Khorsabad, which stood on one of the mounds in question. Here, at a short distance below the surface, he came across the remains of what proved to be a palace of enormous extent. The sculptures that were found in this palace—enormous bulls and lions resting on backgrounds of limestone, and guarding the approaches to the palace chambers, or long rows of carvings in high relief lining the palace walls, and depicting war scenes, building operations, and religious processions—left no doubt as to their belonging to an ancient period of history. The written characters found on these monuments substantiated the view that Botta had come across an edifice of the Assyrian empire, while subsequent researches furnished the important detail that the excavated edifice lay in a suburb of the ancient capitol of Assyria, Nineveh, the exact site of which was directly opposite Mosul. Botta's labors extended over a period of two years; by the end of which time, having laid bare the greater part of the palace, he had gathered a large mass of material including many smaller objects—pottery, furniture, jewelry, and ornaments—that might serve for the study of Assyrian art and of Assyrian antiquities, while the written records accompanying the monuments placed for the first time an equally considerable quantity of original material at the disposal of scholars for the history of Assyria. All that could be transported was sent to the Louvre, and this material was subsequently published. Botta was followed by Austen Henry Layard, who, acting as the agent of the British Museum, conducted excavations during the years 1845-52, first at a mound Nimrud, some fifteen miles to the south of Khorsabad, and afterwards on the site of Nineveh proper, the mound Koyunjik, opposite Mosul, besides visiting and examining other mounds still further to the south within the district of Babylonia proper.

The scope of Layard's excavations exceeded, therefore, those of Botta; and to the one palace at Khorsabad, he added three at Nimrud and two at Koyunjik, besides finding traces of a temple and other buildings. The construction of these edifices was of the same order as the one unearthed by Botta; and as at the latter, there was a large yield of sculptures, inscriptions, and miscellaneous objects. A new feature, however, of Layard's excavations was the finding of several rooms filled with fragments of small and large clay tablets closely inscribed on both sides in the cuneiform characters. These tablets, about 30,000 of which found their way to the British Museum, proved to be the remains of a royal library. Their contents ranged over all departments of thought,—hymns, incantations, prayers, epics, history, legends, mythology, mathematics, astronomy constituting some of the chief divisions. In the corners of the palaces, the foundation records were also found, containing in each case more or less extended annals of the events that occurred during the reign of the monarch whose official residence was thus brought to light. Through Layard, the foundations were laid for the Assyrian and Babylonian collections of the British Museum, the parts of which exhibited to the public now fill six large halls. Fresh sources of a direct character were thus added for the study, not only of the historical unfolding of the Assyrian empire, but through the tablets of the royal library, for the religion of ancient Mesopotamia as well.

The stimulus given by Botta and Layard to the recovery of the records and monuments of antiquity that had been hidden from view for more than two thousand years, led to a refreshing rivalry between England and France in continuing a work that gave promise of still richer returns by further efforts. Victor Place, a French architect of note, who succeeded Botta as the French consul at Mosul, devoted his term of service, from 1851 to 1855, towards completing the excavations at Khorsabad. A large aftermath rewarded his efforts. Thanks, too, to his technical knowledge and that of his assistant, Felix Thomas, M. Place was enabled more accurately to determine the architectural construction of the temples and palaces of ancient Assyria. Within this same period (1852-1854) another exploring expedition was sent out to Mesopotamia by the French government, under the leadership of Fulgence Fresnel, in whose party were the above-mentioned Thomas and the distinguished scholar Jules Oppert. The objective point this time was Southern Mesopotamia, the mounds of which had hitherto not been touched, many not even identified as covering the remains of ancient cities. Much valuable work was done by this expedition in its careful study of the site of the ancient Babylon,—in the neighborhood of the modern village Hillah, some forty miles south of Baghdad. Unfortunately, the antiquities recovered at this place, and elsewhere, were lost through the sinking of the rafts as they carried their precious burden down the Tigris. In the south again, the English followed close upon the heels of the French. J. E. Taylor, in 1854, visited many of the huge mounds that were scattered throughout Southern Mesopotamia in much larger numbers than in the north, while his compatriot, William K. Loftus, a few years previous had begun excavations, though on a small scale, at Warka, the site of the ancient city of Erech. He also conducted some investigations at a mound Mugheir, which acquired special interest as the supposed site of the famous Ur,—the home of some of the Terahites before the migration to Palestine. Of still greater significance were the examinations made by Sir Henry Rawlinson, in 1854, of the only considerable ruins of ancient Babylonia that remained above the surface,—the tower of Birs Nimrud, which proved to be the famous seven-staged temple as described by Herodotus. This temple was completed, as the foundation records showed, by Nebuchadnezzar II., in the sixth century before this era; but the beginnings of the structure belong to a much earlier period. Another sanctuary erected by this same king was found near the tower. Subsequent researches by Hormuzd Rassam made it certain that Borsippa, the ancient name of the place where the tower and sanctuaries stood, was a suburb of the great city of Babylon itself, which lay directly opposite on the east side of the Euphrates. The scope of the excavations continued to grow almost from year to year, and while new mounds were being attacked in the south, those in the north, especially Koujunjik, continued to be the subject of attention.

Rassam, who has just been mentioned, was in a favorable position, through his long residence as English consul at Mosul, for extracting new finds from the mounds in this vicinity. Besides adding more than a thousand tablets from the royal library discovered by Layard, his most noteworthy discoveries were the unearthing of a magnificent temple at Nimrud, and the finding of a large bronze gate at Balawat, a few miles to the northeast of Nimrud. Rassam and Rawlinson were afterwards joined by George Smith of the British Museum, who, instituting a further search through the ruins of Koujunjik, Nimrud, Kalah-Shergat, and elsewhere, made many valuable additions to the English collections, until his unfortunate death in 1876, during his third visit to the mounds, cut him off in the prime of a brilliant and most useful career. The English explorers extended their labors to the mounds in the south. Here it was, principally at Abu-Habba, that they set their forces to work. The finding of another temple dedicated to the sun-god rewarded their efforts. The foundation records showed that the edifice was one of great antiquity, which was permitted to fall into decay and was then restored by a ruler whose date can be fixed at the middle of the ninth century B.C. The ancient name of the place was shown to be Sippar, and the fame of the temple was such, that subsequent monarchs vied with one another in adding to its grandeur. It is estimated that the temple contained no less than three hundred chambers and halls for the archives and for the accommodation of the large body of priests attached to this temple. In the archives many thousands of little clay tablets were again found, not, however, of a literary, but of a legal character, containing records of commercial transactions conducted in ancient Sippar, such as sales of houses, of fields, of produce, of stuffs, money loans, receipts, contracts for work, marriage settlements, and the like. The execution of the laws being in the hands of priests in ancient Mesopotamia, the temples were the natural depositories for the official documents of the law courts. Similar collections to those of Sippar have been found in almost every mound of Southern Mesopotamia that has been opened since the days of Rassam. So at Djumdjuma, situated near the site of the ancient city of Babylon, some three thousand were unearthed that were added to the fast growing collections of the British Museum. At Borsippa, likewise, Rawlinson and Rassam recovered a large number of clay tablets, most of them legal but some of them of a literary character, which proved to be in part duplicates of those in the royal library of Ashurbanabal. In this way, the latter's statement, that he sent his scribes to the large cities of the south for the purpose of collecting and copying the literature that had its rise there, met with a striking confirmation. Still further to the south, at a mound known as Telloh, a representative of the French government, Ernest de Sarzec, began a series of excavations in 1877, which, continued to the present day, have brought to light remains of temples and palaces exceeding in antiquity those hitherto discovered. Colossal statues of diorite, covered with inscriptions, the pottery, tablets and ornaments, showed that at a period as early as 3500 B.C. civilization in this region had already reached a very advanced stage. The systematic and thorough manner in which De Sarzec, with inexhaustible patience, explored the ancient city, has resulted in largely extending our knowledge of the most ancient period of Babylonian history as yet known to us. The Telloh finds were forwarded to the Louvre, which in this way secured a collection from the south that formed a worthy complement to the Khorsabad antiquities.

Lastly, it is gratifying to note the share that our own country has recently taken in the great work that has furnished the material needed for following the history of the Mesopotamian states. In 1887, an expedition was sent out under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, to conduct excavations at Niffer,—a mound to the southeast of Babylon, situated on a branch of the Euphrates, and which was known to be the site of one of the most famous cities in this region. The Rev. John P. Peters (now in New York), who was largely instrumental in raising the funds for the purpose, was appointed director of the expedition. Excavations were continued for two years under Dr. Peters' personal supervision, and since then by Mr. John H. Haynes, with most satisfactory success. A great temple dedicated to the god Bel was discovered, and work has hitherto been confined chiefly to laying bare the various parts of the edifice. The foundation of the building goes back to an earlier period than the ruins of Telloh. It survived the varying fortunes of the city in which it stood, and each period of Babylonian history left its traces at Niffer through the records of the many rulers who sought the favor of the god by enlarging or beautifying his place of worship. The temple became a favorite spot to which pilgrims came from all sides on the great festivals, to offer homage at the sacred shrines. Votive offerings, in the shape of inscribed clay cones, and little clay images of Bel and of his female consort, were left in the temple as witnesses to the piety of the visitors. The archives were found to be well stocked with the official legal documents dating chiefly from the period of 1700 to 1200 B.C., when the city appears to have reached the climax of its glory. Other parts of the mound were opened at different depths, and various layers which followed the chronological development of the place were determined.[9] After its destruction, the sanctity of the city was in a measure continued by its becoming a burial-place. The fortunes of the place can thus be followed down to the ninth or the tenth century of our era, a period of more than four thousand years. Already more than 20,000 tablets have been received at the University of Pennsylvania, besides many specimens of pottery, bowls, jars, cones, and images, as well as gold, copper, and alabaster work.

From this survey of the work done in the last decades in exploring the long lost and almost forgotten cities of the Tigris and of the Euphrates Valley, it will be apparent that a large amount of material has been made accessible for tracing the course of civilization in this region. Restricting ourselves to that portion of it that bears on the religion of ancient Mesopotamia, it may be grouped under two heads, (1) literary, and (2) archaeological. The religious texts of Ashurbanabal's library occupy the first place in the literary group. The incantations, the prayers and hymns, lists of temples, of gods and their attributes, traditions of the creation of the world, legends of the deities and of their relations to men, are sources of the most direct character; and it is fortunate that among the recovered portions of the library, such texts are largely represented. Equally direct are the dedicatory inscriptions set up by the kings in the temples erected to the honor of some god, and of great importance are the references to the various gods, their attributes, their powers, and their deeds, which are found at every turn in the historical records which the kings left behind them. Many of these records open or close with a long prayer to some deity; in others, prayers are found interspersed, according to the occasion on which they were offered up. Attributing the success of their undertakings—whether it be a military campaign, or the construction of some edifice, or a successful hunt—to the protection offered by the gods, the kings do not tire of singing the praises of the deity or deities as whose favorites they regarded themselves. The gods are constantly at the monarch's side. Now we are told of a dream sent to encourage the army on the approach of a battle, and again of some portent which bade the king be of good cheer. To the gods, the appeal is constantly made, and to them all good things are ascribed. From the legal documents, likewise, much may be gathered bearing on the religion. The protection of the gods is invoked or their curses called down; the oath is taken in their name; while the manner in which the temples are involved in the commercial life of ancient Babylonia renders these tablets, which are chiefly valuable as affording us a remarkable insight into the people's daily life, of importance also in illustrating certain phases of the religious organization of the country. Most significant for the position occupied by the priests, is the fact that the latter are invariably the scribes who draw up the documents.

The archaeological material furnished by the excavations consists of the temples of the gods, their interior arrangement, and provisions for the various religious functions; secondly, the statues of the gods, demigods, and the demons, the altars and the vessels; and thirdly, the religious scenes,—the worship of some deity, the carrying of the gods in procession, the pouring of libations, the performance of rites, or the representation of some religious symbols sculptured on the palace wall or on the foundation stone of a sacred building, or cut out on the seal cylinders, used as signatures[10] and talismans.

Large as the material is, it is far from being exhausted, and, indeed, far from sufficient for illustrating all the details of the religious life. This will not appear surprising, if it be remembered that of the more than one hundred mounds that have been identified in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates as containing remains of buried cities, only a small proportion have been explored, and of these scarcely more than a half dozen with an approach to completeness. The soil of Mesopotamia unquestionably holds still greater treasures than those which it has already yielded. The links uniting the most ancient period—at present, c. 4000 B.C.—to the final destruction of the Babylonian empire by Cyrus, in the middle of the sixth century B.C., are far from being complete. For entire centuries we are wholly in the dark, and for others only a few skeleton facts are known; and until these gaps shall have been filled, our knowledge of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians must necessarily remain incomplete. Not as incomplete, indeed, as their history, for religious rites are not subject to many changes, and the progress of religious ideas does not keep pace with the constant changes in the political kaleidoscope of a country; but, it is evident that no exhaustive treatment of the religion can be given until the material shall have become adequate to the subject.

III.

Before proceeding to the division of the subject in hand, some explanation is called for of the method by which the literary material found beneath the soil has been made intelligible.

The characters on the clay tablets and cylinders, on the limestone slabs, on statues, on altars, on stone monuments, are generally known as cuneiform, because of their wedge-shaped appearance, though it may be noted at once that in their oldest form the characters are linear rather than wedge-shaped, presenting the more or less clearly defined outlines of objects from which they appear to be derived. At the time when these cuneiform inscriptions began to be found in Mesopotamia, the language which these characters expressed was still totally unknown. Long previous to the beginning of Botta's labors, inscriptions also showing the cuneiform characters had been found at Persepolis on various monuments of the ruins and tombs still existing at that place. The first notice of these inscriptions was brought to Europe by a famous Italian traveler, Pietro della Valle, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. For a long time it was doubted whether the characters represented anything more than mere ornamentation, and it was not until the close of the 18th century, after more accurate copies of the Persepolitan characters had been furnished through Carsten Niebuhr, that scholars began to apply themselves to their decipherment. Through the efforts chiefly of Gerhard Tychsen, professor at Rostock, Frederick Münter, a Danish scholar, and the distinguished Silvestre de Sacy of Paris, the beginnings were made which finally led to the discovery of the key to the mysterious writings, in 1802, by Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a teacher at a public school in Göttingen. The observation was made previous to the days of Grotefend that the inscriptions at Persepolis invariably showed three styles of writing. While in all three the characters were composed of wedges, yet the combination of wedges, as well as their shape, differed sufficiently to make it evident, even to the superficial observer, that there was as much difference between them as, say, between the English and the German script. The conclusion was drawn that the three styles represented three languages, and this conclusion was strikingly confirmed when, upon the arrival of Botta's finds in Europe, it was seen that one of the styles corresponded to the inscriptions found at Khorsabad; and so in all subsequent discoveries in Mesopotamia, this was found to be the case. One of the languages, therefore, on the monuments of Persepolis was presumably identical with the speech of ancient Mesopotamia. Grotefend's key to the reading of that style of cuneiform writing which invariably occupied the first place when the three styles were ranged one under the other, or occupied the most prominent place when a different arrangement was adopted, met with universal acceptance. He determined that the language of the style which, for the sake of convenience, we may designate as No. 1, was Old Persian,—the language spoken by the rulers, who, it was known through tradition and notices in classical writers, had erected the series of edifices at Persepolis, one of the capitols of the Old Persian or, as it is also called, the Achaemenian empire. By the year 1840 the decipherment of these Achaemenian inscriptions was practically complete, the inscriptions had been read, the alphabet was definitely settled, and the grammar, in all but minor points, known. It was possible, therefore, in approaching the Mesopotamian style of cuneiform, which, as occupying the third place, may be designated as No. 3, to use No. 1 as a guide, since it was only legitimate to conclude that Nos. 2 and 3 represented translations of No. 1 into two languages, which, by the side of Old Persian, were spoken by the subjects of the Achaemenian kings. That one of these languages should have been the current speech of Mesopotamia was exactly what was to be expected, since Babylonia and Assyria formed an essential part of the Persian empire.

The beginning was made with proper names, the sound of which would necessarily be the same or very similar in both, or, for that matter, in all the three languages of the Persepolitan inscriptions.[11] In this way, by careful comparisons between the two styles, Nos. 1 and 3, it was possible to pick out the signs in No. 3 that corresponded to those in No. 1, and inasmuch as the same sign occurred in various names, it was, furthermore, possible to assign, at least tentatively, certain values to the signs in question. With the help of the signs thus determined, the attempt was made to read other words in style No. 3, in which these signs occurred, but it was some time before satisfactory results were obtained. An important advance was made when it was once determined, that the writing was a mixture of signs used both as words and as syllables, and that the language on the Assyrian monuments belonged to the group known as Semitic. The cognate languages—chiefly Hebrew and Arabic—formed a help towards determining the meaning of the words read and an explanation of the morphological features they presented. For all that, the task was one of stupendous proportions, and many were the obstacles that had to be overcome, before the principles underlying the cuneiform writing were determined, and the decipherment placed on a firm and scientific basis. This is not the place to enter upon a detailed illustration of the method adopted by ingenious scholars,—notably Edward Hincks, Isidor Löwenstern, Henry Rawlinson, Jules Oppert,—to whose united efforts the solution of the great problems involved is due;[12] and it would also take too much space, since in order to make this method clear, it would be necessary to set forth the key discovered by Grotefend for reading the Old Persian inscriptions. Suffice it to say that the guarantee for the soundness of the conclusions reached by scholars is furnished by the consideration, that it was from small and most modest beginnings that the decipherment began. Step by step, the problem was advanced by dint of a painstaking labor, the degree of which cannot easily be exaggerated, until to-day the grammar of the Babylonian-Assyrian language has been clearly set forth in all its essential particulars: the substantive and verb formation is as definitely known as that of any other Semitic language, the general principles of the syntax, as well as many detailed points, have been carefully investigated, and as for the reading of the cuneiform texts, thanks to the various helps at our disposal, and the further elucidation of the various principles that the Babylonians themselves adopted as a guide, the instance is a rare one when scholars need to confess their ignorance in this particular. At most there may be a halting between two possibilities. The difficulties that still hinder the complete understanding of passages in texts, arise in part from the mutilated condition in which, unfortunately, so many of the tablets and cylinders are found, and in part from a still imperfect knowledge of the lexicography of the language. For many a word occurring only once or twice, and for which neither text nor comparison with cognate languages offers a satisfactory clue, ignorance must be confessed, or at best, a conjecture hazarded, until its more frequent occurrence enables us to settle the question at issue. Such settlements of disputed questions are taking place all the time; and with the activity with which the study of the language and antiquities of Mesopotamia is being pushed by scholars in this country, in England, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Holland, and with the constant accession of new material through excavations and publications, there is no reason to despair of clearing up the obscurities, still remaining in the precious texts that a fortunate chance has preserved for us.

IV.

A question that still remains to be considered as to the origin of the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia, may properly be introduced in connection with this account of the excavations and decipherment, though it is needless to enter into it in detail.

The "Persian" style of wedge-writing is a direct derivative of the Babylonian, introduced in the times of the Achaemenians, and it is nothing but a simplification in form and principle of the more cumbersome and complicated Babylonian. Instead of a combination of as many as ten and fifteen wedges to make one sign, we have in the Persian never more than five, and frequently only three; and instead of writing words by syllables, sounds alone were employed, and the syllabary of several hundred signs reduced to forty-two, while the ideographic style was practically abolished.

The second style of cuneiform, generally known as Median or Susian,[13] is again only a slight modification of the "Persian." Besides these three, there is a fourth language (spoken in the northwestern district of Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and the Orontes), known as "Mitanni," the exact status of which has not been clearly ascertained, but which has been adapted to cuneiform characters. A fifth variety, found on tablets from Cappadocia, represents again a modification of the ordinary writing met with in Babylonia. In the inscriptions of Mitanni, the writing is a mixture of ideographs and syllables, just as in Mesopotamia, while the so-called "Cappadocian" tablets are written in a corrupt Babylonian, corresponding in degree to the "corrupt" forms that the signs take on. In Mesopotamia itself, quite a number of styles exist, some due to local influences, others the result of changes that took place in the course of time. In the oldest period known, that is from 4000 to 3000 B.C., the writing is linear rather than wedge-shaped. The linear writing is the modification that the original pictures underwent in being adapted for engraving on stone; the wedges are the modification natural to the use of clay, though when once the wedges became the standard method, the greater frequency with which clay as against stone came to be used, led to an imitation of the wedges by those who cut out the characters on stone. In consequence, there developed two varieties of wedge-writing: the one that may be termed lapidary, used for the stone inscriptions, the official historical records, and such legal documents as were prepared with especial care; the other cursive, occurring only on legal and commercial clay tablets, and becoming more frequent as we approach the latest period of Babylonian writing, which extends to within a few decades of our era. In Assyria, finally, a special variety of cuneiform developed that is easily distinguished from the Babylonian by its greater neatness and the more vertical position of the wedges.

The origin of all the styles and varieties of cuneiform writing is, therefore, to be sought in Mesopotamia; and within Mesopotamia, in that part of it where culture begins—the extreme south; but beyond saying that the writing is a direct development from picture writing, there is little of any definite character that can be maintained. We do not know when the writing originated, we only know that in the oldest inscriptions it is already fully developed.

We do not know who originated it; nor can the question be as yet definitely answered, whether those who originated it spoke the Babylonian language, or whether they were Semites at all. Until about fifteen years ago, it was generally supposed that the cuneiform writing was without doubt the invention of a non-Semitic race inhabiting Babylonia at an early age, from whom the Semitic Babylonians adopted it, together with the culture that this non-Semitic race had produced. These inventors, called Sumerians by some and Akkadians by others, and Sumero-Akkadians by a third group of scholars, it was supposed, used the "cuneiform" as a picture or 'ideographic' script exclusively; and the language they spoke being agglutinative and largely monosyllabic in character, it was possible for them to stop short at this point of development. The Babylonians however, in order to adapt the writing to their language, did not content themselves with the 'picture' method, but using the non-Semitic equivalent for their own words, employed the former as syllables, while retaining, at the same time, the sign as an ideograph. To make this clearer by an example, the numeral '1' would represent the word 'one' in their own language, while the non-Semitic word for 'one,' which let us suppose was "ash," they used as the phonetic value of the sign, in writing a word in which this sound occurred, as e.g., ash-es. Since each sign, in Sumero-Akkadian as well as in Babylonian, represented some general idea, it could stand for an entire series of words, grouped about this idea and associated with it, 'day,' for example, being used for 'light,' 'brilliancy,' 'pure,' and so forth. The variety of syllabic and ideographic values which the cuneiform characters show could thus be accounted for.

This theory, however, tempting as it is by its simplicity, cannot be accepted in this unqualified form. Advancing knowledge has made it certain that the ancient civilization, including the religion, is Semitic in character. The assumption therefore of a purely non-Semitic culture for southern Babylonia is untenable. Secondly, even in the oldest inscriptions found, there occur Semitic words and Semitic constructions which prove that the inscriptions were composed by Semites. As long, therefore, as no traces of purely non-Semitic inscription are found, we cannot go beyond the Semites in seeking for the origin of the culture in this region. In view of this, the theory first advanced by Prof. Joseph Halévy of Paris, and now supported by the most eminent of German Assyriologists, Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch, which claims that the cuneiform writing is Semitic in origin, needs to be most carefully considered. There is much that speaks in favor of this theory, much that may more easily be accounted for by it, than by the opposite one, which was originally proposed by the distinguished Nestor of cuneiform studies, Jules Oppert, and which is with some modifications still held by the majority of scholars.[14] The question is one which cannot be answered by an appeal to philology alone. This is the fundamental error of the advocates of the Sumero-Akkadian theory, who appear to overlook the fact that the testimony of archaeological and anthropological research must be confirmatory of a philological hypothesis before it can be accepted as an indisputable fact.[15] The time however has not yet come for these two sciences to pronounce their verdict definitely, though it may be added that the supposition of a variety of races once inhabiting Southern Mesopotamia finds support in what we know from the pre-historic researches of anthropologists.

Again, it is not to be denied that the theory of the Semitic origin of the cuneiform writing encounters obstacles that cannot easily be set aside. While it seeks to explain the syllabic values of the signs on the general principle that they represent elements of Babylonian words, truncated in this fashion in order to answer to the growing need for phonetic writing of words for which no ideographs existed, it is difficult to imagine, as Halévy's theory demands, that the "ideographic" style, as found chiefly in religious texts, is the deliberate invention of priests in their desire to produce a method of conveying their ideas that would be regarded as a mystery by the laity, and be successfully concealed from the latter. Here again the theory borders on the domain of archaeology, and philology alone will not help us out of the difficulty. An impartial verdict of the present state of the problem might be summed up as follows:

1. It is generally admitted that all the literature of Babylonia, including the oldest and even that written in the "ideographic" style, whether we term it "Sumero-Akkadian" or "hieratic," is the work of the Semitic settlers of Mesopotamia.

2. The culture, including the religion of Babylonia, is likewise a Semitic production, and since Assyria received its culture from Babylonia, the same remark holds good for entire Mesopotamia.

3. The cuneiform syllabary is largely Semitic in character. The ideas expressed by the ideographic values of the signs give no evidence of having been produced in non-Semitic surroundings; and, whatever the origin of the system may be, it has been so shaped by the Babylonians, so thoroughly adapted to their purposes, that it is to all practical purposes Semitic.

4. Approached from the theoretical side, there remains, after making full allowance for the Semitic elements in the system, a residuum that has not yet found a satisfactory explanation, either by those who favor the non-Semitic theory or by those who hold the opposite view.

5. Pending further light to be thrown upon this question, through the expected additions to our knowledge of the archaeology and of the anthropological conditions of ancient prehistoric Mesopotamia, philological research must content itself with an acknowledgment of its inability to reach a conclusion that will appeal so forcibly to all minds, as to place the solution of the problem beyond dispute.

6. There is a presumption in favor of assuming a mixture of races in Southern Mesopotamia at an early day, and a possibility, therefore, that the earliest form of picture writing in this region, from which the Babylonian cuneiform is derived, may have been used by a non-Semitic population, and that traces of this are still apparent in the developed system after the important step had been taken, marked by the advance from picture to phonetic writing.

The important consideration for our purpose is, that the religious conceptions and practices as they are reflected in the literary sources now at our command, are distinctly Babylonian. With this we may rest content, and, leaving theories aside, there will be no necessity in an exposition of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians to differentiate or to attempt to differentiate between Semitic and so-called non-Semitic elements. Local conditions and the long period covered by the development and history of the religion in question, are the factors that suffice to account for the mixed and in many respects complicated phenomena which this religion presents.

Having set forth the sources at our command for the study of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion, and having indicated the manner in which these sources have been made available for our purposes, we are prepared to take the next step that will fit us for an understanding of the religious practices that prevailed in Mesopotamia,—a consideration of the land and of its people, together with a general account of the history of the latter.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Isaiah, xlv. For the Babylonian views contained in this chapter, see Alfred Jeremias, Die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Vorstellungen vom Leben nach dem Tode, pp. 112-116.

[6] Book i. sec. 184.

[7] Book I. ("Clio"), secs. 95, 102, 178-200.

[8] An instructive instance is furnished by the mention of a mystic personage, "Homoroka," which now turns out to be—as Professor J. H. Wright has shown—a corruption of Marduk. (See Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, x. 71-74.)

[9] The excavations are still being continued, thanks to the generosity of some public-spirited citizens of Philadelphia.

[10] The parties concerned rolled their cylinders over the clay tablet recording a legal or commercial transaction.

[11] Besides those at Persepolis, a large tri-lingual inscription was found at Behistun, near the city of Kirmenshah, in Persia, which, containing some ninety proper names, enabled Sir Henry Rawlinson definitely to establish a basis for the decipherment of the Mesopotamian inscriptions.

[12] The best account is to be found in Hommel's Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, pp. 58-134. A briefer statement was furnished by Professor Fr. Delitzsch in his supplements to the German translation of George Smith's Chaldaean Genesis (Chaldäische Genesis, pp. 257-262). A tolerably satisfactory account in English is furnished by B. T. A. Evetts in his work, New Light on the Bible and the Holy Land, pp. 79-129. For a full account of the excavations and the decipherment, together with a summary of results and specimens of the various branches of the Babylonian-Assyrian literature, the reader may be referred to Kaulen's Assyrien und Babylonien nach den neuesten Entdeckungen (5th edition).

[13] The most recent investigations show it to have been a 'Turanian' language. See Weissbach, Achämeniden Inschriften sweiter Art, Leipzig, 1893.

[14] Besides Delitzsch, however, there are others, as Pognon, Jäger, Guyard, McCurdy and Brinton, who side with Halévy.

[15] See now Dr. Brinton's paper, "The Protohistoric Ethnography of Western Asia" (Proceed. Amer. Philos. Soc., 1895), especially pp. 18-22.

CHAPTER II.

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE.

I.

The Babylonians and Assyrians with whom we are concerned in this volume dwelt in the region embraced by the Euphrates and the Tigris,—the Babylonians in the south, or the Euphrates Valley, the Assyrians to the northeast, in the region extending from the Tigris into the Kurdish Mountain districts; while the northwestern part of Mesopotamia—the northern half of the Euphrates district—was the seat of various empires that were alternately the rivals and the subjects of either Babylonia or Assyria.

The entire length of Babylonia was about 300 miles; the greatest breadth about 125 miles. The entire surface area was some 23,000 square miles, or about the size of West Virginia. The area of Assyria, with a length of 350 miles and a breadth varying from 170 to 300 miles, covered 75,000 square miles, which would make it somewhat smaller than the state of Nebraska. In the strict sense, the term Mesopotamia should be limited to the territory lying between the Euphrates and the Tigris above their junction, in the neighborhood of Baghdad, and extending northwards to the confines of the Taurus range; while the district to the south of Baghdad, and reaching to the Persian Gulf, may more properly be spoken of as the Euphrates Valley; and a third division is represented by the territory to the east of the Tigris, from Baghdad, and up to the Kurdish Mountains; but while this distinction is one that may be justly maintained, in view of the different character that the southern valley presents from the northern plain, it has become so customary, in popular parlance, to think of the entire territory along and between the Euphrates and Tigris as one country, that the term Mesopotamia in this broad sense may be retained, with the division suggested by George Rawlinson, into Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. The two streams, as they form the salient traits of the region, are the factors that condition the character of the inhabitants and the culture that once flourished there. The Euphrates, or, to give the more correct pronunciation, Purat, signifies the 'river' par excellence. It is a quiet stream, flowing along in majestic dignity almost from its two sources, in the Armenian mountains, not far from the town of Erzerum, until it is joined by the Tigris in the extreme south. As the Shatt-el Arab, i.e., Arabic River, the two reach the Persian Gulf. Receiving many tributaries as long as it remains in the mountains, it flows first in a westerly direction, as though making direct for the Mediterranean Sea, then, veering suddenly to the southeast, it receives but few tributaries after it once passes through the Taurus range into the plain,—on the right side, only the Sadschur, on the left the Balichus and the Khabur. From this point on for the remaining distance of 800 miles, so far from receiving fresh accessions, it loses in quantity through the marsh beds that form on both sides. When it reaches the alluvial soil of Babylonia proper, its current and also its depth are considerably diminished through the numerous canals that form an outlet for its waters. Of its entire length, 1780 miles, it is navigable only for a small distance, cataracts forming a hindrance in its northern course and sandbanks in the south. In consequence, it never became at any time an important avenue for commerce, and besides rafts, which could be floated down to a certain distance, the only means of communication ever used were wicker baskets coated within and without with bitumen, or some form of a primitive ferry for passing from one shore to another.

An entirely different stream is the Tigris—a corrupted form of 'Idiklat.' It is only 1146 miles in length, and is marked, as the native name indicates, by the 'swiftness' of its flow. Starting, like the Euphrates, in the rugged regions of Armenia, it continues its course through mountain clefts for a longer period, and joined at frequent intervals by tributaries, both before it merges into the plain and after doing so, the volume of its waters is steadily increased. Even when it approaches the alluvial soil of the south, it does not lose its character until well advanced in its course to the gulf. Advancing towards the Euphrates and again receding from it, it at last joins the latter at Korna, and together they pour their waters through the Persian Gulf into the great ocean. It is navigable from Diabekr in the north, for its entire length. Large rafts may be floated down from Mosul to Baghdad and Basra, and even small steamers have ascended as far north as Nimrud. The Tigris, then, in contrast to the Euphrates, is the avenue of commerce for Mesopotamia, forming the connecting bond between it and the rest of the ancient world,—Egypt, India, and the lands of the Mediterranean. Owing, however, to the imperfect character of the means of transportation in ancient and, for that matter, in modern times, the voyage up the stream was impracticable. The rafts, resting on inflated bags of goat or sheep skin, can make no headway against the rapid stream, and so, upon reaching Baghdad or Basra, they are broken up, and the bags sent back by the shore route to the north.

The contrast presented by the two rivers is paralleled by the traits distinguishing Upper from Lower Mesopotamia. Shut off to the north and northeast by the Armenian range, to the northwest by the Taurus, Upper Mesopotamia retains, for a considerable extent, and especially on the eastern side, a rugged aspect. The Kurdish mountains run close to the Tigris' bed for some distance below Mosul, while between the Tigris and the Euphrates proper, small ranges and promontories stretch as far as the end of the Taurus chain, well on towards Mosul.

Below Mosul, the region begins to change its character. The mountains cease, the plain begins, the soil becomes alluvial and through the regular overflow of the two rivers in the rainy season, develops an astounding fertility. This overflow begins, in the case of the Tigris, early in March, reaches its height in May, and ceases about the middle of June. The overflow of the Euphrates extends from the middle of March till the beginning of June, but September is reached before the river resumes its natural state. Not only does the overflow of the Euphrates thus extend over a longer period, but it oversteps its banks with greater violence than does the Tigris, so that as far north as the juncture with the Khabur, and still more so in the south, the country to both sides is flooded, until it assumes the appearance of a great sea. Through the violence of these overflows, changes constantly occur in the course that the river takes, so that places which in ancient times stood on its banks are to-day removed from the main river-bed. Another important change in Southern Babylonia is the constant accretion of soil, due to the deposits from the Persian Gulf.

This increase proceeding on an average of about one mile in fifty years has brought it about that the two rivers to-day, instead of passing separately into the Gulf, unite at Korna—some distance still from the entrance. The contrast of seasons is greater, as may be imagined, in Upper Mesopotamia than in the south. The winters are cold, with snowfalls that may last for several months, but with the beginning of the dry season, in May, a tropical heat sets in which lasts until the beginning of November, when the rain begins. Assyria proper, that is, the eastern side of Mesopotamia, is more affected by the mountain ranges than the west. In the Euphrates Valley, the heat during the dry season, from about May till November, when for weeks, and even months, no cloud is to be seen, beggars description; but strange enough, the Arabs who dwell there at present, while enduring the heat without much discomfort, are severely affected by a winter temperature that for Europeans and Americans is exhilarating in its influence.

From what has been said, it will be clear that the Euphrates is, par excellence, the river of Southern Mesopotamia or Babylonia, while the Tigris may be regarded as the river of Assyria. It was the Euphrates that made possible the high degree of culture, that was reached in the south. Through the very intense heat of the dry season, the soil developed a fertility that reduced human labor to a minimum. The return for sowing of all kinds of grain, notably wheat, corn, barley, is calculated, on an average, to be fifty to a hundred-fold, while the date palm flourishes with scarcely any cultivation at all. Sustenance being thus provided for with little effort, it needed only a certain care in protecting oneself from damage through the too abundant overflow, to enable the population to find that ease of existence, which is an indispensable condition of culture. This was accomplished by the erection of dikes, and by directing the waters through channels into the fields.

Assyria, more rugged in character, did not enjoy the same advantages. Its culture, therefore, not only arose at a later period than that of Babylonia, but was a direct importation from the south. It was due to the natural extension of the civilization that continued for the greater part of the existence of the two empires to be central in the south. But when once Assyria was included in the circle of Babylonian culture, the greater effort required in forcing the natural resources of the soil, produced a greater variety in the return. Besides corn, wheat and rice, the olive, banana and fig tree, mulberry and vine were cultivated, while the vicinity of the mountain ranges furnished an abundance of building material—wood and limestone—that was lacking in the south. The fertility of Assyria proper, again, not being dependent on the overflow of the Tigris, proved to be of greater endurance. With the neglect of the irrigation system, Babylonia became a mere waste, and the same river that was the cause of its prosperity became the foe that, more effectually than any human power, contributed to the ruin and the general desolation that marks the greater part of the Euphrates Valley at the present time. Assyria continued to play a part in history long after its ancient glory had departed, and to this day enjoys a far greater activity, and is of considerable more significance than the south.

II.

In so far as natural surroundings affect the character of two peoples belonging to the same race, the Assyrians present that contrast to the Babylonians which one may expect from the differences, just set forth, between the two districts. The former were rugged, more warlike, and when they acquired power, used it in the perfection of their military strength; the latter, while not lacking in the ambition to extend their dominion, yet, on the whole, presented a more peaceful aspect that led to the cultivation of commerce and industrial arts. Both, however, have very many more traits in common than they have marks of distinction. They both belong not only to the Semitic race, but to the same branch of the race. Presenting the same physical features, the languages spoken by them are identical, barring differences that do not always rise to the degree of dialectical variations, and affect chiefly the pronunciation of certain consonants. At what time the Babylonians and Assyrians settled in the district in which we find them, whence they came, and whether the Euphrates Valley or the northern Tigris district was the first to be settled, are questions that cannot, in the present state of knowledge, be answered. As to the time of their settlement, the high degree of culture that the Euphrates Valley shows at the earliest period known to us,—about 4000 B.C.,—and the indigenous character of this culture, points to very old settlement, and makes it easier to err on the side of not going back far enough, than on the side of going too far. Again, while, as has been several times intimated, the culture in the south is older than that of the north, it does not necessarily follow that the settlement of Babylonia antedates that of Assyria. The answer to this question would depend upon the answer to the question as to the original home of the Semites.[16] The probabilities, however, are in favor of assuming a movement of population, as of culture, from the south to the north. At all events, the history of Babylonia and Assyria begins with the former, and as a consequence we are justified also in beginning with that phase of the religion for which we have the earliest records—the Babylonian.

III.

At the very outset of a brief survey of the history of the Babylonians, a problem confronts us of primary importance. Are there any traces of other settlers besides the Semitic Babylonians in the earliest period of the history of the Euphrates Valley? Those who cling to the theory of a non-Semitic origin of the cuneiform syllabary will, of course, be ready to answer in the affirmative. Sumerians and Akkadians are the names given to these non-Semitic settlers who preceded the Babylonians in the control of the Euphrates Valley. The names are derived from the terms Sumer and Akkad, which are frequently found in Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions, in connection with the titles of the kings. Unfortunately, scholars are not a unit in the exact location of the districts comprised by these names, some declaring Sumer to be in the north and Akkad in the south; others favoring the reverse position. The balance of proof rests in favor of the former supposition; but however that may be, Sumer and Akkad represent, from a certain period on, a general designation to include the whole of Babylonia. Professor Hommel goes so far as to declare that in the types found on statues and monuments of the oldest period of Babylonian history—the monuments coming from the mound Telloh—we have actual representations of these Sumerians, who are thus made out to be a smooth-faced race with rather prominent cheek-bones, round faces, and shaven heads.[17] He pronounces in favor of the highlands lying to the east of Babylonia, as the home of the Sumerians, whence they made their way into the Euphrates Valley. Unfortunately, the noses on these old statues are mutilated, and with such an important feature missing, anthropologists, at least, are unwilling to pronounce definitely as to the type represented. Again, together with these supposed non-Semitic types, other figures have been found which, as Professor Hommel also admits, show the ordinary Semitic features. It would seem, therefore, that even accepting the hypothesis of a non-Semitic type existing in Babylonia at this time, the Semitic settlers are just as old as the supposed Sumerians; and since it is admitted that the language found on these statues and figures contains Semitic constructions and Semitic words, it is, to say the least, hazardous to give the Sumerians the preference over the Semites so far as the period of settlement and origin of the Euphratean culture is concerned. As a matter of fact, we are not warranted in going beyond the statement that all evidence points in favor of a population of mixed races in the Euphrates Valley from the earliest period known to us. No positive proof is forthcoming that Sumer and Akkad were ever employed or understood in any other sense than as geographical terms.

This one safe conclusion, however, that the Semitic settlers of Babylonia were not the sole occupants, but by their side dwelt another race, or possibly a variety of races, possessing entirely different traits, is one of considerable importance. At various times the non-Semitic hordes of Elam and the mountain districts to the east of Babylonia swept over the valley, and succeeded, for a longer or shorter period, in securing a firm foothold. The ease with which these conquerors accommodated themselves to their surroundings, continuing the form of government which they found there, making but slight changes in the religious practices, can best be accounted for on the supposition that the mixture of different races in the valley had brought about an interchange and interlacing of traits which resulted in the approach of one type to the other. Again, it has recently been made probable that as early at least as 2000, or even 2500 B.C., Semitic invaders entering Babylonia from the side of Arabia drove the native Babylonian rulers from the throne;[18] and at a still earlier period intercourse between Babylonia and distant nations to the northeast and northwest was established, which left its traces on the political and social conditions. At every point we come across evidence of this composite character of Babylonian culture, and the question as to the origin of the latter may, after all, resolve itself into the proposition that the contact of different races gave the intellectual impetus which is the first condition of a forward movement in civilization; and while it is possible that, at one stage, the greater share in the movement falls to the non-Semitic contingent, the Semites soon obtained the intellectual ascendency, and so absorbed the non-Semitic elements as to give to the culture resulting from the combination, the homogeneous character it presents on the surface.

IV.

Our present knowledge of Babylonian history reaches back to the period of about 4000 B.C. At that time we find the Euphrates Valley divided into a series of states or principalities, parcelling North and South Babylonia between them. These states group themselves around certain cities. In fact, the Babylonian principalities arise from the extension of the city's jurisdiction, just as the later Babylonian empire is naught but the enlargement, on a greater scale, of the city of Babylon.

Of these old Babylonian cities the most noteworthy, in the south, are Eridu, Lagash,[19] Ur, Larsa, Uruk, Isin; and in the north, Agade, Sippar, Nippur, Kutha, and Babylon. The rulers of these cities call themselves either 'king' (literally 'great man') or 'governor,' according as the position is a purely independent one, or one of subjection to a more powerful chieftain. Thus the earliest rulers of the district of Lagash, of whom we have inscriptions (c. 3200 B.C.) have the title of 'king,' but a few centuries later Lagash lost its independent position and its rulers became 'patesis,' i.e., governors. They are in a position of vassalage, as it would appear, to the contemporaneous kings of Ur, though this does not hinder them from engaging in military expeditions against Elam, and in extensive building operations. The kings of Ur, in addition to their title as kings of Ur, are styled kings of Sumer and Akkad. Whether at this time, Sumer and Akkad included the whole of Babylonia, or, as seems more likely, only the southern part, in either case, Lagash would fall under the jurisdiction of these kings, if their title is to be regarded as more than an empty boast. Again, the rulers of Uruk are known simply as kings of that place, while those of Isin incorporate in their titles, kingship over Ur as well as Sumer and Akkad.

For this early period, extending from about 4000 B.C. to 2300, the chronology is as yet uncertain. Beyond the titles of the rulers over Babylonian states, there are but few safe indications for determining the succession of dynasties. So much, however, is now certain,—that simultaneous with the governors of Lagash and the older kings of Ur, there was an independent state in Northern Babylonia with its seat at Agade. Indeed the history of this state can now be traced back six centuries beyond that of Lagash. Two rulers of Agade, Naram-Sin (c. 3800 B.C.) and Sargon (or to give his fuller name, Shargani-shar-ali[20]), are the earliest rulers as yet known. These kings of Agade extended their jurisdiction as far north, at least, as Nippur on the one side and Sippar on the other. The city of Babylon itself, if it existed at this period, was therefore included within the territory of these kings; and it follows that if there existed rulers of Babylon at this time, which is doubtful (since the city is not mentioned), they were in the same position of dependency upon the rulers of Agade as the 'governors' of Lagash were upon some greater power. It is not until about the middle of the third millennium before this era, that Babylon comes into prominence.

In the south, as already intimated, the rulers of Lagash and the dynasty of Ur are the earliest of which we have any record. There is every reason to believe that further excavations at Mugheir will bring to light the names of older kings, and the presumption is in favor of regarding the southern states, or at least some of them, earlier than any in the north. The climax in the power of the kings of Ur, the period when they exerted, in fact as well as in name, the sovereignty over all Sumer and Akkad may be fixed approximately at 3000 B.C. How far we shall be able to go beyond that, for the beginnings of this state, must, for the present, remain doubtful, with the chances in favor of a considerably earlier date; and it may be that prior to Ur and Lagash there were dynasties established elsewhere,—at Eridu, perhaps,—the existence of which will be revealed by future discoveries. An independent state with its seat at Uruk follows upon the culminating period of the glory of Ur, and may be regarded, indeed, as an indication that the rulers of Ur had lost their control over the whole of Southern Babylonia. Isin, whose site has not yet been determined, but which lay probably to the north of Uruk, was another political center. Its rulers, so far as we know them, curiously assign the fourth place to the title 'king of Isin,' giving precedence to their control over Nippur, Eridu, and Uruk. We may conclude from this, that at the time when Isin extended its supremacy, the greater luster attaching to the old towns of Nippur and Uruk, was emphasized by the precedence given to these centers over Isin, although the Isin kings are only 'shepherds' and 'merciful lords' over Nippur and Uruk, and not kings.

At a subsequent period, the kings of Ur appear to have regained the supremacy, which was wrested from them by Isin; and the rulers of the latter acknowledge their dependence upon the kings of Ur. This so-called second dynasty of Ur includes Nippur. The kings are proud of calling themselves the guardians of the temple of Bel in Nippur, nominated to the office by the god himself, and reviving an old title of the kings of Agade, style themselves also 'king of the four regions.' Another change in the political horoscope is reflected in the subjection of Ur to a district whose center was Larsa, not far from Ur, and represented by the mound Senkereh. There are two kings, Nur-Rammân (i.e., light of Ramman) and Sin-iddina (i.e., Sin judges), who call themselves guardians of Ur and kings of Larsa, showing that the center of this principality was Larsa, with Ur as a dependent district. That these rulers take up the dominion once held by the kings of Ur is further manifest in the additional title that they give to themselves, as 'kings of Sumer and Akkad,' whereas the omission of the title 'king of the four regions' indicates apparently the exclusion of Agade and Nippur; and with these, probably North Babylonia in general, from their supremacy. The power of Larsa receives a fatal check through the invasion of Babylonia by the Elamites (c. 2350 B.C.).

These variations in official titles are a reflection of the natural rivalry existing between the various Babylonian states, which led to frequent shiftings in the political situation. Beyond this, the inscriptions of these old Babylonian rulers, being ordinarily commemorative of the dedication to a deity, of some temple or other construction—notably canals—or of some votive offering, a cone or tablet, unfortunately tell us little of the events of the time. Pending the discovery of more complete annals, we must content ourselves with the general indications of the civilization that prevailed, and of the relations in which the principalities stood to one another, and with more or less doubtful reconstructions of the sequence in the dynasties. In all of this period, however, the division between North and South Babylonia was kept tolerably distinct, even though occasionally, and for a certain period, a North Babylonian city, like that of Agade and Nippur, extended its jurisdiction over a section bordering on the south and vice versa. It remained for a great conqueror, Hammurabi, the sixth king of a dynasty having its seat in the city of Babylon itself, who about the year 2300 B.C. succeeded in uniting North and South Babylonia under one rule. With him, therefore, a new epoch in the history of the Euphrates Valley begins. Henceforth the supremacy of the city of Babylon remains undisputed, and the other ancient centers, losing their political importance, retain their significance only by virtue of the sanctuaries existing there, to which pilgrimages continued to be made, and through the commercial activity that, upon the union of the various Babylonian districts, set in with increased vigor.

Attention was directed a few years ago by Pognon and Sayce to the fact that the name of Hammurabi, as well as the names of four kings that preceded him, and of a number that followed, are not Babylonian. Sayce expressed the opinion that they were Arabic, and Professor Hommel has recently reënforced the position of Sayce by showing the close resemblance existing between these names and those found on the monuments of Southern Arabia.[21] While no evidence has as yet been found to warrant us in carrying back the existence of the Minean empire in Southern Arabia beyond 1500 B.C., still since at this period, this empire appears in a high state of culture, with commercial intercourse established between it and Egypt, as well as Palestine, the conclusion drawn by Hommel that Babylonia was invaded about 2500 B.C. by an Arabic-speaking people is to be seriously considered. Elam, as we have seen, was constantly threatening Babylonia from the East, and shortly before Hammurabi's appearance, succeeded in putting an end to the dynasty of Larsa. It now appears that the inhabitants of the Euphrates Valley were also threatened by an enemy lodged somewhere in the southwest. Though Hommel's hypothesis still needs confirmation, and may perhaps be somewhat modified by future researches, still so much seems certain: that the great union of the Babylonian states and the supremacy of the city of Babylon itself was achieved not by Babylonians but by foreigners who entered Babylonia from its western (or southwestern) side. The dynasty of which Hammurabi is the chief representative comes to an end c. 2100, and is followed by another known as Shish-Kha,[22] whose rulers likewise appear to be foreigners; and when this dynasty finally disappears after a rule of almost four centuries, Babylonia is once more conquered by a people coming from the northern parts of Elam and who are known as the Cassites.[23] These Cassites, of whose origin, character, and language but little is known as yet, ruled over Babylonia for a period of no less than 576 years; but adapting themselves to the customs and religion of the country, their presence did not interfere with the normal progress of culture in the Euphrates Valley. We may therefore embrace the period of Hammurabi and his successors, down through the rule of the Cassite kings, under one head. It is a period marked by the steady growth of culture, manifesting itself in the erection of temples, in the construction of canals, and in the expansion of commerce. Active relationships were maintained between Babylonia and distant Egypt.

This movement did not suffer an interruption through the invasion of the Cassites. Though Nippur, rather than Babylon, appears to have been the favorite city of the dynasty, the course of civilization flows on uninterruptedly, and it is not until the growing complications between Babylonia and Assyria, due to the steady encroachment on the part of the latter, that decided changes begin to take place.

About 1500 B.C. the first traces of relationship between Babylonia and the northern Mesopotamian power, Assyria, appear. These relations were at first of a friendly character, but it is not long before the growing strength of Assyria becomes a serious menace to Babylonia. In the middle of the thirteenth century, Assyrian arms advance upon the city of Babylon. For some decades, Babylon remains in subjection to Assyria, and although she regains her independence once more, and even a fair measure of her former glory, the power of the Cassites is broken. Internal dissensions add to the difficulties of the situation and lead to the overthrow of the Cassites (1151 B.C.). Native Babylonians once more occupy the throne, who, although able to check the danger still threatening from Elam, cannot resist the strong arms of Assyria. At the close of the twelfth century Tiglathpileser I. secures a firm hold upon Babylonia, which now sinks to the position of a dependency upon the Assyrian kings.

V.

In contrast to Babylonia, which is from the start stamped as a civilizing power, Assyria, from its rise till its fall, is essentially a military empire, seeking the fulfillment of its mission in the enlargement of power and in incessant warfare. Its history may be traced back to about 1800 B.C., when its rulers, with their seat in the ancient city of Ashur, first begin to make their presence felt. The extension of their power proceeds, as in Babylonia, from the growing importance of the central city, and soon embraces all of Assyria proper. They pass on into the mountain regions to the east, and advancing to the west, they encounter the vigorous forces of Egypt, whose Asiatic campaigns begin about the same time as the rise of Assyria. The Egyptians, abetted by the Hittites—the possessors of the strongholds on the Orontes—successfully check the growth of Assyria on this side, at least for a period of several centuries. In the meanwhile, the Assyrian king gathers strength enough to make an attack upon Babylonia.

The conflict, once begun, continues, as has been indicated, with varying fortunes. Occasional breathing spells are brought about by a temporary agreement of peace between the two empires, until at the end of the twelfth century, Assyria, under Tiglathpileser I., secures control over the Babylonian empire. Her kings add to their long list of titles that of 'ruler of Babylonia.' They either take the government of the south into their hands or exercise the privilege of appointing a governor of their choice to regulate the affairs of the Euphrates Valley. From this time on, the history of Babylonia and Assyria may be viewed under a single aspect. The third period of Babylonian history—the second of Assyrian history—thus begins about 1100 B.C., and continues till the fall of Assyria in the year 606 B.C. These five centuries represent the most glorious epoch of the united Mesopotamian empire. During this time, Assyria rises to the height of an all-embracing power. With far greater success than Egypt, she securely established her sovereignty over the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. After severe struggles, the Hittites are overcome, the names of their strongholds on the Orontes changed, in order to emphasize their complete possession by the Assyrians, and the principalities of Northern Syria become tributary to Assyria. Phoenicia and the kingdom of Israel are conquered, while the southern kingdom of Judah purchases a mere shadow of independence by complete submission to the conditions imposed by the great and irresistible monarchy. Far to the northeast Assyria extends her sway, while Babylonia, though occasionally aroused to a resistance of the tyrannical bonds laid upon her, only to be still further weakened, retains a distinctive existence chiefly in name. The culture of the south is the heritage bequeathed by old Babylonia to the north. Babylonian temples become the models for Assyrian architecture. The literary treasures in the archives of the sacred cities of the south are copied by the scribes of the Assyrian kings, and placed in the palaces of the latter. Meanwhile, the capital of Assyria moves towards the north. Ashur gives way under the glorious reign of Ashurnasirbal to Calah, which becomes the capitol in the year 880 B.C.; and Calah, in turn, yields to Nineveh, which becomes, from the time of Tiglathpileser II., in the middle of the eighth century, the center of the great kingdom. Under Ashurbanabal, who rules from 668 to 626 B.C., the climax of Assyrian power is reached. He carries his arms to the banks of the Nile, and succeeds in realizing the dreams of his ancestors of a direct control over the affairs of Egypt. A patron of science and literature, as so many great conquerors, Ashurbanabal succeeds in making Nineveh a literary as well as a military center.

A vast collection of the cuneiform literature of Babylonia is gathered by him for the benefit of his subjects, as he is at constant pains to tell us. The city is further embellished with magnificent structures, and on every side he establishes his sovereignty with such force, that the might of Assyria appears invincible. The fatal blow, dealt with a suddenness that remains a mystery, came from an unexpected quarter. A great movement of wild northern hordes, rather vaguely known as the Cimmerians and Scythians, and advancing towards the south, set in shortly after the death of Ashurbanabal, and created great political disturbances. The vast number of these hordes, their muscular strength, and their unrestrained cruelty, made them a foe which Assyria found as hard to withstand, as Rome the approach of the Vandals and Goths. The sources for our knowledge of the last days of the Assyrian empire are not sufficient to enable us to grasp the details, but it is certain that the successful attempt of the Babylonians to throw off the Assyrian yoke almost immediately after Ashurbanabal's death, was a symptom of the ravages which the hordes made in reducing the vitality of the Assyrian empire. Her foes gained fresh courage from the success that crowned the revolt of Babylonia. The Medes, a formidable nation to the east of Assyria, and which had often crossed arms with the Assyrians, entered into combination with Babylonia, and the two making several united assaults upon Nineveh, under the leadership of Kyaxares, at last succeeded in effecting an entrance. The city was captured and burned to the ground. With the fall of Assyria, a feeling of relief passed over the entire eastern world. A great danger, threatening to extinguish the independence of all of the then known nations of the globe, was averted. The Hebrew prophets living at the time of this downfall, voice the general rejoicing that ensued when they declared, that even the cedars of Lebanon leaped for joy. The province of Assyria proper, fell into the hands of the Medes, but Babylonia, with her independence established on a firm footing, was the real heir of Assyria's spirit. Her most glorious monarch, Nebuchadnezzar II. (604-561 B.C.), seems to have dreamed of gaining for Babylon the position, once held by Nineveh, of mistress of the world. Taking Ashurbanabal as his model, he carried his arms to the west, subdued the kingdom of Judah, and, passing on to Egypt, strove to secure for Babylon, the supremacy exercised there for a short time by Assyrian monarchs. In addition to his military campaigns, however, he also appears in the light of a great builder, enlarging and beautifying the temples of Babylonia, erecting new ones in the various cities of his realm, strengthening the walls of Babylon, adorning the capital with embankment works and other improvements, that gave it a permanent place in the traditions of the ancient world as one of the seven wonders of the universe.

The glory of this second Babylonian empire was of short duration. Its vaulting ambition appears to have overleaped itself. Realizing for a time the Assyrian ideal of a world monarchy, the fall was as sudden as its rise was unexpected. Internal dissensions gave the first indication of the hollowness of the state. Nebuchadnezzar's son was murdered in 560 B.C., within two years after reaching the throne, by his own brother-in-law, Neriglissar; and the latter dying after a reign of only four years, his infant child was put out of the way and Nabonnedos, a high officer of the state, but without royal prerogative, mounted the throne. In the year 550 news reached Babylon that Cyrus, the king of Anzan, had dealt a fatal blow to the Median empire, capturing its king, Astyages, and joining Media to his own district. He founded what was afterwards known as the Persian empire.

The overthrow of the Medes gave Cyrus control over Assyria, and it was to be expected that his gaze should be turned in the direction of Babylonia. Nabonnedos recognized the danger, but all his efforts to strengthen the powers of resistance to the Persian arms were of no avail. Civil disturbances divided the Babylonians. The cohesion between the various districts was loosened, and within the city of Babylon itself, a party arose antagonistic to Nabonnedos, who in their short-sightedness hailed the advance of Cyrus. Under these circumstances, Babylon fell an easy prey to the Persian conqueror. In the autumn of the year 539 Cyrus entered the city in triumph, and was received with such manifestations of joy by the populace, as to make one almost forget that with his entrance, the end of a great empire had come. Politically and religiously, the history of Babylonia and Assyria terminates with the advent of Cyrus; and this despite the fact that it was his policy to leave the state of affairs, including religious observances, as far as possible, undisturbed. A new spirit had, however, come into the land with him. The official religion of the state was that practiced by Cyrus and his predecessors in their native land. The essential doctrines of the religion, commonly known as Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism, presented a sharp contrast to the beliefs that still were current in Babylonia, and it was inevitable that with the influx of new ideas, the further development of Babylonian worship was cut short. The respect paid by Cyrus to the Babylonian gods was a mere matter of policy. Still, the religious rites continued to be practiced as of old in Babylonia and Assyria for a long time, and when the religion finally disappeared, under the subsequent conquests of the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, it left its traces in the popular superstitions and in the ineradicable traditions that survived. But so far as the history of this religion is concerned, it comes to an end with the downfall of the second Babylonian empire.

The period, then, to be covered by a treatment of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians extends over the long interval between about 4000 B.C. and the middle of the sixth century. The development of this religion follows closely the course of civilization and of history in the territory under consideration. The twofold division, accordingly, into Babylonia and Assyria, is the one that suggests itself also for the religion. The beginning, as is evident from the historical sketch given, must be made with Babylonia. It will be seen that, while the rites there and in Assyria are much the same, the characters of the gods as they developed in the south were quite different from those of the north; and, again, it was inevitable that the Assyrian influence manifest in the second Babylonian empire should give to the religion of the south at this time, some aspects which were absent during the days of the old Babylonian empire. In Babylonia, again, the political changes form the basis for the transformation to be observed in the position occupied by the deities at different periods; and the same general remark applies to the deities peculiar to Assyria, who must be studied in connection with the course pursued by the Assyrian empire.

The division of the subject which thus forces itself upon us is twofold, (1) geographical, and (2) historical.

It will be necessary to treat first of the beliefs and pantheon developed during the first two periods of Babylonian history, down to the practical conquest of Babylonia by Assyria. Then, turning to Assyria, the traits of the pantheon peculiar to Upper Mesopotamia will be set forth. In the third place, the history of the religion will be traced in Babylonia during the union of the Babylonian-Assyrian empire; and, lastly, the new phases of that religion which appeared in the days of the second Babylonian empire. Turning after this to other aspects of the religion, it will be found that the religious rites were only to a small degree influenced by political changes, while the literature and religious art are almost exclusively products of Babylonia. In treating of these subjects, accordingly, no geographical divisions are called for, in setting forth their chief features.

The general estimate to be given at the close of the volume will furnish an opportunity of making a comparison between the Babylonian-Assyrian religion and other religions of the ancient world, with a view to determining what foreign influences may be detected in it, as well as ascertaining the influence it exerted upon others.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] I may be permitted to refer to a publication by Dr. Brinton and myself, The Cradle of the Semites (Philadelphia, 1889), in which the various views as to this home are set forth.

[17] It has been suggested that since the statues of Telloh are those of the priest-kings, only the priestly classes shaved their hair off.

[18] See an interesting discussion of the question by Professor Hommel, "Arabia according to the Latest Discoveries and Researches."—Sunday School Times, 1895, nos. 41 and 43.

[19] Also known as Shirpurla which Jensen (Keils Bibl. 3, 1, 5) thinks was the later name.

[20] See Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, i. 16-18. Naram-Sin signifies 'beloved of the god Sin' (the moon-god); Shargani-shar-ali—'the legitimate king, king of the city.' The excavations of the University of Pennsylvania have cast new light upon this most ancient period of Babylonian history. It is now known that the temple of Bel at Nippur antedates the reign of Naram-Sin, and in the further publications of the University, we may look for material which will enable us to pass beyond the period of Sargon.

[21] Sunday School Times, 1895, no. 41.

[22] For various views regarding the name and character of this dynasty see Winckler, Geschichte, pp. 67, 68, 328; Hilprecht, Assyriaca, pp. 25-28, 102, 103; Winckler, Altorientalische Forschungen, I. 275-277, and Rogers, Outlines, 32, note.

[23] See Delitzsch, Die Sprache der Kossaer.

CHAPTER III.

GENERAL TRAITS OF THE OLD BABYLONIAN PANTHEON.

The Babylonian religion in the oldest form known to us may best be described as a mixture of local and nature cults. Starting with that phase of religious beliefs known as Animism, which has been ascertained to be practically universal in primitive society, the Babylonians, from ascribing life to the phenomena of nature, to trees, stones, and plants, as well as to such natural events, as storm, rain, and wind, and as a matter of course to the great luminaries and to the stars—would, on the one hand, be led to invoke an infinite number of spirits who were supposed to be, in some way, the embodiment of the life that manifested itself in such diverse manners; and yet, on the other hand, this tendency would be restricted by the experience which would point to certain spirits, as exercising a more decisive influence upon the affairs of man than others. The result of this would be to give a preponderance to the worship of the sun and moon and the water, and of such natural phenomena as rain, wind, and storms, with their accompaniment of thunder and lightning, as against the countless sprites believed to be lurking everywhere. The latter, however, would not for this reason be ignored altogether. Since everything was endowed with life, there was not only a spirit of the tree which produced the fruit, but there were spirits in every field. To them the ground belonged, and upon their mercy depended the success or failure of the produce. To secure the favor of the rain and the sun was not sufficient to the agriculturist; he was obliged to obtain the protection of the guardian spirits of the soil, in order to be sure of reaping the fruit of his labors. Again, when through association, the group of arable plots grew into a hamlet, and then through continued growth into a town, the latter, regarded as a unit by virtue of its political organization under a chief ruler, would necessarily be supposed to have some special power presiding over its destinies, protecting it from danger, and ready to defend the rights and privileges of those who stood immediately under its jurisdiction. Each Babylonian city, large or small, would in this way obtain a deity devoted to its welfare, and as the city grew in extent, absorbing perhaps others lying about, and advancing in this way to the dignity of a district, the city's god would correspondingly increase his jurisdiction. As it encroached upon the domain of other local deities, it would by conquest annihilate the latter, or reduce them to a subservient position. The new regime would be expressed by making the conquered deity, the servant of the victorious, or the two might be viewed in the relation of father to son; and again, in the event of a peaceful amalgamation of two cities or districts, the protecting deities might join hands in a compact, mirroring the partnership represented by the conjugal tie. In this way, there arose in Babylon a selection, as it were, out of an infinite variety of personified forces, manifest or concealed, that at one time may have been objects of worship. The uniformity of the spirit world, which is the characteristic trait of primitive Animism, gave way to a differentiation regulated by the political development and the social growth of Babylonia. The more important natural forces became gods, and the inferior ones were, as a general thing, relegated to the secondary position of mere sprites, like the jinns, in Arabic beliefs. Only in the case of the guardian spirit of an entire city or district, would there result—and even this not invariably—an elevation to the grade of deity, in the proper sense of the word. In many cases, however, this guardian deity might be a heavenly body, as the moon or sun or stars, all of which were supposed to regulate the fate of mankind or some force of nature, as the rain or the storm; and even if this were not originally the case, the protecting deity might, in the course of time, become identified with one of the forces of nature; and, if for no other reason, simply because of the prominence which the worship of the force in question acquired in the place. As a consequence, the mixture of local and nature cults is so complete that it is often impossible to distinguish the one from the other. It is hard in many cases to determine whether the deity which is identified with a certain city was originally a mere local spirit watching over a certain restricted territory, or a personification of a natural force associated in some way with a certain section of Babylonia.

CHAPTER IV.

BABYLONIAN GODS PRIOR TO THE DAYS OF HAMMURABI.

With these preliminary remarks, we may turn, as the first part of our subject, to a consideration of the oldest of the Babylonian gods. Our main sources are the inscriptions of the old Babylonian rulers, above referred to. These are, in most cases, of a dedicatory character, being inscribed on statues, cylinders, or tablets, placed in the temples or on objects—cones, knobs, stones—presented as votive offerings to some god. Besides the inscriptions of the rulers, we have those of officials and others. Many of these are likewise connected directly or indirectly with religious worship.

The advantage of the historical texts over the purely religious ones consists in their being dated, either accurately or approximately. For this reason, the former must be made the basis for a rational theory of the development of the Babylonian pantheon through the various periods above instanced. The data furnished by the religious texts can be introduced only, as they accord with the facts revealed by the historical inscriptions in each period.

Taking up the group of inscriptions prior to the union of the Babylonian States under Hammurabi, i.e., prior to 2300 B.C., we find these gods mentioned: Bel, Belit, Nin-khar-sag, Nin-girsu, also appearing as Shul-gur, Bau, Ga-tum-dug, Ea, Nin-a-gal, Nergal, Shamash, under various forms Â, who is the consort of Shamash, Nannar or Sin, Nanâ, Anunit, Ishtar, Innanna or Ninni, Ninâ, Nin-mar, Dun-shagga, Gal-alim, Anu, Nin-gish-zida, Nin-si-a, Nin-shakh, Dumu-zi, Lugal-banda and his consort Nin-gul, Dumuzi-zu-aba, Nisaba, Ku(?)anna, Lugal-erima(?), Dagan, Ishum, Umu, Pa-sag, Nin-e-gal, Nin-gal, Shul(or Dun)-pa-uddu, and Nin-akha-kuddu.

Regarding these names, it may be said at once that the reading, in many cases, is to be looked upon as merely provisional. Written, as they usually are, in the ideographic "style," the phonetic reading can only be determined when the deity in question can be identified with one, whose name is written at some place phonetically, or when the ideographs employed are so grouped as to place the phonetic reading beyond doubt. The plan to be followed in this book will be to give the ideographic reading[24] as provisional wherever the real pronunciation is unknown or uncertain. The ideographic designation of a deity is of great value, inasmuch as the ideographs themselves frequently reveal the character of the god, though of course the additional advantage is obvious when the name appears in both the ideographic and the phonetic writing. It will, therefore, form part of a delineation of the Babylonian pantheon to interpret the picture, as it were, under which each deity is viewed.

En-lil or Bel.

Taking up the gods in the order named, the first one, Bel, is also the one who appears on the oldest monuments as yet unearthed—the inscriptions of Nippur. His name is, at this time, written invariably as En-lil. In the Babylonian theology, he is 'the lord of the lower world.' He represents, as it were, the unification of the various forces whose seat and sphere of action is among the inhabited parts of the globe, both on the surface and beneath, for the term 'lower world' is here used in contrast to the upper or heavenly world. Such a conception manifestly belongs to the domain of abstract thought, and it may be concluded, therefore, that either the deity belongs to an advanced stage of Babylonian culture, or that the original view of the deity was different from the one just mentioned. The latter is the case. Primarily, the ideograph Lil is used to designate a 'demon' in general, and En-lil is therefore the 'chief demon.' Primitive as such a conception is, it points to some system of thought that transcends primitive Animism, which is characterized rather by the equality accorded to all spirits. The antiquity of the association of En-lil with Nippur justifies the conclusion that we have before us a local deity who, originally the protecting spirit merely, of a restricted territory, acquires the position of 'chief demon' as the town of Nippur grows to be the capitol of a large and powerful district. The fame and sanctity of Nippur survives political vicissitudes; and, indeed, in proportion as Nippur loses political prestige, the great deity of the place is released from the limitations due to his local origin and rises to the still higher dignity of a great power whose domain is the entire habitable universe. As the 'lord of the lower world,' En-lil is contrasted to a god Anu, who presides over the heavenly bodies. The age of Sargon (3800 B.C.), in whose inscriptions En-lil already occurs, is one of considerable culture, as is sufficiently evidenced by the flourishing condition of art, and there can therefore be no objection against the assumption that even at this early period, a theological system should have been evolved which gave rise to beliefs in great powers whose dominion embraces the 'upper' and 'lower' worlds. It was because of this wide scope of his power that he became known as Bel, i.e., the lord par excellence; and it is equally natural to find his worship spread over the whole of Babylonia. In the south, the patron deity of Lagash is designated by Gudea as "the mighty warrior of Bel," showing the supremacy accorded to the latter. A temple to En-lil at Lagash, and known as E-adda, 'house of the father,' by virtue of the relationship existing between the god of Nippur and Nin-girsu, is mentioned by Uru-kagina. The temple is described as a lofty structure 'rising up to heaven.' In the north, Nippur remains the place where his worship acquired the greatest importance, so that Nippur was known as the "land of Bel." The temple sacred to him at that place was a great edifice, famous throughout Babylonian history as E-Kur, i.e., mountain house, in the construction of which, a long line of Babylonian rulers took part. From Naram-Sin, ruler of Agade, on through the period of Cassite rule, the kings of Nippur proudly include in their titles that of 'builder of the Temple of Bel at Nippur,' measuring their attachment to the deity by the additions and repairs made to his sacred edifice.[25] Besides the kings of Agade, the rulers of other places pay their devotions to Bel of Nippur. So, a king of Kish, whose name is read Alu-usharshid by Professor Hilprecht,[26] brings costly vases of marble and limestone from Elam and offers them to Bel as a token of victory; and this at a period even earlier than Sargon. Even when En-lil is obliged to yield a modicum of his authority to the growing supremacy of the patron deity of the city of Babylon, the highest tribute that can be paid to the latter, is to combine with his real name, Marduk, the title of "Bel," which of right belongs to En-lil. We shall see how this combination of En-lil, or Bel, with Marduk reflects political changes that took place in the Euphrates Valley; and it is a direct consequence of this later association of the old Bel of Nippur with the chief god of Babylon, that the original traits of the former become obscured in the historical and religious texts. Dimmed popular traditions, which will be set forth in their proper place, point to his having been at one time regarded as a powerful chieftain armed with mighty weapons, but engaged in conflicts for the ultimate benefit of mankind. On the whole, he is a beneficent deity, though ready to inflict severe punishment for disobedience to his commands. We must distinguish, then, in the case of En-lil, at least four phases:

1. His original rôle as a local deity;

2. The extension of his power to the grade of a great 'lord' over a large district;

3. Dissociation from local origins to become the supreme lord of the lower world; and

4. The transfer of his name and powers as god of Nippur to Marduk, the god of Babylon.

The last two phases can best be set forth when we come to the period, marked by the political supremacy of the city of Babylon. It is sufficient, at this point, to have made clear his position as god of Nippur.

Nin-lil or Belit.

The consort of En-lil is Nin-Lil, the 'mistress of the lower world.' She is known also as Belit, the feminine form to Bel, i.e., the lady par excellence. She, too, had her temple at Nippur, the age of which goes back, at least, to the first dynasty of Ur. But the glory of the goddess pales by the side of her powerful lord. She is naught but a weak reflection of Bel, as in general the consorts of the gods are. Another title by which this same goddess was known is

Nin-khar-sag.[27]

which means the 'lady of the high or great mountain.' The title may have some reference to the great mountain where the gods were supposed to dwell, and which was known to Babylonians as the 'mountain of the lands.' Bel, as the chief of the gods, is more particularly associated with this mountain. Hence his temple is called the 'mountain house.' From being regarded as the inhabitant of the mountain, he comes to be identified with the mountain itself. Accordingly, he is sometimes addressed as the "great mountain,"[28] and his consort would therefore be appropriately termed 'the lady of the great mountain.' Besides the temple at Nippur, Belit, as Nin-khar-sag, had a sanctuary at Girsu, one of the quarters at Lagash (see under Nin-girsu), the earliest mention of which occurs on an inscription of Ur-Bau. The latter calls the goddess 'the mother of the gods,' which further establishes her identity with the consort of Bel. Entemena, another governor of Lagash, places his domain under the protection of Nin-khar-sag. The worship at Nippur, however, remained most prominent. The continued popularity of her cult is attested by the fortress Dur-zakar, which a later king, Samsu-iluna (c. 2200), erected in her honor.

Nin-girsu.

In the inscriptions of Gudea and of his time, the god most prominently mentioned is the "Lord of Girsu." Girsu itself, as the inscriptions show, is one of the four sections into which the capitol city of Lagash was divided. It was there that the temple stood which was sacred to the patron deity, and we may conclude from this that Girsu is the oldest part of the city. Afterwards, Lagash became the general name for the capitol through being the quarter where the great palace of the king was erected. That Girsu was once quite distinct from Lagash is also evident from the title of "king of Girsu," with which a certain Uru-kagina, who is to be placed somewhat before Gudea, contents himself. The other three quarters, all of which were originally independent cities, are Uru-azagga, Ninâ, and apparently Gish-galla.[29]

Nin-girsu is frequently termed the warrior of Bel,—the one who in the service of the 'lord of the lower world,' appears in the thick of the fight, to aid the subjects of Bel. In this rôle, he is identical with a solar deity who enjoys especial prominence among the warlike Assyrians, whose name is provisionally read Nin-ib, but whose real name may turn out to be Adar.[30] The rulers of Lagash declare themselves to have been chosen for the high office by Nin-girsu, and as if to compensate themselves for the degradation implied in being merely patesis, or governors, serving under some powerful chief, they call themselves the patesis of Nin-girsu, implying that the god was the master to whom they owed allegiance. The temple sacred to him at Girsu was called E-ninnu, and also by a longer name that described the god as the one 'who changes darkness into light,'—the reference being to the solar character of the god Nin-ib with whom Nin-girsu is identified. In this temple, Gudea and other rulers place colossal statues of themselves, but temper the vanity implied, by inscribing on the front and back of these statues, an expression of their devotion to their god. To Nin-girsu, most of the objects found at Tell-loh are dedicated; conspicuous among which are the many clay cones, that became the conventional objects for votive offerings. There was another side, however, to his nature, besides the belligerent one. As the patron of Lagash, he also presided over the agricultural prosperity of the district. In this rôle he is addressed as Shul-gur or Shul-gur-an, i.e., the "god of the corn heaps"; Entemena and his son Enanna-tuma in erecting a kind of storehouse which they place under the protection of Nin-girsu, declare that their god is Shul-gur;[31] and an old hymn[32] identifies him with Tammuz, the personification of agricultural activity. Such a combination of apparently opposing attributes is a natural consequence of the transformation of what may originally have been the personification of natural forces, into local deities. Each field had its protecting spirit, but for the city as a whole, a local deity, whose rule mirrored the control of the human chief over his subjects, alone was available. To him who watched over all things pertaining to the welfare of the territory coming under his jurisdiction, various attributes, as occasion required, were ascribed, and quite apart from his original character, the god could thus be regarded, as the warrior and the peaceful husbandman at the same time.

Bau.

Perhaps the most prominent of the goddesses in the ancient Babylonian period was Bau. One of the rulers of Lagash has embodied the name of the goddess in his name, calling himself Ur-Bau. It is natural, therefore, to find him more especially devoted to the worship of this deity. He does not tire of singing her praises, and of speaking of the temple he erected in her honor. Still, Ur-Bau does not stand alone in his devotion; Uru-kagina, Gudea, and others refer to Bau frequently, while in the incantation texts, she is invoked as the great mother, who gives birth to mankind and restores the body to health. In the old Babylonian inscriptions she is called the chief daughter of Anu, the god of heaven. Among her titles, the one most frequently given is that of 'good lady.' She is the 'mother' who fixes the destinies of men and provides 'abundance' for the tillers of the soil. Gudea calls her his mistress, and declares that it is she who "fills him with speech,"—a phrase whose meaning seems to be that to Bau he owes the power he wields. Locally, she is identified with Uru-azagga (meaning 'brilliant town'), a quarter of Lagash; and it was there that her temple stood. As a consequence, we find her in close association with Nin-girsu, the god of Girsu. We may indeed go further and assume that Girsu and Uru-azagga are the two oldest quarters of the city, the combination of the two representing the first natural steps in the development of the principality, afterwards known as Lagash, through the addition of other quarters[33]. She is indeed explicitly called the consort of Nin-girsu; and this relation is implied also, in the interesting phrase used by Gudea, who presents gifts to Bau in the name of Nin-girsu, and calls them 'marriage gifts'.[34] It is interesting to find, at this early period, the evidence for the custom that still prevails in the Orient, which makes the gifts of the bridegroom to his chosen one, an indispensable formality.[35] These gifts were offered on the New Year's Day, known as Zag-muk, and the importance of the worship of Bau is evidenced by the designation of this day, as the festival of Bau.

The offerings, themselves, consist of lambs, sheep, birds, fish, cream, besides dates and various other fruits. When Uru-azagga becomes a part of Lagash, Bau's dignity is heightened to that of 'mother of Lagash.' As the consort of Ningirsu, she is identified with the goddess Gula, the name more commonly applied to the 'princely mistress' of Nin-ib, whose worship continues down to the days of the neo-Babylonian monarchy.

It is quite certain, however, that Bau is originally an independent goddess, and that the association of Uru-azagga and Girsu[36] lead to her identification with Gula. Regarding her original nature, a certain index is her character as "daughter of Anu." Anu being the god of heaven, Bau must be sought in the upper realm of personified forces, rather than elsewhere; but exactly which one she is, it is difficult to say. Hommel, indeed,[37] is of opinion that she is the personified watery depth, the primitive chaos which has only the heavens above it; but in giving this explanation, he is influenced by the desire to connect the name of Bau with the famous term for chaos in Genesis, Tohu-wa-bohu. There is, however, no proof whatsoever that Bau and Bohu have anything to do with one another. A goddess who can hardly be distinguished from Bau is

Ga-tum-dug.[38]

Indeed, from the fact that she is also the 'mother of Lagash,' it might seem that this is but another name for Bau. However, elsewhere, in two lists of deities invoked by Gudea (Inscr. B, col. ii. 17), Ga-tum-dug is given a separate place by the side of Bau, once placed before and once after the latter; and it is clear therefore that she was originally distinct from Bau. For Gudea, Ga-tum-dug is the mother who produced him. He is her servant and she is his mistress. Lagash is her beloved city, and there he prepares for her a dwelling-place, which later rulers, like Entena, embellish. She is called the 'brilliant' (Azag), but as this title is merely a play upon the element found in the city, Uru-azagga, sacred to Bau, not much stress is to be laid upon this designation. Unfortunately, too, the elements composing her name are not clear,[39] and it must be borne in mind that the reading is purely provisional. So much, at least, seems certain: that Bau and Ga-tum-dug are two forms under which one and the same natural element was personified. Bau is called in the incantation texts, the mother of Ea. The latter being distinctly a water god, we may conclude that in some way, Bau is to be connected with water as a natural element. The conjecture may be hazarded that she personifies originally the waters of the upper realm—the clouds. Since Ea, who is her son, represents the waters of the lower realm, the relation of mother and son reflects perhaps a primitive conception of the origin of the deep, through the descent of the upper waters. When we come to the cosmogony of the Babylonians, it will be seen that this conception of a distinction between the two realms of waters is a fundamental one. This character as a spirit of the watery elements is shared by others of the goddesses appearing in the old Babylonian inscriptions.[40]

En-ki or Ea.

This god, who, as we shall see, becomes most prominent in the developed form of Babylonian theology, does not occupy the place one should expect in the early Babylonian inscriptions. Ur-Bau erects a sanctuary to Ea, at Girsu. Another of the governors of Lagash calls himself, priest of Ea, describing the god as the "supreme councillor." From him, the king receives "wisdom."[41] A ruler, Rim-Sin, of the dynasty of Larsa, associates Ea with Bel, declaring that these "great gods" entrusted Uruk into his hands with the injunction to rebuild the city that had fallen in ruins. The ideograms, with which his name is written, En-ki, designate him as god of that 'which is below,'—the earth in the first place; but with a more precise differentiation of the functions of the great gods, Ea becomes the god of the waters of the deep. When this stage of belief is reached, Ea is frequently associated with Bel, who, it will be recalled, is the 'god of the lower region,' but who becomes the god of earth par excellence. When, therefore, Bel and Ea are invoked, it is equivalent, in modern parlance, to calling upon earth and water; and just as Bel is used to personify, as it were, the unification of the earthly forces, so Ea becomes, in a comprehensive sense, the watery deep. Ea and Bel assume therefore conspicuous proportions in the developed Babylonian cosmogony and theology. In the cosmogony, Bel is the creator and champion of mankind, and Ea is the subterranean deep which surrounds the earth, the source of wisdom and culture; in the theology, Ea and Bel are pictured in the relation of father and son, who, in concert, are appealed to, when misfortune or disease overtakes the sons of man; Ea, the father, being the personification of knowledge, and Bel, the practical activity that 'emanates from wisdom,' as Professor Sayce,[42] adopting the language of Gnosticism, aptly puts it; only that, as already suggested, Marduk assumes the rôle of the older Bel.

Confining ourselves here to the earlier phases of Ea, it seems probable that he was originally regarded as the god of Eridu,—one of the most ancient of the holy cities of Southern Babylonia, now represented by Abu-Shahrein, and which once stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Ur-Bau expressly calls the god the 'king of Eridu.' The sacredness of the place is attested by Gudea, who boasts of having made the temple of Nin-girsu as sacred as Eridu.[43] It is over this city that Ea watches. The importance of the Persian Gulf to the growth of the city, would make it natural to place the seat of the god in the waters themselves. The cult of water-deities arises, naturally, at places which are situated on large sheets of water; and in the attributes of wisdom which an older age ascribed to Ea, there may be seen the embodiment of the tradition that the course of civilization proceeds from the south. The superiority of the Persian Gulf over the other waters of Babylon—over the two great rivers with their tributary streams and canals—would be another factor that would lead to the god of the Persian Gulf being regarded as the personification of the watery element in general. For the Babylonians, the Persian Gulf, stretching out indefinitely, and to all appearances one with the great ocean whose ulterior shores could not be reached, was the great 'Okeanos,' that flowed around the earth and on which the earth rested. Ea, accordingly (somewhat like En-lil), was delocalized, as it were, and his worship was maintained long after the recollection of his connection with Eridu had all but disappeared. At the same time, for the very reason that he was cut loose from local associations, no place could lay claim to being the seat of the deity. Ur-Bau, when erecting a sanctuary to Ea at Girsu, significantly calls the god 'the king of Eridu.' The sanctuary is not, in this case, the dwelling-place of the god.

We are justified, therefore, in going back many centuries, before reaching the period when Ea was, merely, the local god of Eridu. Whether Ea is to be regarded as the real name of the god, or is also an ideograph like En-ki, is again open to doubt. If Ea is the real pronunciation, then the writing of the name is a play upon the character of the deity, for it is composed of two elements that signify 'house' and 'water,'—the name thus suggesting the character and real seat of the deity. A point in favor of regarding Ea as the real name, albeit not decisive, is the frequent use of the unmistakable ideographic description of the god as En-ki. The consort of Ea who is Dam-kina also occurs in the historical texts of the first period.

The origin of Babylonian civilization at the Persian Gulf, together with the dependence of Babylonia for her fertility upon the streams and canals, account for the numerous water-deities to be found in the ancient Babylonian pantheon, some of which have already been discussed. We will meet with others further on. Every stream, large or small, having its special protecting deity, the number of water-deities naturally increases as the land becomes more and more dissected by the canal system that conditioned the prosperity of the country.

Ea, as we shall see, appears under an unusually large number of names.[44] One of these is

Nin-a-gal,

which, signifying 'god of great strength,' is given to him as the patron of the smith's art.[45] A god of this name is mentioned by Ur-Bau,[46] who speaks of a sanctuary erected in honor of this deity. But since the king refers to Ea (as En-ki) a few lines previous, it would appear that at this period Nin-agal is still an independent deity. The later identification with Ea appears to be due to the idea of 'strength' involved in the name of Nin-agal. In the same way, many of the names of Ea were originally descriptive of independent gods who, because of the similarity of their functions to those of the great Ea, were absorbed by the latter. Their names transferred to Ea, are frequently the only trace left of their original independent existence.

Nergal.

Nergal, the local deity of Cuthah (or Kutu), represented by the mound Tell-Ibrahim, some distance to the east of Babylon, was of an entirely different character from Ea, but his history in the development of the Babylonian religion is hardly less interesting. The first mention of his famous temple at Cuthah is found in an inscription of Dungi (to be read Ba'u-ukin, according to Winckler[47]) who belongs to the second dynasty of Ur (c. 2700 B.C.). Its origin, however, belongs to a still earlier period. Such was the fame of the temple known as E-shid-lam, and the closeness of the connection between the deity and his favorite seat, that Nergal himself became known as shid-lam-ta-ud-du-a, i.e., the god that rises up from E-shid-lam. It is by this epithet that the same Dungi describes him in one of his inscriptions.[48] Down to the latest period of Assyro-Babylonian history, Nergal remains identified with Kutu, being known at all times as the god of Kutu.[49] When Sargon, the king of Assyria, upon his conquest of the kingdom of Israel (c. 722 B.C.), brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, and so forth, across to the lands of the Jordan to take the place of the deported Israelites, the Hebrew narrator (II Kings, xvii. 24-35) tells us in an interesting manner of the obnoxious foreign worship which these people brought to the land, each division bringing the gods of their place with them. The men of Cuthah, he adds (v. 30), made a statue of Nergal. Singamil, of the dynasty, having its capital at Uruk (c. 2750 B.C.), likewise testifies to his devotion to Nergal by busying himself with improvements and additions to his temple at Cuthah. His worship, therefore, was not confined to those who happened to reside at Cuthah; and closely as he is identified with the place, the character of the god is a general and not a special one. The full form of his name appears to have been Ner-unu-gal, of which Nergal, furnished by the Old Testament passage referred to, would then be a contraction or a somewhat corrupt form. The three elements composing his name signify "the mighty one of the great dwelling-place," but it is, again, an open question whether this is a mere play upon the character of the god, as in the name of Ea (according to one of the interpretations above suggested), or whether it is an ideographic form of the name. The Old Testament shows, conclusively, that the name had some such pronunciation as Nergal. Jensen, from other evidences, inclines to the opinion that the writing Ner-unu-gal is the result of a species of etymology, brought about by the prominence given to Nergal as the god of the region of the dead. It is in this capacity that he already appears in the inscription of Singamil, who calls him 'king of the nether world.' The "great dwelling-place," therefore, is clearly the dominion over which Nergal rules, and when we come to the cosmogony of the Babylonians,[50] it will be found that this epithet for the nether world—the great dwelling-place—accords with their conception of the life after death. But while Nergal, with a host of lesser demons about him, appears as the Babylonian Pluto, particularly in the religious texts, his functions are not limited to the control of the dead. He is the personification of some of the evils that bring death to mankind, particularly pestilence and war. The death that follows in his path is a violent one, and his destructive force is one that acts upon large masses rather than upon the individual. Hence, one of the most common ideographs used to express his name is that which signifies 'sword.'

War and pestilence are intimately associated in the mind of the Babylonians. Among other nations, the sword is, similarly, the symbol of the deity, as the plague-bringer as well as the warrior.

To this day, a pestilence is the general accompaniment of war in the East, or follows in its wake. Different from Nin-ib, who is also a god of war, Nergal symbolizes more particularly the destruction which accompanies war, and not the strong champion who aids his subjects in the fight. Nergal is essentially a destroyer, and the various epithets applied to him in the religious texts, show that he was viewed in this light. He is at times the 'god of fire,' again 'the raging king,' 'the violent one' 'the one who burns'; and finally identified with the glowing heat of flame. Often, he is described by these attributes, instead of being called by his real name.[51] Dr. Jensen has recently shown in a satisfactory manner, that this phase of his character must be the starting-point in tracing the order of his development. As the 'glowing flame,' Nergal is evidently a phase of the sun, and Jensen proves that the functions and aspects of the sun at different periods being differentiated among the Babylonians, Nergal is more especially the hot sun of midsummer or midday, the destructive force of which was the chief feature that distinguished it. The hot sun of Babylonia, that burns with fierce intensity, brings pestilence and death, and carries on a severe contest against man. From being the cause of death, it is but a step, and a natural one, to make Nergal preside over the region, prepared for those whom he has destroyed. The course taken by Babylonian theology is responsible for the prominence given to the latter rôle of Nergal, which finally overshadows his other phases to the extent of suggesting the fanciful interpretation of his name as the 'ruler of the great dwelling place for the dead.' In the light of the facts set forth, another explanation for his name must be looked for that would connect the god with solar functions. The name may in fact be divided into two elements, the first having the force of chief or ruler, the second 'great.' The combination would be an appropriate designation for the sun, in the rôle of a destructive power. But Nergal, after all, represents only one phase of the sun-god. The god who was worshipped as the personification of the sun par excellence and the sun as a whole, was

Shamash.

Written with an ideograph that describes him as the 'god of the day,' there is no deity whose worship enjoys an equally continued popularity in Babylonia and Assyria. Beginning at the earliest period of Babylonian history, and reaching to the latest, his worship suffers no interruption. Shamash, moreover, maintains his original character with scarcely any modification throughout this long period. For all that, he bears a name which signifies 'attendant' or 'servitor,' and which sufficiently shows the subsidiary position that he occupied in the Babylonian pantheon. One of the rulers belonging to the dynasty of Isin calls the sun-god, the offspring of Nannar,—one of the names of the moon-god,—and the last king of Babylonia, Nabonnedos, does the same. In combination with the moon-god, the latter takes precedence of Shamash,[52] and in the enumeration of the complete pantheon, in the inscriptions of both Assyrian and Babylonian kings, the same order is preserved. Other evidence that points to the superior rank accorded to Sin, the moon-god over the sun deity in Babylonia, is the reckoning of time by the moon phases. The day begins with the evening, and not with sunrise. The moon, as the chief of the starry firmament, and controlling the fate of mankind, was the main factor in giving to the orb of night, this peculiar prominence. The 'service,' accordingly implied in the name of Shamash appears to have been such as was demanded by his subsidiary position to the moon-god. Beyond the general recognition, however, of this relationship between the two, it does not appear that the worship paid to Shamash, was at all affected by the secondary place, that he continued to hold in the theoretically constructed pantheon. Less than is the case with the other gods, is he identified with any particular city, and we therefore find in the most ancient period, two centers of Southern Babylonia claiming Shamash as their patron saint,—Larsa, represented by the mound of Senkereh, and Sippar, occupying the site of the modern Abu-Habba. It is difficult to say which of the two was the older; the latter, in the course of time, overshadowed the fame of the former, and its history can be traced back considerably beyond the sun-worship at Larsa, the first mention of which occurs in the inscriptions of rulers of the second dynasty of Ur (c. 2900 B.C.). Since Ur, as we shall see, was sacred to the moon-god, it is hardly likely that the Shamash cult was introduced at Larsa by the rulers of Ur. The kings of Ur would not have forfeited the protection of Sin, by any manifestation of preference for Shamash. When Ur-Gur, therefore, tells us that he 'built' a temple to Shamash at Larsa, he must mean, as Sin-iddina of the dynasty of Larsa does, in using the same phrase, that he enlarged or improved the edifice. What makes it all the more likely that Ur-Gur found sun-worship at Larsa in existence is, that in the various places over which this ruler spread his building activity, he is careful in each case to preserve the status of the presiding deity. So at Nippur, he engages in work at the temples of En-lil and of Nin-lil; while at Uruk he devotes himself to the temple of Nanâ. In thus connecting their names with the various sacred edifices of Babylonia, the rulers emphasized, on the one hand, their control of the territory in which the building lay, and on the other, their allegiance to the deity of the place, whose protection and favor they sought to gain.

The mention of a temple to Shamash at Sippar reverts to a still earlier period than that of its rival. Nabonnedos tells us that it was founded by Naram-Sin. Sargon has put his name on some object[53] that he dedicates to the sun-god at Sippar. That there was an historical connection between the two temples may be concluded from the fact that the name of the sacred edifices was the same in both,—E-babbara, signifying the 'house of lustre.' Such a similarity points to a dependence of one upon the other, and the transfer or extension of the worship directly from one place to the other; but, as intimated, we have no certain means of determining which of the two is the older. In view of the general observation to be made in what pertains to the religion of the Babylonians, that fame and age go hand in hand, the balance is in favor of Sippar, which became by far the more famous of the two, received a greater share of popular affection, and retained its prominence to the closing days of the neo-Babylonian monarchy. We shall have occasion in a succeeding chapter to trace the history of the sun-temple at Sippar so far as known. It is interesting to note that Nabonnedos, feeling the end of his power to be near, undertakes, as one of the last resorts, the restoration of this edifice, in the hope that by thus turning once more to the powerful Shamash, he might secure his protection, in addition to that of Marduk, the head of the later Babylonian pantheon.

In Ur itself, Shamash was also worshipped in early days by the side of the moon-god. Eannatum, of the dynasty of Isin (c. 2800 B.C.), tells of two temples erected to him at that place; and still a third edifice, sacred to both Nannar (the moon god) and Shamash at Ur, is referred to by a king of the Larsa dynasty, Rim-Sin (c. 2300 B.C.). The titles given to Shamash by the early rulers are sufficiently definite to show in what relation he stood to his worshippers, and what the conceptions were that were formed of him. He is, alternately, the king and the shepherd. Since the kings also called themselves shepherds, no especial endearment is conveyed by this designation. In the incantations, Shamash is frequently appealed to, either alone, or when an entire group of spirits and deities are enumerated. He is called upon to give life to the sick man. To him the body of the one who is smitten with disease is confided. As the god of light, he is appropriately called upon to banish 'darkness' from the house, darkness being synonymous with misfortune; and the appeal is made to him more particularly as the 'king of judgment.' From this, it is evident that the beneficent action of the sun, was the phase associated with Shamash. He was hailed as the god that gives light and life to all things, upon whose favor the prosperity of the fields and the well-being of man depend. He creates the light and secures its blessings for mankind. His favor produces order and stability; his wrath brings discomfiture and ruin to the state and the individual. But his power was, perhaps, best expressed by the title of "judge"—the favorite one in the numerous hymns that were composed in his honor. He was represented as seated on a throne in the chamber of judgment, receiving the supplications of men, and according as he manifested his favor or withdrew it, enacting the part of the decider of fates. He loosens the bonds of the imprisoned, grants health to the sick, and even revivifies the dead. On the other hand, he puts an end to wickedness and destroys enemies. He makes the weak strong, and prevents the strong from crushing the weak. From being the judge, and, moreover, the supreme judge of the world, it was but natural that the conception of justice was bound up with him. His light became symbolical of righteousness, and the absence of it, or darkness, was viewed as wickedness. Men and gods look expectantly for his light. He is the guide of the gods, as well as the ruler of men.

While there are no direct indications in the historical texts known at present, that this conception of the sun-god existed in all its details before the days of Hammurabi, there is every reason to believe that this was the case; the more so, in that it does not at all transcend the range of religious ideas that we have met with in the case of the other gods of this period. Nor does this conception in any way betray itself, as being due to the changed political conditions that set in, with the union of the states under Hammurabi. Still, the age of the religious texts not being fixed, it is thus necessary to exercise some caution before using them without the basis of an allusion in the historical texts.

Utu.

It but remains, before passing on, to note that the same deity appears under various names. Among these are Utu[54] and apparently also Babbar[55] in the old Babylonian inscriptions. For the latter, a Semitic etymology is forthcoming, and we may therefore regard it as representing a real pronunciation, and not an ideographic writing. Babbar, a contracted form from Barbar, is the reduplication of the same stem bar[56] that we have already met with, in the name of the temple sacred to Shamash. Like E-babbara, therefore, Babbar is the "brilliantly shining one,"—a most appropriate name for the sun, and one frequently applied to him in the religious texts. As to Utu, there is some doubt whether it represents a real pronunciation or not. My own opinion is that it does, and that the underlying stem is atû, which in Babylonian has almost the same meaning as bar or barû, viz., 'to see.' 'Utu' would thus again designate the sun as 'that which shines forth.'

It will be recalled, that other instances have been noted of the same god appearing under different names. The most natural explanation for this phenomenon is, that the variation corresponds to the different localities where the god was worshipped. The identification would not be made until the union of the various Babylonian states had been achieved. Such a union would be a potent factor in systematizing the pantheon. When once it was recognized that the various names represented, in reality, one and the same deity, it would not be long before the name, peculiar to the place where the worship was most prominent, would set the others aside or reduce them to mere epithets.

It may well be that Shamash was the name given to the god at Sippar, whereas at Ur he may have been known as Utu. Ur-Bau (of the first Ur dynasty) calls him Utu also, when speaking of the temple at Larsa, but it would be natural for the kings of Ur to call the sun-god of Larsa by the same name that he had in Ur. That Hammurabi, however, calls the sun-god of Larsa, Utu, may be taken as an indication that, as such he was known at that place, for since we have no record of a sun-temple at Babylon in these days, there would be no motive that might induce him to transfer a name, otherwise known to him, to another place. The testimony of Hammurabi is therefore as direct as that of Sargon, who calls the sun-god of Sippar, Shamash. It is not always possible to determine, with as much show of probability, as in the case of the sun-god, the distribution of the various names, but the general conclusion, for all that, is warranted in every instance, that a variety of names refers, originally, to an equal variety of places over which the worship was spread,—only that care must be exercised to distinguish between distinctive names and mere epithets.

Â.

A consort of the sun-deity, appearing frequently at his side in the incantation texts, is Â. It is more particularly with the Shamash of Sippar, that  is associated. She is simply the 'beloved one' of the sun-deity, with no special character of her own. In the historical texts, her rôle is quite insignificant, and for the period with which we are at present concerned she is only mentioned once by a North Babylonian ruler, Ma-an-ish-tu-su,[57] who dedicates an object to her. The reading of the ideogram Â, or Nin- (i.e., Lady Â), is doubtful. Malkatu ("mistress" or "queen") is offered as a plausible conjecture.[58] Lehman (Keils Bibl. iii. I, 202) suggests A-Ja, but on insufficient grounds. In any case  has the force of mistress, and Nin- simply designates the goddess as the lady, mistress, or queen. It is likely that  was originally an independent deity, and one of the names of the sun-god in a particular locality. It occurs in proper names as a title of Shamash. Instead, however, of becoming identified with Shamash,  degenerated into a pale reflection of Shamash, pictured under the relationship of consort to him. This may have been due to the union of Shamash with the place where  was worshipped. If, as seems likely, that near Sippar, there was another city on the other side of the Euphrates, forming a suburb to it (as Borsippa did to Babylon), the conclusion is perhaps warranted that  was originally the sun-god worshipped at the place which afterwards became incorporated with Sippar.[59] Such an amalgamation of two originally male deities into a combination of male and female, strange as it may seem to us, is in keeping with the lack of sharp distinction between male and female in the oldest forms of Semitic religions. In the old cuneiform writing the same sign is used to indicate "lord" or "lady" when attached to deities. Ishtar appears among Semites both as a male[60] and as a female deity. Sex was primarily a question of strength. The stronger god was viewed as masculine; the weaker as feminine.

Nannar and Sin.

Nannar, a reduplicated form like Babbar, with the assimilation of the first r to n (nar-nar = nannar), has very much the same meaning as Babbar. The latter, as we have seen, is the "lustrous one," the former, the "one that furnishes light." The similarity in meaning is in keeping with the similarity of function of the two deities, thus named: Babbar being the sun and Nannar, the moon. It was under the name of Nannar that the moon-god was worshipped at Ur, the most famous and probably the oldest of the cities over which the moon-god presided. The association of Nannar with Ur is parallel to that of Shamash with Sippar,—not that the moon-god's jurisdiction or worship was confined to that place, but that the worship of the deity of that place eclipsed others, and the fame and importance at Ur led to the overshadowing of the moon-worship there, over the obeisance to him paid elsewhere.

What further motives led to the choice of the moon-god as the patron of Ur, lies beyond the scope of our knowledge. Due allowance must be made for that natural selection, which takes place in the realm of thought as much as in the domain of nature. Attention has already been called to the predominance given by the Babylonians to the moon over the sun. The latter is expressly called the "offspring of the lord of brilliant beginning," that is, the moon-god (Delitzsch, Assyr. Hdw., p. 234 a). It is needless, therefore, to do more, at this place, than to emphasize the fact anew. The moon serving much more as a guide to man, through the regular character of its constant changes, than the sun, was connected in the religious system with both the heavenly and the terrestrial forces. In view of Nannar's position in the heavens, he was called the "heifer of Anu." Anu, it will be recalled, was the god of heaven (and heaven itself), while the "heifer"[61] is here used metaphorically for offspring, the picture being suggested probably by the "horn" that the moon presents at a certain phase. This 'horn' constitutes his crown, and he is frequently represented on seal cylinders with a crescent over his head, and with a long flowing beard, that is described as having the color of lapislazuli. A frequent title is the 'lord of the crown.' On the other hand, by virtue of its influence on the earth, regulating, as the ancients observed, the tides, the moon was connected by the Babylonians with the reckoning of time. Because of this connection with the 'lower world,' it seems, he was also regarded as the first-born of Bel. His sacred edifice at Ur was one to which all rulers of the place devoted themselves. Ur-Gur, Nur-Rammân, Sin-iddina, and Kudur-mabuk tell of their embellishment of the temple, each one appropriating to himself the title of 'builder,' in which they gloried. So close, again, was the identification of the city with the deity, that the latter was frequently known simply as the god of Ur, and the former, as the city of Nannar.

Another name of the moon-god was Sin,—the meaning of which escapes us. At the side of Ur, Harran is the place most celebrated by reason of its moon-worship, and there is every reason to believe that the name Sin was originally attached to Harran. The migrations of the ancient Hebrews were connected as we now know with political movements in Babylonia. They proceed from Ur—or Ur-Kasdim, i.e., Chaldean Ur—northward to Harran, which, by virtue of its position, became a town of much importance. This association of Ur with Harran furnishes an indication for historical relations of some sort, existing between the two places. It is therefore not accidental, that the patron deity of both places was the same. As yet, no excavations have been made at Harran, and we are, therefore, dependent upon incidental notices for our knowledge of its history. These sufficiently show that the place continued through a long period to preserve its sacred character. The old temple there, was one of the many that stirred up the religious zeal of Nabonnedos; and previous to this, we find several Assyrian kings occupied in embellishing and restoring the structure. An interesting reference to Harran, bearing witness to its ancient dignity, is found in an inscription of Sargon II. of Assyria (722-706 B.C.), who enumerates among his claims to the favor of the gods, that he restored the "laws and customs of Harran," by which he evidently means that he was instrumental in giving the place, the dignity it once enjoyed. A curious feature connected with Sin, is the occurrence of the name in Mount Sinai, in the wilderness of Sin, as well as in an inscription of Southern Arabia. May not this be a further testimony to the association of Harran with Sin, since it is from Harran that the departure of the Hebrews for the west took place? What more natural than that in the migrations which carried the Hebrews to the west, the worship of Sin should have been transferred to Arabia?[62] Important as Ur and Harran are as sacred towns, politically they do not retain their prominence after the days of Hammurabi. The amalgamation of Nannar with Sin, and the almost exclusive occurrence of the latter name in later times, does not of necessity point to a preponderating influence of Harran over Ur, but may be due to the greater fame which the former place acquired as the goal of religious pilgrimages. The situation of Harran—the name itself signifies 'road'—as the highway leading to the west, must have been an important factor, in bringing this about. However this may be, Sin and Nannar are as thoroughly identical in the period following Hammurabi, as Babbar and Shamash. The attributes of the one are transferred to the other so completely, that a separation of the two is no longer possible.

The ideographs with which the name of Sin is written show him to have been regarded as the god of wisdom, but while wisdom and light may be connected, it is Nannar's character as the "illuminator" that becomes the chief trait of the god. No doubt the preëminence of Ea in this respect, who is the personification of wisdom, par excellence, made it superfluous to have another deity possessing the same trait. It is, accordingly, as the god of light, that Sin continues to be adored in the Babylonian religion; and when he is referred to, in the historical texts and hymns, this side of his nature is the one dwelt upon. Through his light, the traps laid by the evil spirits, who are active at night, are revealed. In later times, apparently through Assyrian influence, the reckoning of time was altered to the extent of making the day begin with sunrise, instead of with the approach of night; and this, together with the accommodation of the lunar cycle to the movements of the sun, brought about a partial change of the former conditions, and gave somewhat greater prominence to Shamash. As a consequence, the rôle of Sin is not as prominent in the hymns that belong to a later period as in those of earlier days.

The oracles of the Assyrian kings are addressed to Shamash, and not to Sin. Moreover, the personal factor in the case of Sin, if one may express oneself thus, is not as strong as in that of some other gods. His traits are of a more general kind. He is supreme; there is none like him, and the spirits are subservient to his will. But terms of endearment are few, while on the mythological side, comparatively little is made of him. He is strong and he is holy. He is called upon to clothe the evil-doer with leprosy, as with a dress. In a robe, befitting his dignity, he stalks about. Without him, no city is founded, no district restored to former glory. Sin is called the father of the gods, but in a metaphorical rather than in a real sense. The only one of his children who takes an important part in the later phases of Babylonian-Assyrian worship is his daughter Ishtar. She seems to have taken to herself some of the traits of right belonging to Sin, and the prominence of her worship may be regarded as an additional factor in accounting for the comparative obscurity to which Sin gradually is assigned. At all events, Sin is a feature of the earlier period of the Babylonian religion rather than of the later periods.

Innanna.

The secondary position held by the female deities in the Babylonian pantheon has been repeatedly referred to. This trait of the religion finds an illustration not only in the 'shadowy' character of the consorts of the gods, but also in the manner in which goddesses, originally distinct from one another and enjoying an existence independent of any male consort, lose their individuality, as it were, and become merely so many forms of one and the same deity. Indeed, as we approach the moment when the gods of the Babylonian pantheon are ranged into a system, the tendency becomes pronounced to recognize only one goddess, representative of the principle of generation—one 'great mother,' endowed with a variety of traits according to the political and social conditions prevailing at different times in Babylonia and Assyria. In the earliest period which we are now considering, we can still distinguish a number of goddesses who afterwards became merged into this one great goddess. These are Ninni (or Innanna), Nanâ, and Anunit.

Ninni and Innanna are names that appear to have a common origin.[63] Both embody the notion of 'ladyship.' The worship of this goddess centers in the district of Lagash. Ur-Bau (c. 3000 B.C.), who addresses her as 'glorious and supreme,' builds a temple in her honor at Gishgalla, and Gudea refers to a temple known as E-anna, i.e., heavenly house in Girsu.[64] For Gudea, Ninni is the "mistress of the world." Another ruler of Lagash whose name is doubtfully read as E-dingir-ra-na-gin,[65] but who is even earlier than Ur-Bau, declares that he has been 'called' by Innanna to the throne. She is mentioned by the side of Nin-khar-sag. We are still in the period where local associations formed a controlling factor in ensuring the popularity of a deity, and while the goddesses attached to the gods of the important centers are still differentiated, the tendency already exists to designate the female consorts simply as the 'goddess,'—to apply to all, the traits that may once have been peculiar to one. As we pass from one age to the other, there is an increasing difficulty in keeping the various local 'goddesses' apart. Even the names become interchangeable; and since these goddesses all represented essentially the same principle of generation and fertility, it was natural that with the union of the Babylonian states they should become merged into one great mother-goddess. A 'local' goddess who retains rather more of her individuality than others, is

Nanâ.

Her name is again playfully interpreted by the Babylonians—through association with Nin—as 'the lady' par excellence. She was the chief goddess of the city of Uruk. Her temple at Uruk is first mentioned by Ur-Gur, of the second dynasty of Ur. It is restored and enlarged by Dungi, the successor of Ur-Bau, and so thoroughly is she identified with her edifice known as E-anna (again a play upon her name), that she becomes known as the Lady of E-anna.[66] She appears to have had a temple also at Ur, and it is to this edifice that later rulers of Larsa—Kudur-Mabuk and Rim-Sin, as well as the kings of the Isin dynasty, Gamil-Ninib, Libit-Ishtar, and Ishme-Dagan—refer in their inscriptions.

The members of the Isin dynasty pride themselves upon their control over Uruk, and naturally appear as special devotees to Nanâ, whose chosen "consort" they declare themselves to be, wielding the sceptre, as it were, in union with her. Already at this period, Nanâ is brought into connection with the moon-god, being called by Kudur-Mabuk the daughter of Sin. The relationship in this case indicates, primarily, the supremacy exercised by Ur, and also a similarity in the traits of the two deities. In the fully developed cosmology, Nanâ is the planet Venus, whose various aspects, as morning and evening star, suggested an analogy with the phases of the moon.

Venus, like the moon, served as a guide to man, while her inferiority in size and importance to the former, would naturally come to be expressed under the picture of father and daughter. In a certain sense, all the planets appearing at the same time and in the same region with the moon were the children of the latter. Sin, therefore, is appropriately called the father of gods, just as Anu, the personification of the heaven itself, is the supreme father of Sin and Shamash, and of all the heavenly bodies. The metaphorical application of 'father' as 'source,' throughout Oriental parlance, must be kept in mind in interpreting the relationship between the gods. Still another name of the goddess is Anunit, which appears to have been peculiar to the North Babylonian city Agade, and emphasizes her descent from "Anu," the god of heaven. Her temple at Agade, known as E-ul-mash, is the object of Sargon's devotion, which makes her, with Bel and Shamash, the oldest triad of gods mentioned in the Babylonian inscriptions. But the name which finally displaces all others, is

Ishtar.

Where the name originated has not yet been ascertained, as little as its etymology,[67] but it seems to belong to Northern Babylonia rather than to the south.

In time, all the names that we have been considering—Innanna, Nanâ, and Anunit—became merely so many designations of Ishtar. She absorbs the titles and qualities of all, and the tendency which we have pointed out finds its final outcome in the recognition of Ishtar as the one and only goddess endowed with powers and an existence independent of association with any male deity, though even this independence does not hinder her from being named at times as the associate of the chief god of Assyria—the all-powerful Ashur. The attempt has been made by Sayce and others to divide the various names of Ishtar among the aspects of Venus as morning and evening star, but there is no evidence to show that the Babylonians distinguished the one from the other so sharply as to make two goddesses of one and the same planet.

It is more in accord with what, as we have seen, has been the general character of the Babylonian pantheon, to account for the identification of Ninni, Nanâ, and Anunit with Ishtar on the supposition that the different names belonged originally to different localities. Ishtar was appropriately denominated the brilliant goddess. She is addressed as the mother of gods, which signals her supreme position among the female deities. 'The mistress of countries' alternating with 'the mistress of mountains,'[68] is one of her common titles; and as the growing uniqueness of her position is one of the features of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion, it is natural that she should become simply the goddess. This was especially the case with the Assyrians, to whom Ishtar became a goddess of war and battle, the consort, at times, of the chief god of the Assyrian pantheon. At the same time it is important to note that the warlike character of the goddess goes back to the time of Hammurabi (Keils Bibl. 3, 1, 113), and is dwelt upon by other Babylonian kings (e.g., Nebuchadnezzar I., c. 1130 B.C.) prior to the rise of the Assyrian power. How Ishtar came to take on so violent a character is not altogether clear. There are no indications of this rôle in the incantation texts, where she is simply the kind mother who is appealed to, to release the sufferer from the power of the disease-bringing spirits. In the prayers, as will be shown in the proper place, she becomes the vehicle for the expression of the highest religious and ethical thought attained by the Babylonians. On the other hand, in the great Babylonian epic,[69] dealing with the adventures of a famous hero, Gilgamesh, Ishtar, who makes her appearance at the summer solstice, is a raging goddess who smites those who disobey her commands with wasting disease. Starting with this phase of the goddess' character, one can at least understand the process of her further development into a fierce deity presiding over the fortunes of war. The epic just referred to belongs to the old Babylonian period. It embodies ancient traditions of rivalry between the Babylonian principalities, though there are traces of several recastings which the epic received. The violent Ishtar, therefore, is a type going back to the same period as the other side of her character that is emphasized elsewhere. Since, moreover, the Ishtar in the Gilgamesh epic is none other than the chief goddess of Uruk, all further doubt as to the union of such diverging traits in one and the same personage falls to the ground. In this same epic, Ishtar appears as sympathizing with the sufferings of mankind, and bewailing the destruction that was at one time decreed by the gods. It is noteworthy that the violent Ishtar appears in that portion of the epic which, on the assumption of a zodiacal interpretation for the composition, corresponds to the summer solstice, whereas, the destruction which arouses her sympathy takes place in the eleventh month. It is quite possible, therefore, that the two aspects of Venus, as evening and morning stars, corresponding, as they do, to the summer and winter seasons, are reflected in this double character of the goddess. We are not justified, however, in going further and assuming that her double rôle as daughter of Sin and daughter of Anu is to be accounted for in the same manner. In the Gilgamesh epic, she is found in association with Anu, and to the latter she appeals for protection as her father, and yet it is as the daughter of Sin that she enters the world of the dead to seek for the waters that may heal her bridegroom, Tammuz.[70] Evidently, the distinction between Ishtar as the daughter of Anu and as the daughter of Sin is not an important one, the term daughter in both cases being a metaphor to express a relationship both of physical nature and of a political character. Of the various forms under which the goddess appears, that of Anunit—a feminine form indicating descent from and appertaining to Anu—attaches itself most clearly to the god of heaven, and it may be that it was not until the assimilation of Anunit and Nanâ with Ishtar that the goddess is viewed as at once the daughter of Anu and of Sin. If this be so, there is surely nothing strange in the fact that a planet like Venus should be regarded in one place as the daughter of heaven and in another brought into relationship with the moon. She actually belongs to both.

Just as in Babylonia, so in Assyria, there were various Ishtars, or rather various places where the goddess was worshipped as the guardian spirit, but her rôle in the north is so peculiar that all further consideration of it must be postponed until we come to consider, in due time, the Assyrian pantheon. There will be occasion, too, when treating of the Gilgamesh epic, to dwell still further on some of her traits. All that need be said here is to emphasize the fact that the popularity of the Babylonian Ishtar in Assyria, as manifested by Esarhaddon's zeal in restoring her temple at Uruk, and Ashurbanabal's restoration of Nanâ's statue (c. 635 B.C.) which had been captured by the Elamites 1635 years before Ashurbanabal's reign, is largely due to the effected identity with the goddess who, for the Assyrians, was regarded chiefly as the goddess of war and strife. In worshipping the southern Ishtars, the Assyrian kings felt themselves to be showing their allegiance to the same deity to whom, next to Ashur, most of their supplications were addressed, and of whom as warriors they stood in dread.

Ninâ.

A goddess who, while sharing the fate of her sister goddesses in being overshadowed by Ishtar, yet merits a special treatment, is one whose name is plausibly conjectured to be read Ninâ. The compound ideogram expressing the deity signifies 'house of the fish.' The word 'house' in Semitic parlance is figuratively extended to convey the idea of 'possessing or harboring.' Applied to a settlement, the ideogram would be the equivalent of our 'Fishtown.' It is with this same ideogram that the famous capitol of Assyria, Nineveh, is written in the cuneiform texts, and since the phonetic reading for the city, Ni-na-a, also occurs, it is only legitimate to conclude that the latter is the correct reading for the deity as well. As a matter of course, if the goddess bears a name identical with that of a city, it cannot be the Assyrian city which is meant in the old Babylonian inscriptions, but some other place bearing the same name. Such a place actually occurs in the inscriptions of Gudea. It is, in fact, one of the three towns that combined with Shirpurla to create the great capitol bearing the latter name; and Jensen[71] has called attention to a passage in one of Gudea's inscriptions in which the goddess is brought into direct association with the town, so that it would appear that Ninâ is the patron of Ninâ, in the same way that Nin-girsu is the protector of Girsu. In keeping with this we find the mention of the goddess limited to the rulers of Lagash. Several of them—En-anna-tuma, Entemena, and Gudea—declare themselves to have been chosen by her. She is said to regard Gudea with special favor. She determines destinies. Another king, Ur-Ninâ, embodies the name of the goddess in his own, and devotes himself to the enlargement of her temple. From the manner in which she is associated with Nin-girsu, aiding the latter in guarding his temple E-ninnu, and uniting with the god in granting the sceptre to Gudea, one is tempted to conclude that the two towns, Girsu and Ninâ, were amalgamated before their absorption into Lagash, so that the god and goddess acquired the relationship to one another of husband and consort. As for the connection between this Babylonian Ninâ and the late Assyrian capital, it is quite possible that the origin of the latter is to be traced to a settlement made by inhabitants of the former, although it should be added that there is no positive evidence that can be adduced in support of this proposition. It accords, however, with the northward movement of culture and civilization in Mesopotamia. If this connection between the two Ninevehs be accepted, the question suggests itself whether, in time, Ninâ did not become merely another form of Ishtar. The Assyrian capital is frequently spoken of as the 'beloved city' of Ishtar, and unless it be supposed that this epithet simply reflects the comparatively late popularity of the distinctively Assyrian Ishtar, the most natural explanation would be to propose the equation Ninâ = Ishtar.

In the incantation texts, Ninâ is frequently appealed to as the daughter of Ea,—the god of the deep. This relationship, as well as the interpretation of the ideogram above set forth, points to the original character of the goddess as a water-deity. This goddess, therefore, would be of an entirely different form from the ones discussed in the previous paragraphs. Instead of being a member of the heavenly pantheon, her place is with the kingdom over which Ea presides, and whose dwelling-place is the watery deep. In any case, Ninâ is originally distinct from Ishtar, Nanâ, and Anunit; and she retains an independent existence to a later period than most of the other great goddesses that have been discussed. In an inscription of the days of Belnâdinaplu (c. 1100 B.C.), published by Hilprecht,[72] Ninâ appears as the patron deity of Dêr,—a city of Southern Babylonia. There too she is called the 'daughter of Ea,' the creator of everything. She is 'the mistress of goddesses.' Attached to her temple there are lands that having been wrongfully wrested from the priests are returned upon royal command, under solemn invocation of the goddess. How her worship came to be transferred to Dêr we do not know. She appears in the inscription in question by the side of a goddess who—following Hommel—is none other than Bau. Dêr is called the city of the god Anu, and we can only suppose that it must at one time have risen to sufficient importance to harbor in its midst a number of deities. It is presumably[73] the place whence Nebuchadnezzar I. sets out in the twelfth century to drive the Cassites off the throne of Babylonia. May it be that, during the days of the foreign rule, priests attached to the service of various of the old gods and goddesses transferred the worship of these deities to places more secure from interference?

Be this as it may, if our Ninâ has any connection with the goddess of Nineveh, it is certain that Ishtar has retained none of Ninâ's traits. The fusion in this case has been so complete that naught but the faintest tradition of an original and independent Ninâ has survived in the North.

Anu.

This god, who, from a theoretical point of view (as will be shown in a subsequent chapter), was regarded as standing at the head of the organized Babylonian pantheon, figures only incidentally in the inscriptions prior to the days of Hammurabi. Ur-Gur of the second dynasty of Ur, in invoking Nannar, calls the latter 'the powerful bull of Anu.' The reference is interesting, for it shows that already in these early days the position of Anu, as the god of the heavenly expanse, was fixed. The moon appearing in the heavens, and the resemblance of its crescent to a bull's horn,[74] are the two factors that account for the expressive epithet used by Ur-Bau. That the worship of the god of heaven par excellence should not have enjoyed great popularity in the early days of the Babylonian religion might seem strange at first sight. A little reflection, however, will make this clear. A god of the heavens is an abstract conception, and while it is possible that even in an early age, such a conception may have arisen in some minds, it is not of a character calculated to take a popular hold. As we proceed in our attempt to trace the development of the Babylonian religion, we will find the line of demarcation separating the theological system, as evolved by the schoolmen, from the popular phases of the religion, becoming more marked. In the inscriptions of the old Babylonian rulers, comparatively little of the influence of the Babylonian theologians is to be detected. Even the description of the moon as the bull of heaven falls within the domain of popular fancy. It is different in the days after Hammurabi, when political concentration leads to the focussing of intellectual life in the Euphrates Valley, with all the consequences that the establishment of a central priesthood, with growing powers over ever-increasing territory, involves. It is to be noted, moreover, that the manner in which in the old Babylonian inscriptions Anu is written,[75] indicates that the abstraction involved in the conception of a god of heaven had not yet been reached, though some measure of personification was of course inevitable at a time when animistic notions still held sway. A direct indication of this personification of heaven without the deification appears in the epithet 'child of Anu,' bestowed upon the goddess Bau. The reference to the heavens in this connection is an allusion to Bau's position as the patroness of that quarter of Lagash known as the 'brilliant town,'[76] and where Bau's temple stood. The transference of the quality of 'brilliancy' from the town to the goddess would be expressed by calling the latter the offspring of that part of visible nature which is associated in the mind with 'brilliancy.' Somewhat mysterious, and still awaiting a satisfactory explanation, is the title 'sacrificer,' or 'priest of Anu,' which one of the rulers of Lagash, Ur-Nin-girsu, assumes. It is scarcely possible that the god of heaven can be meant; and, on the other hand, if we are to assume merely a personification of heaven, we encounter fresh difficulties. It seems to me that the use of Anu[77] here is purely metaphorical for 'high' or 'lofty,' and that the king merely wishes to emphasize the dignity of his station by declaring himself to be the heavenly priest, somewhat as we should say 'priest by divine grace,' or 'supreme priest.'

Nin-si[78]-a.

Ur-Bau and Gudea alone of the ancient rulers refer to this god. The former erects a temple in honor of the god in some quarter of his capitol city, while the latter emphasizes the strength that the god has given him. These references, however, show that the god must have been of considerable importance, and in this case, his disappearance from the later pantheon is probably due to the absorption of his rôle by the greater god of Lagash,—Nin-girsu. Like Nin-girsu, Nin-si-a was a god of war, and his worship, imported perhaps from some ancient site to Lagash, falls into desuetude, as the attribute accorded to him becomes the distinguishing trait of the chief deity of the place.

Gal-alim.

Among the various deities to whom Gudea gives praise for the position and glory which he attains is Gal-alim.[79] From him he has received great rule and a lofty sceptre. The phrase is of a very general nature and reveals nothing as to the special character of the god in question. An earlier king, Uru-kagina, refers to the temple of the god at Lagash. Gal-alim may have been again a merely local deity belonging to one of the towns that fell under Gudea's rule, and whose attributes again were so little marked that this god too disappeared under the overshadowing importance of Nin-girsu. He and another god, Dun-shagga, are viewed as the sons of Nin-girsu.

Coming to some of the deities that we may designate as minor, it is to be noted that in the case of certain ones, at least, it will be found that they may be identified with others more prominent, and that what seem to be distinct names are in reality descriptive epithets of gods already met with. This remark applies more particularly to such names as begin with the element Nin, signifying either 'lord' or 'lady,' and which, when followed by the name of a place, always points to its being a title, and, when followed by an ideographic compound, only diminishes that probability to a slight degree. We have already come across several instances; thus Nin-girsu, the lord of Girsu, has been shown to be a form of Ninib, itself an ideogram, the reading of which, it will be recalled, is still uncertain; and again, Nin-khar-sag has been referred to, as one of the titles of the great goddess Belit. Similarly, Nin-gish-zida, whose name signifies 'the lord of the right-hand (or propitious) sceptre,' becomes a title and not a name, and when Gudea speaks of this god as the one who leads him to battle, and calls him 'king,' he is simply describing the same god who is elsewhere spoken of as Nin-girsu. By the side of Nin-girsu and Nin-gish-zida appears Nin-shakh, who, as Oppert[80] has shown, is like Nin-girsu the prototype of the well-known god of war, Ninib. However, Nin-shakh occupies, in contradistinction to Nin-gish-zida and others, a position in the old Babylonian pantheon of an independent character, so that it is hardly justifiable, in such a case, to identify him completely with Ninib, and place the name on a par with the epithets just referred to. The dividing line between the mere title and an independent god thus becomes at times very faint, and yet it is well to maintain it whenever called for. In the following enumeration of the minor gods of the old Babylonian pantheon, the attempt will be made to bring out this distinction in each instance.

Beginning with

Nin-shakh

the element Nin, as has several times been mentioned, points to an ideographic form. The second element signifies 'wild boar,' and from other sources we know that this animal was a sacred one in Babylonia, as among other Semitic nations.[81] Its flesh, on certain days of the Babylonian calendar, was forbidden to be eaten, from which we are permitted to conclude that these days were dedicated to the animal, and the prohibition represents perhaps the traces of some old religious festival. May Nin-shakh therefore have been a 'swine deity,' just as Nergal is symbolized by the 'lion'? In both cases the animal would be a symbol of the violent and destructive character of the god.

The ferocious character of the 'swine' would naturally result in assigning to Nin-shakh warlike attributes; and as a matter of fact he is identified at times with Ninib. His subordinate position, however, is indicated by his being called the 'servant,' generally of En-lil, occasionally also of Anu, and as such he bears the name of Pap-sukal,[82] i.e., 'divine messenger.' Rim-Sin builds a temple to Nin-shakh at Uruk, and from its designation as his 'favorite dwelling place' we may conclude that Rim-Sin only restores or enlarges an ancient temple of the deity. In the light of this, the relationship above set forth between Nin-girsu, Nin-gish-zida, and Nin-shakh becomes somewhat clearer. The former, the local deity of Girsu, would naturally be called by the kings 'the lord of the true sceptre,' while the subordination of Girsu as a quarter of Lagash finds its reflection in the relationship of master and servant pictured as existing between En-lil and Nin-girsu. Again, the warlike character of the patron deity of Girsu would lead to an identification with Nin-shakh of Uruk, possessing the same traits; and the incorporation of Uruk as a part of the same empire which included Lagash and its quarters, would be the last link bringing about the full equation between the three. With Ninib—the solar deity—coming into prominence as the god of war, all three names, Nin-girsu, Nin-gish-zida, and Nin-shakh, would be regarded by a later age as merely descriptive of one and the same god.

Dun-shagga.

Gudea makes mention in one of his inscriptions, by the side of Nin-gish-zida, of a god Dun-shagga,[83] whose name signifies the 'chief hero,' but the phonetic reading of which it is impossible to determine.[84] Like Nin-gish-zida, he is a warlike god, and from that one might suppose that he too is only another form of Nin-girsu-Ninib. At all events, he did not differ materially from the latter. It is from him, that Gudea again declares his power to be derived, just as elsewhere he accords to Nin-girsu this distinction. The element 'Dun,' which is very much the same as 'Nin,' speaks in favor of regarding Dun-shagga as a title; but, in default of positive evidence, it will not be out of place to give him an independent position, and to regard his identification with Nin-girsu as a later phase due to the extension of Nin-girsu's jurisdiction and his corresponding absorption of a varying number of minor gods. This tendency on the part of the greater gods to absorb the minor ones is as distinctive a trait in the development of the Babylonian religion, as is the subordination of one god to the other, whether expressed by making the subordinate god the consort, the chief, or the servant of a superior one. We have seen that such terms of relationship correspond to certain degrees of political conditions existing between the conquering and the conquered districts. Amalgamation of two cities or districts is portrayed in the relation of the two patron deities as husband and wife, the stronger of the two being the former, the more subservient pictured as the latter. The more pronounced superiority of the one place over the other finds expression in the relation of father to child, while that of master and servant emphasizes the complete control exercised by the one over the other. Lastly, the absorption of one deity into another, is correlative either with the most perfect form of conquest, or the complete disappearance of the seat of his worship in consequence of the growing favor of one possessing sufficiently similar qualities to warrant identification with the other.

Lugal-banda.

Sin-gashid of the dynasty of Uruk makes mention of this deity at the beginning of one of his inscriptions. To him and to his consort, Nin-gul, a temple as 'the seat of their joy' at that place is devoted. This association of the god with the town points again to a local deity, but possessing a character which leads to the absorption of the god in the solar god, Nergal, whom we have already encountered, and who will occupy us a good deal when we come to the period after Hammurabi. The identification of the two is already foreshadowed in an inscription of another member of the same dynasty, Sin-gamil, who places the name of Nergal exactly where his predecessor mentions Lugal-banda. The first element in his name signifies 'king,' the second apparently 'strong,' so that in this respect, too, the god comes close to Nergal, whose name likewise indicates 'great lord.' The consort of Lugal-banda is

Nin-gul.

Her name signifies 'the destructive lady,'—an appropriate epithet for the consort of a solar deity. It is Sin-gashid again who associates Ningul with Lugal-banda, and emphasizes his affection for the goddess by calling her his mother. In one inscription, moreover, Sin-gashid addresses himself exclusively to the goddess, who had an equal share in the temple at Uruk.

Dumuzi-zu-aba.

Among the deities appealed to by Ur-Bau appears one whose name is to be interpreted as the 'unchangeable child of the watery deep.' The great god of the deep we have seen is Ea. Dumuzi-zu-aba therefore belongs to the water-deities, and one who, through his subordinate rank to Ea, sinks to the level of a water-spirit. Ur-Bau declares himself to be the darling of this deity, and in the town of Girsu he erects a temple to him. Girsu, however, was not the patron city of the god, for Ur-Bau gives Dumuzi-zu-aba, the appellation of 'the lord of Kinunira,'[85] a place the actual situation of which is unknown. Dumuzi-zu-aba, accordingly, is to be regarded as a local deity of a place which, situated probably on an arm of the Euphrates, was the reason for the watery attributes assigned to the god. The comparative insignificance of the place is one of the factors that accounts for the minor importance of the god, and the second factor is the popularity enjoyed by another child of the great Ea, his child par excellence, Marduk, who is best known as the patron god of the city of Babylon. By the side of Marduk, the other children of Ea, the minor water-deities, disappear, so that to a later generation Dumuzi-zu-aba appears merely as a form of Marduk. With Dumuzi-zu-aba, we must be careful not to confuse

Dumu-zi,

who in the old Babylonian inscriptions is mentioned once by Sin-iddina,[86] in connection with the sun-god. Dumu-zi, signifying 'child of life,' has a double aspect—an agricultural deity and at the same time a god of the lower world. He plays an important part in the eschatological literature of the Babylonians, but hardly none at all in the historical and incantation texts. A fuller treatment may therefore be reserved for a future chapter.

Lugal-erima.

A purely local deity, if the reading and interpretation offered by Jensen, 'King of the city Erim,' is correct. The mention of the deity in an inscription of Ur-Bau, who calls himself the 'beloved servant' of this god, would be due to the circumstance that the district within which the city in question lay was controlled by the rulers of Lagash. To invoke as large a number of deities as possible was not only a means of securing protection from many sides, but was already in the early days of Babylonian history indulged in by rulers, as a means of emphasizing the extent and manifold character of their jurisdiction.

Nin-e-gal and Ningal.

A temple was erected to Nin-e-gal by the wife of Rim-Sin, of the dynasty ruling in Larsa. Her name as interpreted in the tablet dedicated to her, signifies again, as in several cases already noted, 'great lady.' She was probably therefore only the consort of some patron deity; and Nannar being the most prominent god invoked by Rim-Sin, it would seem that the goddess to whom the queen pays her respects is again one of the consorts of the moon-god.[87] This conclusion is supported by the direct association of Nannar of Ur and Ningal in an inscription emanating from an earlier member of the same dynasty to which Rim-Sin belongs. Nur-Rammân speaks of building temples to these deities in the city of Ur. Hence the goddess is also represented as interceding with Sin on behalf of those who appeal to her. The form Nin-e-gal is but a variant of Nin-gal, so that the identification of the two lies beyond doubt, and it may very well be that the temple erected by the consort of Rim-Sin is the same as the one referred to by Nur-Rammân. In a land where polygamy was a prevailing custom, the gods too might be represented as having a number of consorts. There would of course be, just as in human relations, one chief consort, but there might be others ranged at the side of the latter.[88] Some of these may have been consorts of other minor deities, worshipped in the same district, and who were given to the more important divinity as he gradually overshadowed the others. In this way, we may account for the large variety of 'ladies' and 'great ladies' met with in the Babylonian pantheon, and who, being merely 'reflections' of male deities, with no sharply marked traits of their own, would naturally come to be confused with one another, and finally be regarded as various forms of one and the same goddess. A member of the dynasty ruling in Isin, En-anna-tuma, earlier even than Nur-Rammân, invokes Nin-gal in an inscription found in the ancient capital, Ur. Here, too, the goddess appears in association with Nannar; but, curiously enough, she is designated as the mother of Shamash. It will be borne in mind that in the city of Ur, the sun-god occupied a secondary place at the side of the moon-god. This relationship is probably indicated by the epithet 'offspring of Nin-gal,' accorded to Shamash in the inscription referred to. The moon being superior to the sun, the consort of the moon-god becomes the mother of the sun-god.

Reference has several times been made to

Nin-gish-zida,

who, originally a distinct solar deity, becomes scarcely distinguishable from Nin-girsu, and is eventually identified with the great Nin-ib.[89] It is noticeable that these four deities, Nin-girsu, Nin-shakh, Nin-gish-zida, and Nin-ib, who are thus associated together, all contain the element Nin in their names,—a factor that may turn out to be of some importance when more abundant material shall be forthcoming for tracing their development in detail. One of Gudea's inscriptions[90] begins with the significant statement, 'Nin-gish-zida is the god of Gudea'; and elsewhere when speaking of him, he is 'my god,' or 'his god.' None of the ancient Babylonian rulers make mention of him except Gudea, though in the incantation texts he is introduced and significantly termed 'the throne-bearer' of the earth. The purely local character of the deity is, furthermore, emphasized by the reference to his temple in Girsu, on a brick and on a cone containing dedicatory inscriptions, inscribed by Gudea in honor of the god.[91]

Shul (or Dun)-pa-uddu.

The wife of the famous Gudea, Gin-Shul-pa-uddu, bears a name in which one of the elements is a deity, the phonetic reading of whose name is still uncertain.[92] The elements comprising it, namely, 'lord' (?), 'sceptre,' and 'radiant,' leave little doubt as to the solar character of the god. Besides Gudea's wife, a ruler, Ur-Shul-pa-uddu,[93] belonging apparently to a somewhat earlier period, embodies this deity in his name. The worship of the deity, therefore, belongs to a very early epoch, and appears at one time to have enjoyed considerable popularity within a certain district of Babylonia. To what region of Babylonia he belongs has not yet been ascertained. Judging from analogous instances, he represented some phase of the sun worshipped in a particular locality, whose cult, with the disappearance of the place from the surface of political affairs, yielded to the tendency to concentrate sun-worship in two or three deities,—Shamash and Ninib more especially. In the astronomy of the Babylonians the name survived as a designation of Marduk-Jupiter.[94]

Nin-Mar.

A local deity, designated as the lady of Mar, is invoked by Ur-Bau, from whom we learn that she was the daughter of Ninâ. Mar, with the determinative for country, Ki, appears to have been the name of a district extending to the Persian Gulf.[95] The capital of the district is represented by the mound Tel-Id, not far from Warka. Her subsidiary position is indicated in these words, and we may conclude that Nin-Mar at an early period fell under the jurisdiction of the district in which Ninâ was supreme. For all that, Nin-Mar, or the city in which her cult was centralized, must have enjoyed considerable favor. Ur-Bau calls her the 'gracious lady,' and erects a temple, the name of which, Ish-gu-tur,[96] i.e., according to Jensen's plausible interpretation, 'the house that serves as a court for all persons,' points to Mar as a place of pilgrimage to which people came from all sides. Gudea, accordingly, does not omit to include 'the lady of Mar' in his list of the chief deities to whom he pays his devotions; and on the assumption of the general favor in which the city of Mar stood as a sacred town, we may account for the fact that a much later ruler, Dungi, of the dynasty of Ur,[97] erects a temple to her honor.

Pa-sag.

A deity, the phonetic reading of whose name is unknown, or at all events uncertain,[98] is mentioned once by Gudea in the long list of deities that has been several times referred to. The ideographs with which his name is written designate him as a chief of some kind, and in accord with this, Gudea calls him 'the leader of the land.' Pa-sag is mentioned immediately after the sun-god Utu, and in view of the fact that another solar deity, I-shum, whom we shall come across in a future chapter, is designated by the same title[99] as Pa-sag, it seems safe to conclude that the latter is likewise a solar deity, and in all probability, the prototype of I-shum, if not indeed identical with him.

Nisaba (or Nidaba).

In a dream which the gods send to Gudea, he sees among other things, a goddess, whose name may be read Nisaba or Nidaba.[100] Ninâ, who interprets the dream to the ruler of Shirpurla, declares that Nisaba is her sister. In a text belonging to a still earlier age, the deity is mentioned as the begetter of a king whose name is read Lugal-zaggisi.[101] From the manner in which the name of the goddess is written, as well as from other sources, we know that Nisaba is an agricultural deity. In historical texts she plays scarcely any rôle at all, but in incantations she is often referred to; and from the fact that Nisaba is appealed to, to break the power of the demons in conjunction with Ea, it would appear that the position once occupied by her was no insignificant one. Nin-girsu, it will be recalled, has also traits which connect him with agricultural life, and Ninâ being the daughter of Nin-si-a, one of the forms under which Ningirsu-Ninib appears, we may connect Nisaba directly with the cults of which Lagash formed the center. Nisaba must have been the consort of one of the agricultural gods, whose jurisdiction falls within Gudea's empire. Lugal-zaggisi, as the king of Uruk, assigns to the goddess a first place. Her origin must, therefore, be sought in this region. In later days the name of the goddess is used to describe the fertility of the soil in general. So Ashurbanabal, describing the prosperity existing in his days, says that grain was abundant through the 'increase of Nisaba.'[102]

KU(?)-Anna.

A goddess of this name—reading of the first sign doubtful—is mentioned by Ur-Bau, who builds a temple to her in Girsu. If Amiaud is correct in his reading of the first sign, the goddess was identified at one time by the Babylonians with the consort of Ramman—the storm-god. This would accord with the description that Ur-Bau gives of the goddess. She is the one who deluges the land with water—belonging therefore to the same order as Bau.

In a list of deities enumerated by a ruler of Erech, Lugal-zaggisi,[103] are found (1) a local goddess,

Umu,

designated as the 'priestess of Uruk,'[104] and occupying an inferior rank to (2) a goddess,

Nin-akha-kuddu,[105]

who is called 'the mistress of Uruk.' The importance of Erech in the early history of Babylonia is emphasized by the inscriptions from Nippur, recently published by Dr. Hilprecht. It is natural, therefore, to find several deities of a purely local type commemorated by kings who belong to this region. The goddess Umu is not heard of again. The great goddess of Uruk, Nanâ, absorbs the smaller ones, and hence Nin-akha-kuddu survives chiefly in incantation texts as 'the lady of shining waters,' of 'purification,' and of 'incantations.'[106]

Lastly, a passing reference may be made to several deities to whom sanctuaries are erected by Uru-Kagina in the great temple of Bau at Uru-azaga, and whom Amiaud regards as sons of Bau.

Uru-Kagina enumerates three, Za-za-uru, Im-pa-ud-du, and Gim-nun-ta-ud-du-a.[107] The element ud-du in the last two names signifies 'radiant' or 'rising up'; while pa-ud-du (like in Shul-pa-ud-du, p. [99]) means 'radiant sceptre.' If to this, we add that Im is 'storm,' it will appear plausible to see in the second name a form of a raging solar deity and perhaps also in the third; gim nun in the latter name may mean 'creating lord.' To these Amiaud[108] adds from other sources, Khi-gir-nunna, Khi-shaga, Gurmu, and Zarmu. He takes these seven deities as sons of Bau, but he offers no conclusive evidence for his theory. Some of these deities may turn out to be synonymous with such as have already been met with.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Indicated by separating the syllables composing the name.

[25] At the period when the kings of Ur extend their rule over Nippur, they, too, do not omit to refer to the distinction of having been called to the service of the great god at his temple.

[26] The name signifies, 'He has founded the city,' the subject of the verb being some deity whose name is omitted.

[27] Jensen, Keils Bibl. 3, 1, p. 23, proposes to read Nin-Ur-sag, but without sufficient reason, it seems to me. The writing being a purely ideographic form, an epitheton ornans, the question of how the ideographs are to be read is not of great moment.

[28] We may compare the poetic application 'rock' to Yahweh in the Old Testament, e.g., Job 1. 12, and frequently in Psalms,—lxii. 3, 7; xcii. 16, 18, etc.

[29] Reading doubtful. Jensen suggests Erim. Hommel (Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch. xv. 37 seq.) endeavored to identify the place with Babylon, but his views are untenable. If Gish-galla was not a part of Lagash, it could not have been far removed from it. It was Amiaud who first suggested that Shir-pur-la (or Lagash) was the general name for a city that arose from an amalgamation of four originally distinct quarters. ("Sirpurla" in Revue Archéologique, 1888.) The suggestion has been generally, though not universally accepted.

[30] That Ninib is only an ideographic form is sufficiently clear from the element NIN-, lord. The proof, however, that Ninib is Adar, is still wanting. See Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 457, 458.

[31] From the context (De Sarzec, Découvertes, pl. 6, no. 4, ll. 13-21, and pl. 31, no. 3, col iii. ll. 2-6), there can be no doubt that Shul-gur (or Shul-gur-ana) is an epithet of Nin-girsu. The ideographs descriptive of the edifice suggest a corn magazine of some kind. One is reminded of the storehouses for grain in Egypt. See Jensen's Notes, Keils Bibl. 3, 1, pp. 15, 18, 73. A comparison of the two texts in question makes it probable that Ab-gi and E-bi-gar are synonymous.

[32] Rawlinson, iv. 27, no. 6; 11, 45-46.

[33] It is noticeable that there is no mention made of a special god of Lagash, which points to the later origin of the name.

[34] Inscr. D, col. li. 13; G, col. ii. ll. 1-8; iii. 4 seq.

[35] See Gen. xxiv. 53. Burkhardt, Notes on the Bedouins, i. 109, gives an example of the custom.

[36] The two names are used by Gudea (Inscr. G, col. iii. 12) in a way to indicate that they embrace the whole district of Lagash.

[37] Semit. Völker, p. 382.

[38] See Jensen, Keils Bibl. 3, 1, 28, note 2.

[39] The first signifies 'to make,' the third means "good, favorable," but the second, upon which so much depends, is not clear. Amiaud reads tum instead of sig.

[40] E.g., Ninâ (see below).

[41] De Sarzec, pl. 7, col. i. 12.

[42] Hibbert Lectures, p. 104.