PART II. THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS.

Lecture I. Introductory.

It is now fourteen years ago since I delivered a course of lectures for

the Hibbert Trustees on the religion of the ancient Babylonians. The

subject at that time was almost untouched; even such materials as were

then accessible had been hardly noticed, and no attempt had been made to

analyse or reduce them to order, much less to draw up a systematic account

of ancient Babylonian religion. It was necessary to lay the very

foundations of the study before it could be undertaken, to fix the

characteristic features of the Babylonian faith and the lines along which

it had developed, and, above all, to distinguish the different elements of

which it was composed. The published texts did not suffice for such a

work; they needed to be supplemented from that great mass of unpublished

cuneiform documents with which the rooms of our museums are filled. My

lectures were necessarily provisional and preliminary only, and I had to

content myself with erecting a scaffold on which others might build. The

time had not yet come for writing a systematic description of Babylonian

religion, and of the phases through which it passed during the long

centuries of its existence.

Nor has the time come yet. The best proof of this is the unsatisfactory

nature of the attempts that have recently been made to accomplish the

task. Our evidence is still too scanty and imperfect, the gaps in it are

too numerous, to make anything of the sort possible. Our knowledge of the

religious beliefs of Babylonia and Assyria is at best only piecemeal. Now

and again we have inscriptions which illustrate the belief of a particular

epoch or of a particular class, or which throw light on a particular side

of the official or popular religions; but such rays of light are

intermittent, and they penetrate the darkness only to be succeeded by a

deeper obscurity than before. All we can hope to do is to discover the

leading conceptions which underlay the religion of Babylonia in its

various forms, to determine and distinguish the chief elements that went

to create it, and to picture those aspects of it on which our documentary

materials cast the most light. But anything like a systematic description

of Babylonian religion will for many years to come be altogether out of

the question; it must wait until the buried libraries of Chaldæa have been

excavated, and all their contents studied. We are but at the beginning of

discoveries, and the belief that our present conclusions are final is the

belief of ignorance.

As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, the first endeavour of the

student of ancient Babylonian religion must be to distinguish between the

Semitic and non-Semitic elements embodied in it. And before we can do this

we must also distinguish between the Semitic and non-Semitic elements in

our sources of information. This was the principal task to which I applied

myself, and the failure to recognise the necessity of it has been the main

cause of the little progress that has been made in the study of the

subject. Since I wrote the means for undertaking the task with success

have been multiplied; thanks to the excavations of the French and American

explorers, the pre-Semitic world of Babylonia has been opened out to us in

a way of which we could not have dreamed; and numberless texts have been

found which belong to the early days of Sumerian or non-Semitic culture.

We are no longer confined to the editions of Sumerian texts made in later

times by Semitic scribes; we now have before us the actual inscriptions

which were engraved when Sumerian princes still ruled the land, and the

Sumerian language was still spoken by their subjects. We can read in them

the names of the gods they worshipped, and the prayers which they offered

to the spirits of heaven. The materials are at last at hand for

determining in some measure what is Sumerian and what is Semitic, and what

again may be regarded as a mixture or amalgamation of both.

But though the materials are at hand, it will be long before they can all

be examined, much less thoroughly criticised. I cannot emphasise too

strongly the provisional and imperfect character of our present knowledge

of Babylonian literature. Thousands of tablets are lying in the museums of

Europe and America, which it will take years of hard work on the part of

many students to copy and read. At Tello,(202) M. de Sarzec found a

library of more than 30,000 tablets, which go back to the days of the

priest-king Gudea; and the great temple of Bel at Nippur in Northern

Babylonia has yielded five times as many more to the American excavators.

Other excavations by natives or Turkish officials have at the same time

brought to light multitudinous tablets from other ancient sites,—from

Jokha, near the Shatt el-Hai, and from the ruins of the temple of Nebo at

Borsippa. It is true that a large proportion of these tablets are

contracts and similar business documents, but they contain much that is of

importance not only for the social history of Babylonia, but for its

religious history as well. Meanwhile the vast number of texts which have

come from the mounds of Nineveh and Sippara is still but imperfectly

known; it is only within the last three years that the catalogue of the

Kouyunjik collection of tablets, which have been in the British Museum for

almost half a century, has been at last completed in five portly volumes;

and there still remain the numberless tablets from Babylonia which line

the Museum shelves. And even of what has been catalogued there is much

which has not yet been fully copied or examined. The British Museum,

moreover, is no longer the sole repository of Babylonian literature. The

Louvre, the Berlin Museum, and the American University of Pennsylvania,

are equally filled with the clay tablets of the Babylonian scribes; while

the collection in the Museum of Constantinople far exceeds those which

have been formed elsewhere. Even private individuals have their

collections of larger or less extent; that of Lord Amherst of Hackney, for

example, would have made the fortune of one of the great museums of the

world but a few years ago.

It is evident that it will be long before more than a fraction of this

vast and ever-accumulating literature can be adequately studied. And what

adds to the difficulty is that it is still increasing year by year. At

present there are as many as three exploring expeditions in Babylonia. M.

de Sarzec’s successor on behalf of the French Government is still carrying

on work at Tello, the ancient Lagas, which was begun as far back as 1877;

the Americans are continuing their excavations at Nippur, where, ever

since 1888, they have been excavating for the first time on a thoroughly

systematic and scientific plan; and now the Germans have commenced work at

Babylon itself, and have already fixed the site of the temple of

Bel-Merodach and of that palace of Nebuchadrezzar in which Alexander the

Great died.(203) Even while I am writing, the news has come of the

discovery of a great library at Nippur, which seems to have been buried

under the ruins of the building in which it was kept as far back as the

Abrahamic age. The mounds in which it has been found lie to the south-west

of the great temple of Bel. Already nearly 20,000 tablets have been

rescued from it, and it is calculated that at least 130,000 are yet to be

disinterred. The tablets lie in order upon the clay shelves on which they

were arranged in the days of Khammurabi, the Amraphel of Genesis;(204)

and, so far as they have been examined by Professor Hilprecht, it would

appear that they relate to all the various branches of knowledge which

were known and studied at the time. History, chronology, religion and

literature, philology and law, are all alike represented in them. When we

remember that the catastrophe which overwhelmed them occurred more than

two thousand years before the Christian era, we may well ask what new and

unexpected information the future has in store for us, and hesitate about

coming to conclusions which the discovery of to-morrow may overthrow. We

know but a tithe of what the monuments of Babylonia have yet to reveal to

us, and much that we seem to know to-day will be profoundly modified by

the knowledge we shall hereafter possess.

The imperfection of his materials places the student of Babylonian

religion at a greater disadvantage than the student of Babylonian history

or social life. The facts once obtained in the field of history or of

social life remain permanently secured; the theories based upon them may

have to be changed, but the facts themselves have been acquired by science

once for all. But a religious fact is to a large extent a matter of

interpretation, and the interpretation depends upon the amount of the

evidence at our disposal as well as upon the character of the evidence

itself. Moreover, the history of religion is a history of spiritual and

intellectual development; it deals with ideas and dogmas which shift and

change with the process of the ages, and take as it were the colour of

each succeeding century. The history of religion transports us out of what

German metaphysicians would call the “objective” world into the

“subjective” world of thought and belief; it is not sufficient to know the

literal meaning of its technical terms, or the mere order and arrangement

of its rites and ceremonies; we have to discover what were the religious

conceptions that were connected with the terms, and the dogmas that

underlay the performance of a particular rite. A mere barren list of

divine names and titles, or even the assurance that theology had

identified certain gods with one another, will not carry us very far; at

most they are but the dry bones of a theological system, which must be

made to live before they can tell us what that system actually was.

The study of ancient Babylonian religion is thus beset with many

difficulties. Our materials are imperfect, and yet at the same time are

perpetually growing; the religious system to which they relate is a

combination of two widely different forms of faith, characteristic of two

entirely different races; and before we can understand it properly, we

must separate the elements of which it consists, and assign to each their

chronological position. The very fact, however, that religious texts are

usually of immemorial antiquity, and that changes inevitably pass over

them as they are handed down in successive editions, makes such a task

peculiarly difficult. Nevertheless it is a task which must be undertaken

before we have the right to draw a conclusion from the texts with which we

deal. We must first know whether they are originally Sumerian or Semitic,

or whether they belong to the age when Sumerian and Semitic were fused in

one; whether, again, they are composite or the products of a single author

and epoch; whether, lastly, they have been glossed and interpolated, and

their primitive meaning transformed. We must have a chronology for our

documents as well as an ethnology, and beware of transforming Sumerian

into Semitic, or Semitic into Sumerian, or of interpreting the creations

of one age as if they were the creations of another. The critical

examination of the texts must precede every attempt to write an account of

Babylonian religion, if the account is to be of permanent value.

Unfortunately we have nothing in Babylonia that corresponds with the

Pyramid texts of Egypt. We have no body of doctrine which, in its existing

form, is coeval with the early days of the monarchy, and can accordingly

be compared with the religious belief and the religious books of a later

time. The Pyramid texts have enabled us to penetrate behind the classical

age of Egyptian religion, and so trace the development of many of the

dogmas which distinguished the faith of later epochs; it is possible that

similarly early records of the official creed may yet be discovered in

Babylonia; but up to the present nothing of the sort has been found. We

are confined there to the texts which have passed through the hands of

countless editors and scribes, or else to such references to religious

beliefs and worship as can be extracted from the inscriptions of kings and

priests. The sacred books of Babylonia are known to us only in the form

which they finally assumed. The Babylonian religion with which we are

acquainted is that official theology in which the older Sumerian and

Semitic elements were combined together and worked into an elaborate

system. To distinguish the elements one from the other, and discover the

beliefs and conceptions which underlie them, is a task of infinite labour

and complexity. But it is a task which cannot be shirked if we would even

begin to understand the nature of Babylonian religion, and the fundamental

ideas upon which it rested. We must analyse and reconstruct, must compare

and classify and piece together as best we may, the fragments of belief

and practice that have come down to us. Above all, we must beware of

confusing the old with the new, of confounding Sumerian with Semitic, or

of ascribing to an earlier epoch the conceptions of a later time.

The picture will be at most but a blurred and mutilated one. But its main

outlines can be fixed, and with the progress of discovery and research

they will be more and more filled in. And the importance of the picture

lies in the fact that Babylonian religion exercised a profound influence

not only over the lands immediately adjoining the Babylonian plain, but

over the whole of Western Asia as well. Long before the days of Abraham,

Canaan was a Babylonian province, obeying Babylonian law, reading

Babylonian books, and writing in Babylonian characters. Along with

Babylonian culture necessarily came also the religion of Babylonia and the

theological or cosmogonic dogmas which accompanied it. Abraham himself was

born in a Babylonian city, and the religion of his descendants was

nurtured in an atmosphere of Babylonian thought. The Mosaic Law shows

almost as clear evidences of Babylonian influence as do the earlier

chapters of Genesis.

Recent discoveries have gone far towards lifting the veil that has

hitherto covered the beginnings of Babylonian history. We have been

carried back to a time when the Edin or “plain” of Babylonia was still in

great measure a marsh, and the waters of the Persian Gulf extended 120

miles farther inland than they do to-day. If we take the rate at which the

land has grown since the days of Alexander the Great as a basis of

measurement, this would have been from eight to nine thousand years ago.

At this time there were already two great sanctuaries in the country,

around each of which a settlement or city had sprung up. One of these was

Nippur in the north, the modern Niffer; the other was Eridu, “the good

city,”(205) now marked by the mounds of Nowâwis or Abu-Shahrain, which

stood on what was then the shore of the Persian Gulf. Now its site is more

than a hundred miles distant from the sea. But it was once the seaport of

Babylonia, whose inhabitants caught fish in the waters of the Gulf or

traded with the populations of the Arabian coast. Nippur, on the other

hand, was inland and agricultural. It was the primitive centre of those

engineering works which gradually converted the pestiferous marshes of

Babylonia into a fruitful plain, watered by canals and rivers, and

protected from inundation by lofty dykes. While Eridu looked seaward,

Nippur looked landward, and the influences that emanated from each were

accordingly diverse from the very outset.

As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, Babylon must have been a colony

of Eridu. Its tutelary god was a son of Ea of Eridu, and had been

worshipped at Eridu long before his cult was carried northward to Babylon.

Dr. Peters has since suggested that Ur was similarly a colony of Nippur.

The moon-god of Ur was the son of the god of Nippur, and though Ur lay but

a few miles from Eridu, it was an inland and not a maritime town. It stood

on the desert plateau to the west of the Euphrates, overlooking the

Babylonian plain, which at the time of its foundation had doubtless not as

yet been reclaimed. But its situation exposed it to Arabian influences.

Unlike the other great cities of Babylonia, it was in Arabia rather than

in Babylonia, and its population from the outset must have contained a

considerable Arabian element. Semitic settlers from Southern Arabia and

Canaan occupied it, and it was known to them as Uru, “the city” _par

excellence_.(206)

Nippur and Eridu were already old when Ur first rose to fame. They were

both great sanctuaries rather than the capitals of secular kingdoms. The

god of Nippur was El-lil, “the lord of the ghost-world,”(207) the ruler of

the spirits, whose abode was beneath the earth, or in the air by which we

are surrounded. He was the master of spells and incantations, of the

magical formulæ which enabled those who knew them to keep the evil spirits

at bay, or to turn their malice against an enemy. Nippur was peculiarly

the home of the darker side of Babylonian religion; the teaching and

influences that emanated from it regarded the spirit-world as a world of

night and darkness, peopled by beings that were, for the most part,

hostile to man. The _lil_ or ghost belonged to the realm of the dead

rather than to that of the living, and the female _lilîtu_ was the

ancestress of that Lilith whom the Jewish Rabbis made a vampire under the

form of a beautiful woman, who lived on the blood of the children she slew

at night.

Eridu, on the contrary, was the seat of the Chaldæan god of culture. Ea,

whose home was in the deep, among the waters of the Persian Gulf, had

there his temple, and it was there that he had taught the first

inhabitants of Babylonia all the elements of civilisation, writing down

for them the laws they should obey, the moral code they should follow, and

the healing spells that prevented disease and death. He was the author of

all the arts of life, the all-wise god who knew the things that benefited

man; and his son and minister Asari, who interpreted his will to his

worshippers, received the title of him “who does good to mankind.” While

El-lil of Nippur was the lord and creator of the spirit-world, Ea was the

lord and creator of men. He had made man, like a potter, out of the clay,

and to him, therefore, man continued to look for guidance and help.

The character of Ea was doubtless coloured by the position of his city.

The myth which spoke of him as rising each morning out of the Persian Gulf

to bring the elements of culture to his people, clearly points to that

maritime intercourse with the coasts of Southern Arabia which seems to

have had a good deal to do with the early civilisation of Babylonia.

Foreign ideas made their way into the country, trade brought culture in

its train, and it may be that the Semites, who exercised so profound an

influence upon Babylonia, first entered it through the port of Eridu.

However this may be, it was at Eridu that the garden of the Babylonian

Eden was placed; here was “the centre of the earth”; here, too, the waters

of the Tigris and Euphrates were poured out on either side from vases held

by the god.(208)

Until Eridu, however, is excavated with the same systematic care as

Nippur, we must be content to derive our knowledge of it and of its

influence upon the primitive culture and religion of Babylonia from the

records which have been found elsewhere. That its sanctuary was at least

as old as that of Nippur, we may gather from the fact that it was founded

before the coast-line had receded from the spot on which it stood. Its

early relations to Nippur must be left to the future to disclose.

That neither Nippur nor Eridu should have been the seat of a secular

kingdom, is not so strange as at first sight it appears to be. The

priesthood of each must have been too numerous and powerful to surrender

its rights to a single pontiff, or to allow such a pontiff to wrest from

it its authority in civil affairs. It is difficult for a king to establish

himself where a theocratic oligarchy holds absolute sway, and the

reverence in which the temples and worship of El-lil and Ea were held

would have prevented the success of any attempt of the kind. It was their

sanctuaries which made Babylonia a holy land, wherein all who could were

buried after death. Like Abydos in Egypt, Nippur or Eridu continued to be

a sanctuary, governed by its own hierarchy and enjoying its own

independent existence, while secular kingdoms grew up at its side.(209)

Like Egypt, Babylonia was originally divided into several independent

States. From time to time one of these became predominant, and obliged the

other States to acknowledge its supremacy. But the centre of power shifted

frequently, and it took many centuries before the government became

thoroughly centralised. The earlier dynasties which claimed rule over the

whole country had at times to defend their claims by force of arms.

Like Egypt, too, Babylonia fell naturally into two halves, Akkad in the

north and Sumer in the south. The recollection of the fact was preserved

in the imperial title of “king of Akkad and Sumer,” which thus corresponds

with the Egyptian title of “king of Upper and Lower Egypt.” But whereas in

Egypt the conquering race moved from south to north, causing the name of

Upper Egypt to come first in the royal title, in Babylonia it was the

Semites of the northern half who imposed their yoke upon the south. Akkad

accordingly takes precedence of Sumer.

I have said that the veil which has so long covered the early history of

the country is beginning at last to be lifted. Rays of light are beginning

to struggle through the darkness, and we can at last form some idea of the

process which made Babylonia what it was in later historical times. When

the light first breaks upon it, the leading kingdom, at all events in the

north, is Kis. Here a Semitic dynasty seems to have established itself at

an early period, and we hear of wars carried on by it with its southern

neighbours. Towards the south, Lagas, the modern Tello, became the chief

State under its high priests, who made themselves kings. But Lagas, like

all the other petty kingdoms of the country, had at length to submit to a

Semitic power which grew up in the north, and, after unifying Babylonia,

created an empire that extended to the shores of the Mediterranean. This

was the empire of Sargon of Akkad, and his son Naram-Sin, whose date is

fixed by the native annalists at B.C. 3800, and whose importance for the

history of religion and culture throughout Western Asia can hardly be

overestimated.

Palestine and Syria—the land of the Amorites, as the Babylonians called

them—became a Babylonian province; and a portion of a cadastral survey for

the purposes of taxation has come down to us, from which we learn that it

had been placed under a governor who bears the Canaanitish name of

Uru-Malik (Urimelech).(210) Naram-Sin carried his arms even into Magan,

the Sinaitic Peninsula, where he wrested from the Egyptians the coveted

mines of copper and malachite. Susa had long been a Babylonian dependency;

and as Mesopotamia, including the later Assyria, also obeyed Babylonian

rule, the whole of Western Asia became Babylonian or, to use the words of

Sargon’s Annals, “all countries were formed together into one (empire).”

Intercourse was kept up between one part of the empire and the other by

means of high roads, along which the imperial post travelled frequently.

Some of the letters carried by it, with the clay seals which served as

stamps, are now in the museum of the Louvre.(211)

How long the empire of Sargon lasted is still uncertain. But from that day

onward the kings who claimed supreme authority in Babylonia itself also

claimed authority in Syria; and from time to time they succeeded in

enforcing their claim. Erech and Ur now appear upon the scene, and more

than one imperial dynasty had its capital at Ur. When the last of these

fell, Babylonia passed for a while into a state of decay and anarchy, a

dynasty of South Arabian or Canaanitish origin established itself at

Babylon; while Elamite princes seized Larsa, and compelled the southern

half of the country to pay them tribute. A deliverer finally arose, in the

person of Khammurabi or Ammurapi, of the Arabian dynasty; he drove the

Elamites out of Babylonia, defeated Arioch of Larsa, captured his capital,

and once more united Babylonia under a single head, with its centre at

Babylon. From henceforth Babylon remained the capital of the monarchy, and

the sacred city of Western Asia. The national revival was accompanied by a

literary revival as well. Poets and writers arose whose works became

classical; new copies and editions were made of ancient books, and the

theology of Babylonia was finally systematised. Under Khammurabi and his

immediate successors we may place the consummation of that gradual process

of development which had reduced the discordant elements of Babylonian

society and religion into a single harmonious system.

This theological system, however, cannot be understood, unless we bear in

mind that, as in Egypt so too in Babylonia, there was originally a number

of small independent principalities, each with its tutelary deity and

special sanctuary. The head of the State was the _patesi_, or high priest

of the god, his vicar and representative upon earth, and the interpreter

of the divine commands to men. At the outset, therefore, Babylonian

government was essentially theocratic; and this theocratic character clung

to it to the last. It was this which made Babylon a sacred city, whose

priests had the power of conferring the right to rule upon whom they

would, like the Pope in the Middle Ages. Though the high priest became in

time a king, he never divested himself of his sacerdotal mantle, or forgot

that he was the adopted son of his god.(212)

The tutelary gods followed the fortunes of the cities over whose destinies

they watched. The rise of a city to power meant the supremacy also of the

divinity to whom it was dedicated; its decay involved his decline. The

gods of the subject cities were the vassals of the deity of the dominant

State; when the kings of Ur were supreme in Babylonia, the moon-god of Ur

was supreme as well. Similarly the rise of Babylon brought with it the

supremacy of Merodach, the god of Babylon, who henceforward became the Bel

or “Lord” of the whole pantheon.

A god who had once occupied so exalted a position could not, however, be

easily deposed. Babylonian history preserved the memory of the ruling

dynasties whose suzerainty had been acknowledged throughout the country,

and Babylonian religion equally remembered the gods whose servants and

representatives they had been. A god who had once been supreme over

Babylonia could not again occupy a lower seat; it was necessary to find a

place for him by the side of the younger deity, whose position was merely

that of a chief among his peers. When Babylon became the capital, the

older seats of empire still claimed equality with her, and the priestly

hierarchies of Ur or Erech or Sippara still accounted themselves the

equals of her priesthood. The ancient sanctuaries survived, with their

cults unimpaired and their traditions still venerated; and the reverence

paid to the sanctuary and its ministers was reflected back upon the god.

Hence it was that at the head of the official faith there stood a group of

supreme gods, each with his rank and powers definitely fixed, and each

worshipped in some one of the great cities of the kingdom. But the system

of which they formed part was necessarily of artificial origin. It was the

work of a theological school, such as was made possible by the existence

of the primeval sanctuaries of Nippur and Eridu. Without these latter the

organisation of Babylonian religion would have been imperfect or

impossible. But from the earliest days of Babylonian civilisation, Nippur

and Eridu had alike exercised a unifying influence on the diverse and

discordant elements of which the population was composed; they were

centres, not only of religion, but of culture as well, and this culture

was essentially religious. For unnumbered centuries the gods of Nippur and

Eridu were acknowledged as supreme by all the inhabitants of the country,

whatever might be their race or the particular local divinities they

adored, and the religious teaching of the priests of Nippur and Eridu was

accepted as the inspired utterances of heaven. When Babylon became at

length the capital of a united monarchy under an Arabian dynasty, the

ancient gods of Nippur and Eridu yielded to its _parvenu_ deity only under

protest; despite the fact that the city of Merodach had been the leader in

the national war of independence, Merodach himself had to be identified

with the son of Ea of Eridu, and the title of Bel which he wrested from

El-lil of Nippur was never acknowledged at Nippur itself. There at least

the old “Lord of the ghost-world” still remained for his worshippers the

“Lord” of all the gods.

The title had been given him by the Semites, though the sanctuary in which

he was worshipped was of Sumerian or non-Semitic foundation. The fact

introduces us to the last point on which I wish to touch in the present

lecture. The population of Babylonia was not homogeneous. The Chaldæan

historian Berossos tells us how, at the beginning of the world, races of

various origin were gathered together in it; and the statement has been

fully confirmed by the monuments. Two main races were represented in the

country. One of these, usually termed Sumerian, spoke an agglutinative

language, and came, perhaps, from the mountainous regions of Elam; the

other were the Semites, whose first home was, I believe, in Arabia. The

Sumerians were the first in the land. To them were due the elements of

Babylonian civilisation; they were the first to drain the marshes and

cultivate the soil, to build the temples and cities, and to invent—or at

all events to develop—that system of pictorial writing out of which the

cuneiform characters gradually arose. They were, too, the first to carry

the culture they had created among the neighbouring populations of Western

Asia. The result was that their language and script spread far and wide;

wherever proto-Chaldæan civilisation extended, the proto-Chaldæan language

went with it. And along with the language and literature there went also

the theology of primitive Babylonia. The names of the Sumerian divinities

made their way into other lands, and the dialects of the Semitic tribes

were profoundly affected by the forms of Sumerian speech. The earliest

civilisation of Western Asia was Sumerian.

But a time came when the Sumerian was supplanted by the Semite. It was in

Northern Babylonia that the Semite first predominated. Here the empire of

Sargon of Akkad grew up, and the cuneiform syllabary became an imperfect

means for expressing the sounds of a Semitic language. From Northern

Babylonia Semitic influences passed into the south, a mixed Semitic and

Sumerian population came into existence, and the Babylonians of history

were born. The mixed population necessarily had a mixed language, and a

composite culture produced a composite theology. To disentangle the

elements of this theology is the first and most pressing task of its

historian; but it is a task full of difficulties, which the native

theologians themselves not unfrequently failed to overcome.

The union of Sumerian and Semite created the Babylonian with whom we have

to deal, just as the union of Kelt and Teuton has created the Englishman

of to-day. Other races, it is true, settled in his country in subsequent

ages, but their influence was comparatively slight and transitory. At one

time non-Semitic Elamites from the east overran both Babylonia and the

district of Susa, which up to that time had been a Babylonian province,

and founded a dynasty at Babylon which lasted for nearly six hundred

years. But, like the Hyksos dynasties in Egypt, it made but little

permanent impression upon the people; in character and religion they

remained what they were before. Nor did the irruption of Bedâwin tribes

and other more pure-blooded representatives of the Semitic race have a

greater effect. They were rather influenced by the Babylonians than the

Babylonians by them. Their own culture was inferior, and Babylonia was

their teacher in the arts and comforts of life. The wild Bedâwin, who

tended the flocks of their Babylonian masters, the Amorite merchants from

Canaan, who formed trading settlements in the Babylonian cities, even the

South Arabian princes who headed the national revolt against Elamite

supremacy and made Babylon the capital of their kingdom, were all alike

absorbed into the Babylonian race. They became the children of Babylonian

civilisation, and, along with the culture, they adopted the language of

the Babylonian people. The mixed race which had produced the civilisation

of Babylonia, was destined to retain its individuality unimpaired down to

the day when Europe took the place of Asia in the history of the civilised

world.

But the fact of the mixture must never be lost sight of. Without it,

Babylonian religion, like the Babylonian system of writing, would be a

hopeless puzzle. We could, indeed, draw up long lists of obscure deities

with unmeaning names, and enumerate the titles which the inscriptions give

them, but any attempt to trace their history or discover the religious

ideas of which they are the expression, would be impossible. We must know

what is Semitic and what is Sumerian, or what is due to a combination of

the two elements, before we can penetrate to the heart of the old

Babylonian theology, and ascertain the principles on which it rests. The

native writers themselves were aware of this, and fully realised the fact

that Sumerian conceptions of the godhead formed the background of the

official faith. But their uncritical efforts to solve the problem of the

origin of their religion have added only to the complication of it. Just

as the English lexicographers of a past generation found a Greek or Latin

derivation for the Teutonic words of our language, so the scholars of

Babylonia discovered Sumerian etymologies for Semitic words and divine

names, or else assimilated them to other words of a different origin. Thus

the Semitic word _Sabattu_, “Sabbath,” is derived from the Sumerian _sa_,

“heart,” and _bat_, “to cease” or “rest,” and interpreted as “a day of

rest for the heart”; while _pardêṡu_, “paradise,” is explained as the

_par_ or “domain of the god Eṡu.”(213) In many cases it is as yet

impossible to tell whether a native etymology really rests on a fact of

history, or is the invention of learned pedantry or popular etymologising.

Marduk or Merodach, for instance, is variously derived from the Sumerian

Amar-utuki, “the heifer of the sun-spirit”; and the Semitic Mar-Eridugga,

“the son of the city Eridu.”(214) The first etymology is certainly false;

our present materials do not allow us to speak so positively in regard to

the second. All we can say about it is that it is unlikely in the extreme.

And yet a good deal turns upon the true origin of the name of the patron

god of Babylon. If it is Semitic, the foundation of the city and of the

temple around which it was built would presumably belong to Semitic days,

and the development of the cult of the god would be Semitic from the

first. The identification of Merodach, moreover, with Asari the son of Ea

of Eridu, would receive substantial support; the “son of Eridu” would

naturally be the son of the god of Eridu, and we should have to see in

Babylon a colony from the old seaport of the Babylonian plain.

The divergent etymologies, however, assigned to the name of Merodach by

the theologians of Babylonia show that they were quite as much in the dark

as we are in regard to its origin and significance. Its derivation had

been already lost in the night of time; the worship of the god and the

building of his sanctuary went back to ages too remote for the memory of

man. And yet Merodach was one of the youngest gods in the Babylonian

pantheon. By the side of Ea of Eridu or El-lil of Nippur he was but a

child, the offspring of a later day; and even when he became supreme in

Babylonia, the fact that he was so was still remembered. If it is

difficult to trace the earliest lineaments of Merodach, how much more

difficult must it be to trace those of the older gods!

The theology of Babylonia, as it is known to us, is thus an artificial

product. It combines two wholly different forms of faith and religious

conception. One of these was overlaid by the other at a very early period

in the history of the people, and the theological beliefs of Sumer

received a Semitic interpretation. This natural process of combination and

assimilation was followed by an artificial attempt to weld the whole into

a consistent and uniform shape. An artificial system took the place of

natural growth, and the punning etymologies which accompanied it were but

an illustration of the principles that underlay its methods. If we would

successfully analyse the theology which has come down to us, we must, as

it were, get behind it and discover the elements of which it was composed.

We must separate and distinguish Sumerian and Semitic, must trace the

influences they exerted upon one another, and, above all, must detect and

discard the misinterpretations and accretions of the later systematic

theology. For such an undertaking, it is true, our materials are still

miserably scanty, and, with imperfect materials, the results also can be

imperfect only. But all pioneering work is necessarily imperfect, and for

many a day to come the history of Babylonian religion must be left to the

pioneer. Year by year, indeed, the materials are increasing, and it may be

that a discovery will yet be made, like that of the Pyramid texts in

Egypt, which will reveal to us the inner religious thought and belief of

Babylonia in those distant ages, when Nippur and Eridu, and not as yet

Babylon, were the theological centres of the land. Even now we possess

inscriptions of the Sumerian epoch, which tell us the names of the gods

who were worshipped by the kings of the pre-Semitic age, and throw light

on the religious ideas which animated them, and the religious ritual which

they observed. But such inscriptions are still comparatively few, their

translation is full of difficulties, and the references contained in them

to the theology of the time are scanty and unsatisfactory. And the most

important of them—those of the high priests of Tello—belong to an epoch

when the Semite had been for many centuries in the land, influencing and

being influenced by his Sumerian neighbours. Though Lagas was still

Sumerian, its overlord was the Semitic king of Ur.(215)

You must not, therefore, expect either so complete or so detailed an

account of Babylonian religion as that which it is now possible to give of

the religion of Egypt. There are no pictures from the walls of tombs, no

bas-reliefs from the temples, to help us; we have to depend almost wholly

on the literature that has come down to us, mutilated and only half

examined as it is. Our efforts to interpret it are without the assistance

of pictorial representations such as are at the disposal of the

Egyptologist; they rest upon philology alone, and the element of

uncertainty in them is therefore considerable.

The advances made in our knowledge of Babylonian religion, since I

lectured upon it some fifteen years ago, are consequently not so great as

the inexperienced student might be tempted to believe. There are some

things to be added, there is more to be corrected, but the main facts and

principles which I then tried to place before the world of scholars remain

intact. In some cases confirmation has come of suggestions which seemed

only possible or probable; in other cases others have worked with greater

success and better materials upon the foundations which I laid. If,

therefore, the progress made during the past few years may appear

disappointing, there is no reason for surprise; the fault lies not with

the Assyriologist, but with the materials with which he has to deal. The

labourer is ready, but the harvest is not yet ripe.

Lecture II. Primitive Animism.

Deep down in the very core of Babylonian religion lay a belief in what

Professor Tylor has called animism. It belonged to the Sumerian element in

the faith of the people, and, as we shall see, was never really

assimilated by the Semitic settlers. But in spite of Semitic influences

and official attempts to explain it away, it was never eradicated from the

popular creed, and it left a permanent impress upon the folk-lore and

superstitions of the nation. As in Egypt, so too in Babylonia, animism was

the earliest shape assumed by religion, and it was through animism that

the Sumerian formed his conception of the divine.

In Egypt it was the _Ka_ which linked “the other world” with that of

living men. In Babylonia the place of the _Ka_ was taken by the _Zi_. We

may translate Zi by “spirit,” but like the Ka it was rather a double than

a spirit in our sense of the term. Literally the word signified “life,”

and was symbolised in the primitive picture-writing of the country by a

flowering plant. Life, however, meant a great deal more to early man than

it does to us. It was synonymous with motion, with force and energy. All

that moved was endowed with life; life was the only force known to man

which explained motion, and, conversely, motion was the sign and

manifestation of life. The arrow which sped through the air or the rock

which fell from the cliff did so in virtue of their possessing life, or

because the motive force of life lay in some way or other behind them. The

stars which slowly moved through the sky, and the sun which rose and set

day by day, were living beings; it was life which gave them the power of

movement, as it gave the power of movement to man himself and the animals

by whom he was surrounded. The power of movement, in fact, separated the

animate from the inanimate; all that moved possessed life; the motionless

was lifeless and dead. Man’s experience was necessarily his measure of the

universe; the only force he knew of was the force we call life, and his

reason seemed to demand that what held true of himself must hold true also

of the rest of the world.

But, like the Egyptian, the Sumerian could not conceive of life except

under visible and concrete form. The abstract was still embedded, as it

were, in the concrete; it could not be divorced from it in thought any

more than in those pictorial characters which were used by the scribes.

What we mean by “force” would have been unintelligible to the primitive

Babylonian; for him life was something real and material, which had a

shape of its own, even though this shape was but an unsubstantial shadow,

seen indeed by the eye, but eluding the grasp. At the same time it was

more than a shadow, for it possessed all the qualities of the object or

person to whom it belonged. It was not life in the abstract, but the

counterpart of an individual object, which endowed that object with the

power of motion, and gave it a place in the animate world.

The Sumerian Zi, therefore, closely resembled the Egyptian Ka. The human

Zi was the imperishable part of man; it made him a living soul while he

was in this world, and after death continued to represent him in the

shadowy world below.(216) Unlike the _lilla_ or “ghost,” it represented

the man himself in his personality; if that personality were destroyed, it

also ceased to exist. While on the one side it was the Zi which gave man

life and the power of movement, on the other side, without the individual

man there could be no individual Zi. Food and drink were offered to the

Babylonian dead as they were to the Egyptian, and the objects the dead man

had loved during his lifetime were deposited in his grave. His seal was

attached to his wrist, his spear or staff was laid at his side, and at

times even dates or fish or poultry were buried with him, lest he might

feel hungry in the darkness of the tomb. The child had his favourite toys

to play with, the woman her necklace of beads. The water-jar was there,

filled with “the pure water” for which the dead thirsted, along with the

bowl of clay or bronze out of which it might be drunk. “A garment to

clothe him,” says an old hymn, “and shoes for his feet, a girdle for his

loins and a water-skin for drinking, and food for his journey have I given

him.”(217)

Like men, the gods too had each his Zi. We hear of the Zi of Ea, the god

of the deep;(218) and the primeval “mother, who had begotten heaven and

earth,” was Zi-kum or Zi-kura, “the life of heaven” and “earth.”(219)

In the early magical texts “the Zi of heaven” and the “Zi of earth” are

invoked to remove the spell that has been cast over the sick or the

insane. Even when Ea and his son Asari had taken the place of the demons

of the older faith, the official religion was still compelled to recognise

their existence and power. The formula of exorcism put into the mouth of

Ea himself ends with an appeal to the “life” of heaven and earth. It

begins, indeed, with “the charm of Ea,” through the efficacy of which the

evil spell is to be dissolved; but the charm of the god of wisdom is soon

forgotten, and it is to the Zi of heaven and earth that the exorcist

finally has recourse. “O life of heaven, mayest thou conjure it; O life of

earth, mayest thou conjure it!” thus, and thus only, could the exorcism

end. The old associations were too strong to be overcome, and the

worshippers of Ea had to allow a place at his side for the “spirits” of an

earlier age.

The ancient conception of the Zi lingered long among the Babylonian

population. But, as the Semitic element became predominant, it fell more

and more into the background, and survived—so far at least as the official

religion was concerned—only in a few old formulæ and names. One of the

fixed stars, for example, was called Sib-zi-Anna, “the Shepherd of the

Life of Heaven,” and a common form of oath was by “the life of the gods”

or “king” (_nis ilâni_, _nis sarri_). Even Sennacherib swears by “the life

of Assur”; but it is questionable whether either he or any of his

contemporaries remembered the original meaning and history of the phrase.

The Sumerian Zi had received a Semitic translation, and therewith a

Semitic connotation. The ideas attached to the Semitic _nêsu_ were not

those which had once clustered around the Zi. On the lips of the Semite

even the word Zi itself meant “life” and little more. When Pur-Sin II. of

Ur, a century or two before Abraham, addresses a dedication in Sumerian to

the moon-god, he calls himself “the divine _Zi_ of his country”(220)—in

other words, a “god who gives life to his land.” There is no question here

of a vital force which is the counterpart of a man or god; we have, on the

contrary, the Semitic conception of a divine father from whom his people

derive their life. The Semite has transferred his own ideas to the

language of his Sumerian predecessors, and “life” for him is no

materialised reflection of an individual thing, but a principle which is

diffused, as it were, from a divine centre. The “Zi of heaven” has become

the abstract life, which the god can communicate to those about him.

It is only in the dim background of history, therefore, that we find in

Babylonia a belief analogous to that which created the Egyptian doctrine

of the Ka. It was foreign to the Semitic mind, and with the rise of

Semitic supremacy, accordingly, it disappeared from the religion of

Babylonia. We have to look for its fossilised relics in the old magical

texts, which, like the spells and charms of modern folk-lore, have

preserved so many of the beliefs and superstitions of an otherwise

forgotten past, or else in divine names and epithets which go back to a

remote antiquity. The animism of the Sumerian is difficult to discover and

trace, for it was already buried under Semitic modes of thought when the

first libraries of Babylonia were being formed.

It was another Sumerian belief which exercised a greater influence upon

the Semitic mind. This was the belief in ghosts. The _lil_ or ghost was

distinct from the _Zi_; while the _Zi_ belonged to the world of the

living, the _lil_ belonged to the world of the dead. The _lil_

consequently was no counterpart or double of either man or god, but a

being with an independent existence of its own. Its home was beneath the

earth, where the dead had their dwelling; but it visited this upper world

under the shadow of night, or in desert places to which nothing living

came.(221) It was essentially a spirit of darkness, and one of the names

by which it was known was that of “the light-despoiler.”(222) It came in

the raging wind which darkens the heaven with clouds, or in the cloud of

dust which betokens the approach of the storm. The _lil_, in fact, was

essentially a demon, “without husband or wife,” one of those evil spirits

who tormented and perplexed mankind.

The sexless Lil was waited on by “a maid,” who under the cover of night

enticed men to their destruction, or seduced them in their dreams. She was

a veritable vampire, providing the Lil she served with its human food.

When the Semite succeeded to the heritage of the Sumerian, the sexless Lil

disappeared. Semitic grammar demanded that there should be a distinction

between masculine and feminine, and Semitic modes of thought equally

demanded that a female Lilît should take her place by the side of a male

Lilu. The attributes of the “serving-maid” of the Sumerian Lil were

transferred to the new creation of the Semitic mind, and the siren who

lured men to their destruction ceased to be a serving-maid, and became the

female Lilît herself. But the origin of the powers she exercised was never

forgotten. When the name and character of the Babylonian Lilît were

borrowed by the Hebrews under the form of Lilith, she was conceived of as

a single individual spirit rather than as a class. Isaiah (xxxiv. 14)

tells us how Lilith shall haunt the desolate ruins of Edom, and find among

them “a place of rest”; while, according to the Rabbis, Lilith had been

the first wife of man, in appearance the fairest of women, but in reality

a vampire demon who sucked at night the blood of her victims.

The lord and ruler of the Lils was the god who was worshipped at Nippur.

He bore, accordingly, the title of En-lil, “the lord of the ghost-world,”

and his temple was one of the oldest sanctuaries of Sumerian

Babylonia.(223) It was a centre of primeval civilisation, and the source

of the magical arts which gathered round the belief in the spirits of the

underworld. But the lordship of the underworld implied also a lordship

over the earth, of which it formed a part. En-lil, “the lord of the

ghost-world,” thus became in time the ruler, not only of the dead, but

also of the living. His empire ceased to be confined to the realms of

darkness, and was extended to this upper world of light and of mankind. Up

to the last, however, his primitive character was never forgotten. In the

story of the Deluge he appears as the destroyer of men; Namtar, the

plague-demon, is his minister; and like Kingu, the demon-god of chaos, he

wore the tablets of destiny, which determine when men shall die.(224)

En-lil was accordingly the sovereign of the dead as well as of the spirits

of the underworld. The Sumerian _lil_ must therefore have once included

the ghosts of men as well as other ghosts which never had a material

existence in the flesh. The _lil_ must once have meant that immaterial

part of man which, after death, had its home in the underworld, from

whence it issued at night to satisfy its cravings for food with the

garbage of the streets. By the side of the Zi there must also have been

the Lil; but we must wait till more monuments of Sumerian antiquity are

discovered before we can define the exact relationship between them.(225)

In the Epic of Gilgames it is said that when the shade of Ea-bani was

called up from the dead, like that of the shade of Samuel by the Witch of

Endor, “it arose from the earth like a cloud of dust.”(226) It was fitting

that the ghost should be likened to a dust-storm. Its home was in the

ground; and there, in the dark underworld, its food, we are told, was

dust. But the word used by the poet for the ghost of Ea-bani is not _lil_.

It is another word, utukku, which occurs frequently in the magical texts.

Here the _utukku_ is a general name for a demon, and we hear of the

_utukku_ “of the field,” “of the mountain,” “of the sea,” and “of the

grave.” The “_utukku_ of the grave” must be the restless ghost of some

dead man which has become a spirit of darkness, working evil to mankind.

The ordinary _utukku_, however, had no human ancestry; it was a demon pure

and simple, which sat upon the neck of the sufferer and inflicted upon him

pain and death. It corresponded with the vampire of European folk-lore;

and just as the ranks of the vampire might be recruited from the dead, so

too might the class of demons whom the Babylonians termed _utukki_.

It was the same with another species of demon, the _ekimmu_, which hovered

around the tomb and attacked the loins of those who fell in its way. But

the _ekimmu_ was a being whose origin was known. It was the spirit of an

unburied corpse over whose unsanctified remains the funeral rites had

never been performed. The mystic ceremonies and magical words which

consigned the dead to their last resting-place had been neglected, and the

hapless spirit was left unprovided with the talismans that would enable

him to cross the river of death, or join his comrades in the passive

tranquillity of the lower world. Restlessly, therefore, it wandered about

the desert places of the earth, finding at times a shelter in the bodies

of the living, whom it plagued with sore diseases, and seeking to satiate

its hunger under the cover of night with the refuse it could pick up “in

the street.” The food and drink which pious hands laid in the tomb were

denied to the tombless ghost, and it had to search for them where it

could. The Epic of Gilgames concludes with a description of it, which

paints in vivid colours the old Babylonian belief—

“He whose body lies forsaken in the field,

As thou and I alike have seen,

His _ekimmu_ rests not in the earth.

He whose _ekimmu_ has none to care for him,

As thou and I alike have seen,

The garbage of the pot, the refuse of food,

Which is thrown into the street, must he eat.”

It is no wonder that a Babylonian king prays that the body of his enemy

may be “cast aside, and no grave allowed to him,”(227) or that

Assur-bani-pal should have torn the bodies of the Elamite kings from their

tombs at Susa. Sennacherib similarly desecrated the burial-places of the

ancestors of Merodach-baladan; and one of the oldest of Babylonian

monuments, the so-called Stela of the Vultures, depicts the bodies of the

slaughtered enemy exposed to the vultures that feed upon them, while the

slain Babylonians themselves are buried by their companions under a

tumulus of earth.

The _ekimmu_ was thus, properly speaking, the ghost of the unburied

corpse; whereas the _utukku_ was the ghost of a corpse which had obtained

burial, but through some accident or other had escaped from the realms of

the dead. While, therefore, the _ekimmu_ necessarily had a human origin,

the _utukku_ was only accidentally a human ghost. The rites with which its

body had been laid in the grave, ought to have confined it to the

underground regions of the dead; and the “pure water” and food with which

it had been provided were sufficient to sustain it in its existence below.

If it returned to the upper world it could only have been through the arts

of the necromancer, and the sufferings it may have inflicted upon men were

but the revenge it took for being disturbed. The _utukku_, like the _lil_,

belonged to a class of supernatural beings who manifested their presence

in a particular way, and it was only as it were accidentally that the

ghost of a dead man came to be included among them.

But it must be noticed that no distinction was drawn in the mind of the

Babylonian between these supernatural beings and the ghosts of the dead,

at all events so far as their nature and to a certain extent their powers

were concerned. The ghost might become an _ekimmu_ just as it might become

a _lil_; all were alike denizens of the underground world, and in primeval

times obeyed the rule of the En-lil, “the lord of ghosts.”

The same belief must once have prevailed in Palestine. When the spirit of

Samuel was called up from the dead, the witch declared she saw Elohim

rising up from the earth in the form of an old man clothed in a mantle.

Now Elohim or “gods” was the general term under which the Canaanite

included all the beings of the spiritual world in whom he believed; and in

calling the spirit of Samuel “Elohim,” the witch was accordingly asserting

that the human ghost she had evoked had become thereby one of them. As the

ghost of Ea-bani when summoned from its resting-place became an _utukku_,

so the ghost of Samuel for the same reason became one of the Elohim.

The ghost, like the body to which it had belonged, was dependent for its

existence upon food and drink. The legend of the descent of Istar into

Hades describes the ghosts of the dead as flitting like winged bats

through their gloomy prison-house, drinking dust and eating clay. The

bread and dates and water offered at the tombs of the dead were a welcome

substitute for such nauseous food. Food, however, of some kind it was

necessary for the ghost to have, otherwise it would have suffered from the

pangs of hunger, or died the second death for want of nourishment.

Like the Egyptian Ka, consequently, the Babylonian ghost was conceived of

as a semi-material counterpart of the body, needing, like the body, drink

and food; and if recalled to the upper world in the form of an _utukku_ or

an _ekimmu_, resembling the body in every detail, even to the clothes it

wore. Moreover, as in Egypt, the doctrine of the double must be extended

to inanimate objects as well as to living things. The offerings deposited

with the dead included not only poultry and fish, but also dates and

grain, wine and water. The objects, too, which the dead had loved in his

life were laid in his grave—toys for the child, mirrors and jewellery for

the woman, the staff and the seal for the man. It must have been the

doubles of the food and drink upon which the ghost fed in the world below,

and the doubles of the other objects buried with the corpse, which it

enjoyed in its new mode of existence. There must have been ghosts of

things as well as ghosts of men.

The overlaying of primitive Sumerian animism by Semitic conceptions and

beliefs naturally introduced new elements into the views held about the

imperishable part of man, and profoundly modified the old theories

regarding it. The Zi, as we have seen, became synonymous with the vital

principle; the _lil_, the _utukku_, and the _ekimmu_ were banished to the

domain of the magician and witch. The words survived, like “ghost” in

English, but the ideas connected with them insensibly changed. In place of

En-lil, “the lord of the ghost-world,” a new conception arose, that of

Bilu or Baal, “the lord” of mankind and the visible universe, whose symbol

was the flaming sun.(228) The ghosts had to make way for living men, the

underground world of darkness for the world of light. En-lil became a

Semitic Baal, and man himself became “the son of his god.”(229)

With the rise of Semitic influence came also the influence of the culture

that emanated from Eridu. The character of Ea of Eridu lent itself more

readily to Semitic conceptions than did the character of En-lil. There was

no need for violent change; the old Sumerian god (or rather “spirit”)

retained his name and therewith many of his ancient attributes. He

remained the god of wisdom and culture, the father of Aṡari, “who does

good to man.”

When Asari was identified with Merodach the sun-god of Babylon, Semitic

influence was already in the ascendant. Merodach was already a Semitic

Baal; the supremacy of his city made him the supreme Baal of Babylonia.

The older Baal of Nippur was absorbed by the younger Baal of Babylon, and

the official cult almost ceased to remember what his attributes and

character had originally been. Even the reciter of the magical texts

probably forgot that the god had once been a chief _lil_ or ghost and

nothing more.

This altered conception of the god of Nippur was necessarily accompanied

by an altered conception of the ghost-world over which he had ruled. It

was handed over to other gods in the State religion, or else passed into

the possession of the wizard and necromancer. Nergal of Cutha became the

lord of Hades, which he shared with the goddess Eris-kigal or Allat.

Legend told how at the command of the gods of light, Nergal had forced his

way into the dark recesses of the underworld, and there compelled the

goddess to become his bride. From henceforward Hades was a realm under the

control of the gods of heaven, and part of that orderly universe which

they governed and directed.

The conquest of Hades by the gods of light implied the conquest by them of

death. The dead was no longer a mere ghost, beyond the reach of the lords

of heaven, and able to play havoc in their own sphere when darkness had

swallowed up the light. The lords of heaven now claimed the power of

“raising the dead to life.” It is an epithet that is applied more

especially to Merodach, the minister and interpreter of his father Ea,

through whose magic words and wise teaching he heals the diseases of

mankind, and even brings them again from the world of the dead.

It is evident that we here have a new conception before us of the

imperishable part of man. The gods are with man beyond the grave as they

are on this side of it. There is no inexorable destiny forbidding them to

bring him back to life. In other words, there is a life in the next world

as well as in this. It may be a very inferior and shadowy kind of life,

but it is a life nevertheless, and not the existence of a bloodless ghost

which would perish if it could not satisfy its cravings with food and

drink. The religious consciousness has passed beyond the stage when the

future world is peopled with the doubles and counterparts of existing

things, and it has attained to the conception of a spiritual life which

man can share with the immortal gods. Animism has made way for polytheism.

How close this connection between the gods and the souls of men became in

later days, may be seen from the fact that when Assur-bani-pal visited the

tombs of his forefathers, he poured out a libation in their honour and

addressed to them his prayers. They had, in short, become gods, like the

gods of light to whom temples were erected and offerings made. The change

in point of view had doubtless been quickened by that deification of the

king of which I shall have to speak in a future lecture, and which seems

to have been of Semitic origin. When the king became a god, to whom

priests and temples were dedicated both in his lifetime and after his

death, it was inevitable that new ideas should arise in regard to the

nature of the soul. The spirit who was addressed as a god, and set on a

level with the divine lords of heaven, was no powerless and starveling

ghost in the underworld of En-lil, but a spirit in the more modern sense

of the word, who dwelt in the realms of light, where he could hear and

answer the prayers that were laid before him. The ghost had been

transformed into a soul, whose nature was the same as that of the gods

themselves, and which, like them accordingly, could move freely where it

would, listening to the petitions of those on earth, and interceding for

them.

This conception of the soul had already been arrived at in the age of

Sargon of Akkad, the earliest to which at present anything like full

contemporaneous records reach back. But it was an age in which Semitic

influence was already dominant; Sargon was the founder of a Semitic empire

which extended to the shores of the Mediterranean, and the Sumerian epoch

of Babylonian civilisation had long since passed away. Remote as the age

seems to us of to-day, it was comparatively late in the history of

Chaldæan culture. And deification was not confined to the person of the

king. The high priests of the Babylonian cities who owned allegiance to

him were similarly deified by their subjects. The daily offering was made,

for instance, to the deified Gudea, the Sumerian governor of Lagas; he who

had ruled on earth, whether Semite or Sumerian, was adjudged worthy of a

place among the gods of the official creed. King and noble alike could be

raised to the rank of a divinity; and we even find Gimil-Sin, the king of

Ur, erecting a temple to his own godhead.(230) We are reminded of the

shrines built by the later Pharaohs in honour of their own Kas.

The deification of man, and therewith a belief in the higher destinies of

the human soul, can thus be traced back to an early period of Semitic

supremacy in Babylonia. Unfortunately our evidences for this belief in the

higher destinies of the soul are still but scanty. In this respect

Babylonia offers a striking contrast to Egypt. There the larger part of

the monumental records we possess are derived from tombs; and Egyptian

belief in regard to the future life is abundantly described not only on

the tombstones, but also on the inscribed and pictured walls of the

sepulchre itself. We know almost more of what the Egyptian thought about

the imperishable part of man and its lot hereafter, than we do about any

other portion of his creed. In Babylonia and Assyria, on the contrary,

there are no tombstones, no pictured and inscribed tombs. The literature

we possess tells us but little concerning the future life and the beliefs

connected with it. The ritual and the hymns to the gods are concerned with

this life, not with the next, and we have to grope our way, as it were,

through obscure allusions and ambiguous phrases if we would find in them

any references to the world beyond the grave. To fall back on mythological

poems and heroic epics is dangerous and misleading. The literary myth will

give us as false an idea of the psychology of a people as it will of their

theology; at most it will express the beliefs of the individual writer, or

enshrine old terms and phrases, the primitive meaning of which has passed

away. To extract a psychology from literary legends is as difficult as to

extract from them sober history. The poets who depicted Hades, with its

batlike ghosts that fed upon dust, were using the language of the past

rather than of the age in which they lived. We might as well infer that

the Englishman of the eighteenth century believed in the Muses whom his

poets invoked, as infer from the language of the poets of Babylonia that

the Hades they described was the Hades of popular belief. The cult of the

kings and nobles is sufficient of itself to prove that such could not have

been the case. And when primitive conceptions become the commonplaces of

literature, their true signification is lost or blurred.

Still less help can be obtained from the magical texts. And by an

unfortunate accident the magical texts constitute a very undue proportion

of those which have hitherto been examined. Until recently we have been

dependent for our knowledge of Babylonian literature on the relics of the

library of Nineveh, the greater part of which was collected by

Assur-bani-pal, and Assur-bani-pal had a special predilection for charms

and exorcisms, and the pseudo-science of the augur or astrologist. The

world of the magical texts was a world that stood apart by itself. Magic

was only half recognised by the orthodox faith; its beliefs and practices

had come down from an age when that orthodox faith did not as yet exist,

and its professors were looked upon with suspicion by the official

priesthood. The creed upon which it rested, therefore, was a creed of the

remote past rather than of the present. Its gods and goddesses were not

those of the State religion except in name; the Istar who patronised the

witch and superintended the mixture of the poisonous philtre under the

cloak of night, was a very different Istar from the goddess of love and

war who promised help and comfort to Esar-haddon in his need, and was

known to be “the mother” of mankind. The State religion, indeed, wisely

temporising, had recognised magic so far as it could be regulated, and

placed, as it were, under the supervision of the priesthood; “the black

art” was never a heresy to be suppressed by force, as in ancient Israel;

but for all that it stood outside the official faith, and embodied

principles and conceptions which could be harmonised but imperfectly with

the higher and more enlightened ideas of the historical period. We may

find in the magical texts survivals from the primeval age of animism, if

only we know how to interpret them rightly, for the religious conceptions

of a later age we shall look in vain. They offer us magic and not

religion, the wizard or witch and not the priest.

Such, then, are the reasons why it is impossible for the present to

describe the psychology of the Babylonians with the same accuracy and

fulness as that of the Egyptians, or to trace its history with the same

detail. The materials are wanting, and probably we shall never have them

in the same abundance as in Egypt. But one thing is clear. Behind the

polytheistic view of the human spirit which prevailed in later times,

there lay an animistic view which closely resembled the primitive Egyptian

doctrine of the Ka. The animistic view passed away with the rise of

Semitic supremacy and the deification of man, and to discover and define

it must be largely a matter of inference. The doctrine of the double was

superseded by the doctrine of the soul—that is to say, of an immortal

element which after death was reunited with the gods. The Zi, with the Lil

and the Ekimmu, had to make way for a higher and purer conception of the

spirit of man. The old names, indeed, still remained, but more and more

emptied of their earlier meaning, or banished to the outer darkness of the

magician and witch. The water and food that once served to nourish the

ghost in the world below, became offerings to the dead man, and to the

gods under whose protection he continued to be. “All the furniture that

befitteth the grave,” says an Assyrian king, “the due right of his

sovereignty, I displayed before the sun-god, and beside the father who

begat me I set them in the grave. Gifts unto the princes, even the spirits

of earth, and unto the gods who inhabit the grave, I then presented.”(231)

The gifts, it will be noticed, are not only set by the side of the dead,

but are also presented to the sun-god, who is thus associated with the

deceased king. They are consecrated to the god of light, who judged

mankind, before they can be claimed by the gods of the grave.

But with all this it must be allowed that a great contrast exists between

the Babylonian and the later Egyptian view of the imperishable part of man

and its lot in the other world. And this difference of view results from a

further difference in the view taken of this present life. To the Egyptian

the present life was but a preparation for the next; not only the

spiritual elements of which he was composed, but, as he hoped, his body

itself would survive beyond the grave. It was otherwise in Babylonia. No

traces of mummification are to be found there; at most we hear of the

corpse being anointed for death, as it were, with oil or honey; and

cremation, partial or complete, seems to have been practised. The thoughts

of the Babylonian were fixed rather on this world than on the next; his

horizon, speaking generally, was bounded by death. It was in this world

that he had relations with the gods and duties towards them, and it was

here that he was punished or rewarded for the deeds committed in the

flesh. The practical character of the Babylonians did not lend itself to

dreams and speculations about the future; the elaborate map of the other

world, which is drawn in the sacred books of Egypt, would have been

impossible for them. They were too much absorbed in commerce and trade and

the practical pursuit of wealth, to have leisure for theories that

concerned themselves with a doubtful future and an invisible world. The

shadow of the old religion of Nippur, moreover, with its underground Hades

of darkness and gloom, rested to the last on the mind of the Babylonian

people. The brighter views which had emanated from Eridu never succeeded

in overcoming it altogether. The gods of light ruled, indeed, over a world

that had once belonged to the demons of night, but their victory never

extended further. The land of Hades still continued to be a land of

darkness, even though the waters of life gushed up from below the golden

throne of the spirits who dwelt there. We find no conception in Babylonian

literature parallel to the Egyptian fields of Alu, no judgment-hall of

Hades before which the conscience of the dead man is arraigned. The

Babylonian was judged in this life and not in the next, and the god who

judged him was the sun-god of day, and not the dead sun-god of the other

world.

It is usually the fashion to ascribe this concentration of religion upon

the present world, with its repellent views of Hades and limitation of

divine rewards and punishments to this life, to the inherent peculiarities

of the Semitic mind. But for this there is no justification. There is

nothing in the Semitic mind which would necessitate such a theological

system. It is true that the sun-god was the central object of the Semitic

Babylonian faith, and that to the nomads of Arabia the satisfaction of

their daily wants was the practical end of existence. But it is not among

the nomads of Arabia that we find anything corresponding with the

Babylonian idea of Hades and the conceptions associated with it. The idea

was, in fact, of Babylonian origin. If the Hebrew Sheol resembles the

Hades of Babylonia, or the Hebrew conception of rewards and punishments is

like that of the Assyrians and Babylonians, it is because the Hebrew

beliefs were derived from the civilisation of the Euphrates. Historically

we know that the Israelites traced their origin from Ur of the Chaldees,

and that in days long before Abraham, Canaan formed part of a Babylonian

empire, and was permeated by Babylonian culture; on the theological side

the derivation of the Hebrew doctrines is equally clear. The Hebrew Sheol

is too exactly a counterpart of the Babylonian world of the dead not to

have been borrowed from it, like Lilith and the other spirits whose home

it was, and the theology which taught that the sun-god was the supreme

judge of men, punishing in this life their sins or rewarding their good

deeds, was part of the culture which came from Babylonia to the West. It

was no inherent heritage of Semitic nature, but the product of a

civilisation whose roots went back to a non-Semitic race. The ruling caste

in Egypt were of Semitic extraction, but their religion contains little or

no trace of the ideas which underlay the Babylonian doctrines of divine

retribution and the future life of the soul.

It is to Babylonia, therefore, that we must look for the origin of those

views of the future world and of the punishment of sin in this life which

have left so deep an impression on the pages of the Old Testament. They

belonged primarily to Babylonia, and were part of the price which the

Semites of the West had to pay for the inestimable gift of culture that

came to them from the banks of the Euphrates. They were views from which

the Israelite was long in emancipating himself. The inner history of the

Old Testament is, in fact, in large measure a history of the gradual

widening of the religious consciousness of Israel in regard to them, and

their supersession by a higher and more spiritual form of faith. The old

belief, that misfortune implies sin and prosperity righteousness, is

never, indeed, entirely eradicated, and Sheol long continues to be a land

of shadow and unsubstantiality, where good and bad share the same fate,

and the things of this life are forgotten; but little by little newer and

purer views make their way into the religion of the people, and the higher

message which Israel was destined to receive takes the place of the

teaching of the old culture of Babylonia. Babylonia had done its part; new

forces were needed for the education of mankind.

Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia.

I have already had occasion to refer to one of the gods of Babylonia,

En-lil or El-lil of Nippur.(232) His worship goes back to the earliest

period of Babylonian history; his sanctuary at Nippur was one of the

oldest in the land. He belongs to the period when the Sumerian was still

supreme, and the name he bore was the Sumerian title of En-lil, “the lord

of the ghost-world.” But it was a title only; the “lord of the ghosts” was

himself a ghost, albeit the chief among them.

The fact must be kept carefully in mind. As yet there was no god in the

proper sense of the term. The superhuman powers that were dreaded and

propitiated were ghosts only, like the ghosts of dead men; and, like the

latter, they were denizens of the grave and the underground world. It was

only at night that they emerged from their retreat, and terrified the

passer-by. Primitive man fears the dark as much as does the child; it is

then that the powers of evil are active, and spiritual or supernatural

foes lurk behind every corner ready to injure or destroy him. The ghosts

of the night are accordingly objects of terror, harmful beings from whom

all forms of sickness and insanity are derived.

But even these ghosts can be controlled by those who know the magic words

or the mystic rites which they are compelled to obey. Between the ghost

and his victim the sorcerer or medicine-man can interpose, and by means of

his spells force the spirit to quit the body of the sufferer or enter the

body of an enemy. By the side of the ghost, therefore, stands the

sorcerer, who is at once the master and the minister of the spirit-world.

With the progress of civilisation an organised body of sorcerers

necessarily grows up. But an organised body of sorcerers also implies an

organised body of spirits, and an organised system of controlling them.

The spells and charms which have been handed down from the past are formed

into a system, and the spirits themselves are classified and defined,

while special functions are assigned to them. The old unorganised animism

passes into an organised shamanism, such as still prevails among certain

Siberian tribes. The sorcerer is on the high road to becoming a priest.

Between the sorcerer and the priest, however, there is a gulf too wide to

be spanned. The religious conceptions presupposed by them differ in kind

as well as in degree. The nature of the superhuman beings by whom man is

surrounded, and the relations which he bears to them, are essentially

different in the two cases. The priest may also be a sorcerer, but the

sorcerer cannot be a priest.

Can shamanism develop naturally into theism, and the sorcerer into the

priest? Or is there need of foreign influences and of contact with other

ideas and religious beliefs? I should myself be inclined to adopt the

second alternative. Theism may absorb shamanism, and the priest throw the

ægis of his authority over the sorcerer, but the natural development of

the one into the other is contrary to the facts of psychology as well as

to those of history. The evolution of a god out of the shaman’s ghost may

be conceivable, but no evidence for it exists. The superstitions and

beliefs of shamanism linger, indeed, under a theistic religion, and the

polytheism of Babylonia was no exception to the rule. Up to the last the

magician flourished there, and the spells he worked were recognised by the

religion of the State. But for all that they stood outside the religion of

the State, harmonising with it just as little as the superstitions of

popular folk-lore harmonise with the religion we profess. No one would

assert that the Christianity of to-day has grown out of beliefs like that

in the vampire which still holds such sway in some of the Christian

countries of Europe; and there is just as little reason for asserting that

the vampire of the primitive Sumerian developed into a Babylonian deity.

They represent two diverse currents of belief, which may for a time run

side by side, but never actually coalesce.

Babylonian tradition itself bore witness to the fact. The Chaldæan

historian Berossos tells us that the elements of culture, and therewith of

the organised religion of a later day, were brought to Babylonia from

abroad. Oannes or Ea, the culture-god, had risen morning by morning out of

the waters of the Persian Gulf, and instructed the savage races of the

shore in the arts of life. It was not from Nippur and the worshippers of

En-lil, but from that mysterious deep which connected Babylonia with other

lands, that its civilisation had come. It was Ea who had taught men “to

found the temple” in which the gods of aftertimes were to be adored. The

culture-god of Babylonia was Ea, and the home of Ea was not in Babylonia,

but in the deep.

There is no mistaking the significance of the legend. The culture of

Babylonia originated on the seacoast, and was brought to it across the

sea. The elements of civilisation were due to intercourse with other

lands. And this civilisation was associated with a god—with a god, too,

who represented all the higher aspects of Babylonian religion, and was

regarded as the author of its sacred books. The impulse which transformed

the “lord of the ghost-world” into a god, and replaced the sorcerer by a

priest, came not from within, but from without.

The impulse went back to that primitive age when Sumerian supremacy was

still unquestioned in the land. Other races, so the legend averred, were

already settled there, but they were all alike rude and savage “as the

beasts of the field.” How far distant it may have been in the night of

time we can but dimly conjecture. At the rate at which the northern coast

of the Persian Gulf is being slowly silted up, it would be at least eight

thousand years ago when the old seaport of Eridu and the sanctuary of its

god Ea stood on the shores of the sea. But the influence of the Semite was

already beginning to be felt, though indirectly, through maritime trade.

New ideas came from the south. Ea was a god, and like the gods of the

Semitic race he had a wife and son. While he himself was lord of the deep,

Dam-kina, his wife, was the mistress of the land. His son was Aṡari, “the

prince who does good to man,”(233) and who, in contradistinction to the

night-demons of Nippur, brought knowledge and healing to the men whom Ea

had created. The Sumerian might indeed speak of the “Zi”—“the spirit”—of

Ea, or rather of the deep, but to the Semite he was a veritable god.

At the same time it was the conception only of Ea and his family which we

need trace to a foreign source. Their names are purely Sumerian, and their

origin consequently must be Sumerian too. Doubtless they had once been

mere _lils_ or ghosts, belonging to the ghost-world of the god of Nippur,

and the spells taught by Ea to mankind were survivals from the day when

the sorcerer was still his priest.(234) But under Semitic influence the

_lil_ had been transformed into a god; the sacred book took the place of

the charm, and the priest of the magician. The charm and the magician were

still recognised, but it was on the condition that they adapted themselves

to the new ideas. Sumerian shamanism was overlaid by Semitic polytheism,

and in process of time was absorbed into it.

The culture of Eridu spread northward, along with the religious ideas

which formed so integral a part of it. The worship of Ea was adopted in

other cities of Babylonia, and the god of Babylon was identified with his

son. The _lil_ which had been pictured under animal shape put on human

form, and the Sumerian accepted the conviction of the Semite, that man was

made in the likeness of his god. En-lil of Nippur had to yield to the

influence of the stranger. The antiquity of his worship, the sanctity of

his temple, could not save him from his fate. He too became a Semitic god;

his old name became an unmeaning title, which survived in literature but

not in the mouths of the people, and he was henceforth addressed as a

Semitic Bilu or Baal. He ceased to be the chief of the ghosts of night,

and was transformed into the divine “Lord” of Semitic worship, who, like

the sun, watched over this nether earth. It was a transformation and not a

development.

As the Semitic Bel, the god of Nippur continued for long centuries to

retain the ancient veneration of the people. Unlike the Greek Kronos, he

was not as yet dethroned by the younger gods. The position occupied by the

great sanctuary of Nippur and its priesthood long prevented this. But the

destiny of Kronos at last overtook him. Babylon became the capital of the

kingdom, and its god accordingly claimed precedence over all others.

Merodach of Babylon assumed the title of Bel, and little by little the old

god of Nippur was robbed of his ancient rank. For the Babylonia of later

history Merodach and not En-lil was the supreme Baal, and even the legends

that had been told of the god of Nippur were transferred to his younger

rival. The memories that still gathered round Nippur were too deeply

tinged with the colours of a religion that had passed away, and the

beliefs of a darker and less civilised form of faith. Merodach was the

champion of the gods of light, En-lil had been the lord of the demons of

darkness. Theologically as well as politically it was needful that

Merodach should supplant En-lil.

The spread of the worship of Ea, or rather of the religious conceptions

with which it was associated, brought with it the effacement of Dam-kina.

Dam-kina had once been the earth; just as En-lil at Nippur was “the lord

of ghosts,” of whom he was himself one, so at Eridu Dam-kina was the “lady

of the earth,” with which, as its Zi or “spirit,” she was herself

identified. Sumerian grammar knew no distinction of gender, and in the

Sumerian family the woman held a foremost place by the side of the man. It

was otherwise among the Semites. The distinction between the masculine and

the feminine is engrained in the Semitic languages, but the distinction is

attained by forming the feminine out of the masculine. While a

considerable part of Semitic flexion is the result of vowel changes within

the word itself, the feminine is created by attaching an affix to the

masculine form. The masculine presupposes the feminine, but the feminine

is dependent on the masculine.

Semitic grammar merely reflects the fundamental ideas of the Semitic mind.

For the Semite the woman is the lesser man, formed out of him and

dependent upon him. Like the feminine of the noun, she is the colourless

reflection of her husband, though without the reflection there can be no

husband. Wherever the Semitic spirit has prevailed, the woman has been

simply the helpmeet and shadow of the man; for the orthodox Mohammedan she

hardly possesses a soul. It is only where the Semitic spirit has been met

and checked by the influence of another race that this is not the case;

the high place retained by the woman in Babylonian society would of itself

have been a proof that Semitic culture had here been engrafted on that of

an older people, even if the monuments had not revealed to us that such

was indeed the fact.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the goddesses or female spirits of

Sumerian faith faded away as the Semitic element in Babylonian religion

became stronger. At first Semitic influence had done no more than

transform the “handmaid of the _lil_” into a goddess; then the goddesses

themselves became like the woman in Semitic thought, pale and colourless,

existing merely for the sake of the god. Dam-kina, the lady of the earth,

was remembered only by the antiquarian or by the compiler of a

cosmological system. When she became the wife of Ea her fate was sealed.

Her attributes and office, in fact, were transferred to him. At Eridu he

had necessarily been more than the lord of the deep; he was lord of the

city as well. He had as it were migrated from the deep; he had left his

palace of the sea and come to dwell in a sanctuary on land. The ground on

which Eridu stood was the gift of the sea, the soft silt which the

retreating waves of the Persian Gulf had left behind them. It had once

been part of the domain of Ea, if not Ea himself. Ea accordingly came to

be addressed as the “lord of the earth” as well as of the sea, and Eridu,

his city, was the “city of the lord of the land.” The men who inhabited it

were his creation: he had formed them like a potter out of the clay, and

as the divine “potter” he was therefore known unto them.(235) Like the

Egyptian Khnum at the Cataract, he was the first artist in clay, and the

models that he made were the first men.

The god of culture was thus also the creator of mankind. He brought

civilisation to them from his home beneath the waves, but it was because

he had already created them. They were not indeed his children, but the

creation of his hands, for the culture-god was necessarily an artist, and

the men he moulded were the highest products of his skill. Water and earth

had alike gone to their formation; Ea was master not only of the sea, but

of the land of Eridu as well.

The heritage of Dam-kina was thus usurped by the god whom Semitic

influence had given to her as husband. And therewith the heritage of

another goddess of the Sumerian cult was usurped as well. This was Bau,

whose native home was probably farther to the north, though she had been

as it were domesticated at Eridu in early days. As Dam-kina was made the

wife of Ea, so Bau was made his mother. For this there was a special

reason. Bau was known as “the great mother,” from whom mankind had

received the herd and the flock as well as the crops of the field. She it

was who gave fertility to the soil, and protected those who tilled it. The

heifer was her symbol, and she may have been originally the local spirit

of some field in the neighbourhood of Eridu.(236) But in the days when she

is first known to us by contemporaneous inscriptions, she is already a

goddess, and the Semitic conception of a divine mother is already attached

to her.(237) She thus resembles another goddess, Aruru by name, whom an

old cosmological poem associates with Merodach (or rather Ea) in creating

“the seed of man,” which springs forth from her bosom like the reed from

the marsh or “the wild cow with its young.” In their origin Bau and Aruru

are alike but Dam-kina under other names,—the earth-spirits of the old

Sumerian religion, who beget or create all living things. The underground

world over which En-lil held rule was not only the home of the dead, it

was also the place where the seed must be buried before it can spring up

into the green herb. That same ghost-world, consequently, to which the

dead must journey, is also the source of life. The _lil_ (or rather the

Zi) who inhabits it is the mother of mankind, even though it is also the

home of the demon who plagues them with disease.

Hence it was that when Bau assumed the dress of a Semitic goddess, she

became first the creatress-mother, and then the mother of the creator. As

such, however, she entered into rivalry with another deity who was

similarly in process of development out of an earlier form. This was

Zi-Kum or Zi-Garum, “the spirit of the sky,” who is called “the mother

that has begotten heaven and earth,” and “the seeress of the spirit of the

earth” (_Ê-kur_), that is to say, of En-lil.(238) To the primitive

seafarer of Babylonia the waters of the Persian Gulf seemed to descend

from the vault of heaven which rested upon them; the streams which

intersected the ground were fed by the rains, and it was therefore natural

to suppose that the sea which blended with the sky was similarly derived

from it. The deep was embosomed in the heavens, and the spirit of the deep

accordingly must have been begotten by the spirit of the sky.

But this spirit of the sky necessarily owned obedience to the “lord of the

ghost-world,” and the mother of Ea of Eridu was thus at the same time a

ministering handmaid of En-lil.(239) The Zi who was worshipped at Eridu

was also a Lil in the theology of Nippur, and the home of the Lil was

beneath the earth. In this way we must explain how it is that Zi-Kum, “the

heaven,” is also, under another aspect, Zi-Kura, “the earth,” and as such

identical with Dam-kina and Bau.(240) That she should have coalesced with

Bau rather than with Dam-kina, was due to the fact that the one was made

the mother of Ea, while the other became his wife. But the lineaments of

the old “spirit of the sky” were soon obliterated. As the religion of

Babylonia moved further and further away from the animism of the past, the

spirit’s existence faded into the background and Bau stepped into its

place. Zi-Kum, “the spirit of the sky,” ended by becoming a symbol of that

primordial deep from which Ea had derived his wisdom, and whose waters

were above the visible firmament as well as below it.(241) Ea, the god of

the mixed Babylonian race, had absorbed the spirits and ghosts of the

Sumerian faith. Their attributes had been taken from them, and they had

been transformed into goddesses whose sole end was to complete the family

of the culture-god.

The old faith was avenged, however, when Babylon became the political head

of Babylonia. Ea was supplanted by his son, and the honours he had

received were transferred to the younger god. It was his son, too, under a

new and foreign name. Merodach was son of Ea only because he had been

identified with Aṡari, who was son of Ea in the theology of Eridu.

Henceforward Ea shines merely by reflected light. His wisdom is handed on

to Merodach; even the creation of mankind is denied to him. It is not Ea,

but Merodach, who conquers the dragon of chaos and introduces law and

order into the world, and it is equally not Ea but Merodach who is the

creator of all visible things. Ea is not robbed, like Bel of Nippur, of

his name and prerogatives, he is simply effaced.(242)

Midway between Nippur and Eridu stood the city of Erech. Doubtless it was

of Sumerian foundation, like the other great cities of Babylonia, but as

far back as we can trace its history it is already a seat of Semitic power

and religious cult. Its god was Anu, the sky. It may be that Anu had been

brought from elsewhere, for a Babylonian inscription of the twelfth

century B.C. calls Dêr rather than Erech his city; but if so, the Semitic

inhabitants of Erech knew nothing of it. For them Anu was the protecting

god of their city, the father of Istar, whose habitation it was. From the

days when Erech first became a Semitic possession, Anu and Istar had been

worshipped in it side by side. Indeed, it would seem from the inscription

of Lugal-zaggi-ṡi, discovered at Nippur, that at the remote period to

which it belongs Istar had not yet been associated with Anu in the divine

government of Erech. Lugal-zaggi-ṡi was king of Erech, and as a

consequence “priest of Ana,” but not of Istar. So far as the evidence goes

at present, it points to the fact that the divine patron of Erech was Anu,

and that Istar was introduced by the Semites, perhaps from the town of

Dilbat (now Dillem).

The god and his name were alike borrowed by the Semite from his Sumerian

predecessor. Ana was the Sumerian word for “sky,” and it was doubtless a

spirit of the sky which had been worshipped by the primitive population of

the country. But when the hieroglyphic pictures were first invented, out

of which the cuneiform characters afterwards developed, the spirit was

already on the way to becoming a god. The eight-rayed star which denotes

Ana in the historical days of Babylonia also denotes a god. He thus became

a type of the god as distinguished from the spirit, and bears witness to

the evolution that was already taking place in the religion of Babylonia.

That there had been spirits of the sky, however, as well as spirits of the

earth, was never forgotten. By the side of the Anunna-ki or “spirits of

the earth” the later theology continued to retain a memory of the Igigi or

spirits of heaven.(243) As En-lil was the chief among the spirits of the

earth, so it is probable that Ana was chief among the spirits of the sky.

But there was not the same difficulty in accommodating his name and

personality to the new conception of a god that there was in the case of

En-lil. His old Sumerian title brought with it no associations with

animism; there was no need to change it, and it could therefore, like the

name of Ea, be retained even when the spirit of the sky had become the god

of heaven. From the outset Ana had stood outside the sphere and dominion

of En-lil; he was no ghost of the underworld to be degraded or renamed.

While, therefore, in En-lil of Nippur, even under his new Semitic form of

Bel, the dominant element remained Sumerian, and in Ea of Eridu the

Semitic and Sumerian elements were mingled together, Ana of Erech was

distinctively a Semitic god. It was only by main force, as it were, that

En-lil could be transformed into the semblance of a Semitic Baal; up to

the last he continued to be lord of the earth rather than of the sky,

whose dwelling-place was below rather than above.(244) It was this,

perhaps, which facilitated his effacement by Merodach; the lineaments of a

Baal were more easily traceable in the sun-god of Babylon than in the god

of Nippur. But the sky-god was already a Baal. Between him and the Semitic

Baal-shamain, “the lord of heaven,” the distance was but slight, and it

was not difficult to clothe him with the attributes which the Semite

ascribed to his supreme deity. A consciousness of the fact may possibly be

detected in the readiness with which the name and worship of Anu were

accepted in the Semitic West; when Babylonian culture made its way to

Canaan, it was primarily Anu and the divinities most closely associated

with him—Istar, Anat, and Dagon—who found there a home.

Ana, the sky, thus became Anu, the god of a Semitised Babylonia. But a

Semitised Babylonia could not conceive of a god without a goddess who

stood to him in the relation of the feminine to the masculine gender. Out

of Anu was formed Anat, the feminine counterpart of the god. The same

process at Nippur had created a Belit or Beltis out of the masculine Bel.

The goddesses owed their existence to a grammatical necessity, and their

unsubstantial and colourless character justified their origin. They fitly

represented the relation in which, according to Semitic ideas, the woman

stood to the man. She was formed out of him in nature as the feminine was

out of the masculine in language, and her very existence thus depended on

her “lord.”

There was, indeed, a goddess, even in Erech, the centre of Semitic

influence, who possessed a very strongly-marked and independent character

of her own. This was Istar, of whom I shall have to speak at a future

time. But it was just because Istar possessed this independent character

that she could not be the wife of the god of the sky. The Semitic Baal

brooked the presence of no independent goddess in the divine family; the

wife of the god could not claim rights of her own any more than the wife

of the man. Anu, like Bel and Ea, stood alone.

Erech had been made the capital of a temporarily united Babylonia at an

early age in its Semitic history. Before the days of Sargon of Akkad,

Lugal-zaggi-ṡi—we know him only by his Sumerian name—had made himself

supreme over the smaller States of the country, and even carried his arms

to the distant West. In an inscription he has left us he boasts that his

empire extended “from the lower sea of the Tigris and Euphrates to the

upper sea,” presumably the Mediterranean, as he further defines his power

as stretching “from the rising to the setting of the sun.” Erech became

the capital of the kingdom, and it was perhaps at this time that it

acquired the name which it bore ever afterwards of “the city” _par

excellence_. Future ages were never allowed to forget that it had once

been the premier city of Babylonia.

Lugal-zaggi-ṡi calls himself “the priest of Anu,” the god of the city

which he had made the seat of his power. Anu for awhile was the god of the

supreme State in Babylonia, and therefore supreme god of the whole

country. The king, it is true, had come from the north, and his authority

had been given him by Bel of Nippur; the old sanctuary of Nippur still

claimed the first place in the religion of Northern Babylonia, and the

cult of its god retained its ancient hold on the veneration of the people.

But from henceforward he had to share his divine honours with another; Bel

of Nippur, indeed, conferred the sovereignty, but the sovereign was priest

and vicegerent of Anu. Bel and Anu were associated together at the head of

the pantheon of Northern Babylonia, and the position they occupied in it

became more and more unique.

So firmly established was it before the reign of Sargon of Akkad, that

even his victories and the empire he founded failed to give them a

colleague in the god of the new capital city. Bel and Anu remained

supreme; the sun-god of Akkad or Sippar had to content himself with a

subordinate rank. The theological system which put Bel and Anu at its head

was already formed, and the position assigned to them by the veneration

and traditions of antiquity was too firmly fixed to be shaken. Northern

Babylonia worshipped a dyad in the shape of two supreme gods.

But Babylonia itself was a dual State. It was probably on this account

that Lugal-zaggi-ṡi had fixed his capital at Erech in the centre of the

country, midway between north and south. And the gods of Northern

Babylonia were not necessarily those of the south. Here Ea was at the head

of the divine host; for the south his city of Eridu was what Nippur was

for the north, and the same causes which made Bel the dispenser of power

to the northern princes, made Ea the guardian and guide of the monarchy in

the south. For their worshippers Bel and Ea stood on the same level; the

cult of each alike had descended from a remote antiquity, and their

priests exercised a similar influence and power. As the Babylonians of the

north were called the people of Bel whom Bel could grant to whom he would,

so too the mixed races of the south were the creation of Ea to whom the

god of Eridu had taught the arts of life.

The union of north and south consequently brought with it the formation of

a divine triad. Ea joined himself to Bel and Anu, and the supreme triad of

Anu, Bel, and Ea thus came into existence. The process of formation was

facilitated by the fact that the three gods were already distinguished

from one another in their main features. Anu was the god of the sky; the

earlier history of Bel had given him naturally the dominion of the earth;

and though, in becoming a Semitic Baal, he had acquired the attributes of

a god of the upper sphere, these were allowed to fall into the background.

Ea was even easier to deal with; his home was in the deep, and his rule

was accordingly confined to the waters and the sea. That he had once been

a god of the land as well as of the sea, was dropped out of sight, and in

the later centuries of Babylonia it even began to be forgotten that he had

created man out of the dust of the ground. He ceased to be the divine

potter, and became instead the god of the waters, who pours out the Tigris

and Euphrates from the vases in his hands. As god of the earth and the

living things upon it, his place was taken by his son. Aṡari, transformed

into the Semitic sun-god Merodach, became the inheritor of his father’s

wisdom, and therewith of his father’s power.

The formation of the Babylonian triad, and the differentiation of the

divine persons who composed it, must have been the work of a theological

school. It is an artificial scheme elaborated after the union of the

northern and southern parts of the country. The universe is divided

between the three divine representatives of Northern, Central, and

Southern Chaldæa, whose sanctuaries were the oldest in the land, and whose

cult had been handed down from time immemorial. The triad once formed

became a model after which others could be created. The other great gods

followed the example that had been set them, and were similarly resolved

into triads. As the orthodox theological system of Egypt rested on the

Ennead, the corresponding Babylonian system rested on the triad. The

principle in each case was much the same. The Ennead was but a multiple of

the triad, and presupposed the sacred number. Perhaps we may see in it the

result of a contact between Sumerian modes of thought and the Semitic

conception of the divine family. Where the god had a wife and a son, the

godhead would naturally be regarded as a trinity.(245)

Under the first and supreme triad came the second triad of Sin, Samas, and

Hadad. Sin, the moon-god, was adored under many names and in many forms.

But his two chiefest temples were at Ur and at Harran. Ur, the modern

Muqayyar, on the western bank of the Euphrates, had been dedicated to his

service from the earliest times. The ruins of his temple still rise in

huge mounds from the ground. The city stood outside the limits of the

Babylonian plain, in the Semitic territory of the Arabian desert, and its

Semitic population was therefore probably large. Harran, the other seat of

the moon-god, was equally beyond the limits of Babylonia, and guarded the

high road of commerce and war that led from the East to the West. But the

name Harran, “the road,” is Babylonian, and, like its temple and god, the

city doubtless owed its origin to Babylonian colonists. They probably came

from Ur.

The moon-god of Ur is called the son of En-lil of Nippur, and it may be

therefore that Nippur was the mother-city of Ur. But it must be remembered

that whereas Ur was built on the desert plateau of Arabia, Nippur stood

among the marshes of the Babylonian plain. Its sanctuary could not have

been founded before the marshes had been, at all events, partially

drained, and the inundating rivers been regulated by dykes and canals. A

settlement on the higher and drier ground would seem more naturally to

precede one in the pestiferous swamps below it, and the fact that Ur was

the neighbour of Eridu seems to point to its early foundation and

connection with the old seaport of the country. At the same time the

worship of the moon-god is associated with the Semites of Arabia and the

west rather than with Eridu, whose god revealed himself to mankind by day

and not in the shades of night.(246)

It was right and fitting, however, that the moon-god should be “the

firstborn” of the god of Nippur. The realm of En-lil was in the

underground world of darkness, and the spirits over whom he had ruled

plied their work at night. Naturally, therefore, it was from him and the

dark world which originally belonged to him that the moon-god proceeded.

It may be that Sin had once been one of the spirits in the domain of

En-lil, a mere ghost whom the sorcerer could charm. But with his elevation

to the rank of a god his attributes and character grew fixed and defined.

In the ancient hymns addressed to him he is far more than a mere god of

the moon. His worshipper at Ur, where he was known under the name of

Nannar, addressed him as not only “lord of the moon,” but also “prince of

the gods,” “the begetter of gods and men.” It is thus that we read in an

old bilingual hymn—

“Father, long-suffering and full of forgiveness, whose hand

upholds the life of all mankind,

Lord, thy divinity, like the far-off heaven, fills the wide sea

with fear ...

Firstborn, omnipotent, whose heart is immensity, and there is none

who shall discern it ...

Lord, the ordainer of the laws of heaven and earth, whose command

may not be [broken] ...

In heaven, who is supreme? Thou alone, thou art supreme!

On earth, who is supreme? Thou alone, thou art supreme!

As for thee, thy will is made known in heaven, and the angels bow

their faces.

As for thee, thy will is made known on earth, and the spirits

below kiss the ground.

As for thee, thy will is blown on high like the wind; the stall

and the fold are quickened.

As for thee, thy will is done on the earth, and the herb grows

green.”

Such language is fitter for a supreme Baal than for a local moon-god; and,

in fact, it was as a supreme Baal rather than as a local moon-god that

Nannar was adored at Ur. His connection with the moon was, as it were, an

accident; the essential point about him was that he was the guardian god

of the city. Its temple had been dedicated to him in prehistoric days, and

with the rise of Semitic influence all the attributes associated with a

Semitic Baal gathered round his person. He remained, it is true, a

moon-god, but he was also more than a moon-god. He was the chief deity of

a city whose kings had ruled throughout Babylonia, and carried their arms

to the distant West.

His transformation into a supreme Baal was doubtless assisted by the

important place filled by the moon in early Babylonian culture. The moon

was the measurer of time; the first calendar was a lunar one, and time was

marked by the movements of the moon and not by those of the sun. It was on

this account that the moon-god was called En-zu, “the lord of knowledge,”

by the Sumerians; through him they learned how to regulate the year and

the festivals of the gods. Astronomy had been cultivated in Babylonia from

the beginning of its history, and for a nation of astronomers the moon was

naturally an object of veneration and regard. It was the symbol of law and

order as well as of the light that illuminated the darkness of the night.

But we must notice that it was only at Ur and Harran that Sin or Nannar

was thus elevated to the rank of a supreme Baal. The official theology

refused to include him among the three chief gods of the land. He was, in

fact, as Professor Hommel has shown, rather the Baal of the Semitics of

Arabia and the West than of the Babylonians themselves, and the place

occupied by his cult at Ur proves how completely this city lay outside the

limits of the true Babylonia, and was peopled by an Arabian population.

The sun-god was born of the moon. The lunar year preceded the solar, and

to the primitive Babylonian the moon was a more important agent of culture

even than the sun. Moreover, the sun seemed to rise from that world of

night over which the moon held sway; the day was begotten by the night,

and was accordingly reckoned from evening to evening. It is not until we

come to the later age of Babylonian history that we find the old system

making way for a new one, in which the day begins at midnight; and the 1st

chapter of Genesis, with its “evening and morning,” perpetuates the

ancient system of Babylonian astronomy.

The sun-god was known under many names, and, like the moon-god, was

worshipped in many of the Babylonian cities. But just as in historical

times there were two chief seats of the worship of the moon-god,—at Ur in

the south, and at Harran in the north,—so too there were two chief seats

of the worship of the sun-god, one in Southern and the other in Northern

Babylonia. The southern seat was Larsa, the northern Zimbir or Sippara on

the borders of Mesopotamia. And as the moon-god of Ur was older than the

moon-god of Harran, so there are reasons for thinking that the sun-god of

Larsa was older than his rival at Sippara. Babylonian culture moved from

south to north.

Both at Larsa and at Sippara the temple of the sun-god was called

Ê-Babbara,—Bit-Uri in Semitic,—“the house of light.” At Sippara it had

been founded or restored by Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon of Akkad, in the

early days of Semitic supremacy. The Sumerian Utu had already become the

Semitic Samas, and clothed himself in the attributes of a Semitic Bel. And

therewith he had necessarily taken to himself a wife. This was Â, who, in

becoming the consort of a Semitic Baal, was compelled to change her sex.

For the Sumerian  was a male god, a local sun-god, in fact, whom

Professor Jastrow suggests may originally have been the sun-god of one of

the separate villages out of the amalgamation of which the city of Sippara

arose.(247) Sumerian grammar, however, did not recognise gender; so far as

outward form was concerned, the same word, as in English, might be

indifferently masculine or feminine, and there was therefore nothing in

the name of  itself which would forbid the foreigner from dealing with it

as he would. Samas of Sippara needed a wife, and Â, despite her male

origin, was accordingly given to him. But the gift was fatal to  herself.

She lost her individuality, and became the mere double of her husband.

Samas absorbed her attributes and worship, and gradually she sinks out of

sight, or survives only in the works of theological antiquarians or in the

literature of the past.(248)

Hadad, the third in the second triad of the Babylonian State religion, had

no city which he could peculiarly call his own. He had developed out of

the Sumerian spirits of the storm, who revealed themselves in the raging

wind or the tempest of rain. More than one elemental spirit or demon had

gone to his making and there was consequently no single sanctuary in which

his cult had been handed down from the beginning of time. Wherever the

storm raged or the deluge descended, Hadad was to be found, like the

spirits from whom he had descended.

Under the influence of Semitic ideas he gradually became the god of the

air. His old character, indeed never deserted him; up to the last he

remained the divine power, who not only gave the fertilising rain in the

thunder, and he carried the forked lightning in his hand. God of the air

though he was, he continued to be the storm-god as well.

The god of the storm was naturally the god of the mountains. When the

armies of Babylonia first made their way to the West, they found

themselves in a land of mountains, where the storm burst suddenly upon

them, and the streams flowed swollen with rain into the sea. Here,

therefore, in the land of the Amorites the Babylonian seemed to have

discovered the true home of the god he worshipped. Hadad was an Amorite

rather than a Babylonian, and the title, accordingly, by which he was most

frequently addressed in early days was that of “the Amorite god.”

The title is Sumerian in origin, and must therefore have been given while

as yet the Sumerian was dominant. This raises the question whether the

name by which the god was subsequently known in Semitic Babylonia was not

rather of Amorite than of Babylonian derivation. And there is much in

favour of the view. Hadad, or Rimmon as he was also termed, was in a

special way the god of Syria. His worship was spread along the whole

length of the Syrian seaboard, and we find him holding there the rank of a

supreme Baal. It is not as the god of storms, but as the sun-god himself,

that he was adored in Syria, and his very name there became synonymous

with deity. That the Semitised Sumerian of Babylonia should have

identified the supreme god of a land of mountains and storms with his own

storm-god, we can understand; that the Syrian should have transferred the

name of a Babylonian god of storms to his own chief Baal, would be

difficult to explain. However this may be, the person of Hadad is

peculiarly Semitic. The features which he inherited from his Sumerian

ancestry were obscured or dropped, and he became in all respects a Semitic

god. We need not be surprised, therefore, at finding that he was a special

favourite in Assyria. Assur-nazir-pal calls him “the mightiest of the

gods,” and the Assyrian troops in their onset are likened to him.(249)

The doctrine of the triad was not confined to the more prominent gods. It

was extended to others also who occupied a lower rank in the divine

hierarchy or in the public cult. Thus Samas helps to form the subordinate

triad of Samas, Malik, and Bunênê, in which the local sun-gods, Malik and

Bunênê, are distinguished from Samas of Sippara, and Bunênê is transformed

into a female divinity, the consort of Malik. But in all cases the

principle is the same. The Semitic conception of the divine family,

husband, wife, and son, is combined with the older ideas of genderless

Sumerian, which placed the goddess on the same level as the god, and the

result is a triad in which the Sumerian element has so far prevailed as to

exclude the mother and son, and leave three gods of equal power and

rank.(250)

The Babylonian triad is thus in no way a trinity. The divine persons who

compose it are coequal and independent one of the other, the sphere of

each being limited by that of the other. But they divide the whole

universe between them, or at all events that part of the universe over

which their attributes and authority extend. They are partners with

carefully defined powers, arranged in groups of three. None of them is a

supreme Baal dominant over the other two. Nor, indeed, are they Baalim at

all in the strict sense of the word. For the Semitic Baalim admitted of no

such grouping; each was supreme god in his own locality, where his powers

were neither shared nor limited by another god. A triad like that of Anu,

Bel, and Ea could not exist where each local Baal claimed all the

attributes that were divided between the three Babylonian deities, and its

existence in Babylonia is one of many proofs that, though Babylonian

religion in its later form was moulded by Semitic hands, the elements that

composed it had come in large measure from an older faith.

Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar.

It is thus that Nebuchadrezzar addresses his god in the plenitude of his

glory and power—

“To Merodach, my lord, I prayed; I began to him my petition; the word of

my heart sought him, and I said: ‘O prince that art from everlasting, lord

of all that exists, for the king whom thou lovest, whom thou callest by

name, as it seems good unto thee thou guidest his name aright, thou

watchest over him in the path of righteousness! I, the prince who obeys

thee, am the work of thy hands; thou hast created me, and hast intrusted

to me the sovereignty over multitudes of men, according to thy goodness, O

lord, which thou hast made to pass over them all. Let me love thy supreme

lordship, let the fear of thy divinity exist in my heart, and give what

seemeth good unto thee, since thou maintainest my life.’ Then he, the

firstborn, the glorious, the leader of the gods, Merodach the prince,

heard my prayer and accepted my petition.”(251)

“To Merodach, my lord, I prayed, and lifted up my hand: ‘O Merodach, (my)

lord, the wise one of the gods, the mighty prince, thou didst create me

and hast intrusted to me the dominion over multitudes of men; as my own

dear life do I love the height of thy court; among all mankind have I not

built a city of the earth fairer than thy city of Babylon. As I have loved

the fear of thy divinity and have sought after thy lordship, accept the

lifting up of my hands, hearken to my petition, for I the king am the

adorner (of the shrine) who rejoices thy heart, an instructed ruler, the

adorner of all thy fortresses.’ ”(252)

The god before whom the great Babylonian conqueror thus humbles himself in

passionate devotion, was the divine guardian and lord of his capital city.

Ever since the days when Babylon had been but one of the many villages of

Babylonia, Merodach had been its presiding god. It was to him that

Ê-Saggil, its sanctuary, was dedicated, and from him and his priesthood

the kings of Babylon derived their right to rule. Merodach had given them

their supremacy, first in Babylonia and then throughout Western Asia, and

the supremacy he bestowed upon them was reflected upon himself. The god

followed the fortunes of his city, because through him his city had risen

to power; and he became Bel, “the lord,” not for the inhabitant of Babylon

only, but for all the civilised world. Like Amon of Thebes, Bel-Merodach

of Babylon supplanted the older gods of the country because the city

wherein he was worshipped supplanted the earlier seats of Babylonian

power.

Like Amon of Thebes, moreover, Merodach of Babylon owed much to his solar

character. Youngest of the gods though he might be, he was yet a form of

the sun-god,(253) and as such a representative and impersonation of the

supreme Baal. However much his solar features were overshadowed by other

attributes in later days, they were never wholly obscured, and his solar

origin was remembered to the last. It was never forgotten that before he

became the supreme Bel or “lord” of Babylonian theology he had been merely

a local sun-god, like Utu of Larsa or Samas of Sippara.

We can even trace his cult to Sumerian days. A punning etymology, proposed

for his name in an age when the true origin of it had been lost, made him

the _amar-utuki_ or “heifer of the goblin”; and the fact that the sun-god

was known to have once been an _utuk_ or “goblin” seemed to lend

countenance to it. But when we first catch glimpses of his worship, he has

already ceased to belong to the goblins of the night. He has been

identified with Asari the son of Ea of Eridu, and has thus became the

messenger and interpreter of the culture-god.

In the language of Sumer, Asari signified “the strong one” or

“prince.”(254) His name was expressed by two ideographs which denoted

“place” and “eye,” and had precisely the same meaning and form as the two

which expressed the name of the Egyptian Osiris.(255) Between the Sumerian

Asari and the Egyptian Osiris, therefore, it seems probable that there was

a connection. And to my mind the probability is raised to practical

certainty by the fact that the character and attributes of both Asari and

Osiris were the same. Osiris was Un-nefer, “the good being,” whose life

was spent in benefiting and civilising mankind; Asari also was “the good

heifer” (_amar-dugga_), and his common title was that of “the prince who

does good to men” (_Aṡari-galu-dugga_). He it was who conveyed to men the

teaching of Ea, who healed their diseases by means of his father’s spells,

and who “raised the dead to life.” Asari and Osiris are not only the same

in name and pictorial representation, they play the same part in the

history of religion and culture.

But there was one important difference between them. Osiris was a dead

god, whose kingdom was in the other world; Asari brought help to the

living, whom he restored from sickness and delivered from death. Even in

Egypt, however, it was remembered that Osiris had been a god of the living

before he was god of the dead. Tradition told how he had instructed men in

the arts of life, and done for primeval Egypt what Ea and Asari had done

for Chaldæa. The difference between him and Asari is a difference that

runs through the whole of Egyptian and Babylonian theology. The Egyptian

of the historical period fixed his eyes on the future life, and the god he

worshipped accordingly was the god who judged and saved him in the other

world; the religion of the Babylonian was confined to this world, and it

was in this world only that he was judged by the sun-god, and received his

sentence of reward or punishment. The mummified sun-god did not exist for

the Babylonians, for the practice of mummification was unknown among them.

It is possible that Aṡari, “the prince who does good to men,” had been

originally a title of Ea. If so, the title and the god had been separated

from one another at an early epoch, and the title had become itself a god

who owned Ea as his father. This relationship between Ea and his son

betrays Semitic—or at all events foreign—influence. The ghosts and spirits

of primitive Sumerian belief were not bound together by any such family

ties; the demons of the night had little in common with the men they

terrified and plagued. Asari had once been conceived of as a ram, Ea as an

antelope; and between the ram and the antelope no genetic relationship was

possible. They might be united together like the composite creatures which

had come down to the Babylonians from the old Sumerian days, but there

could be no birth of one from the other. Birth characterises the present

creation in which like springs from like; it was only in the time of chaos

that unlike forms could be mingled together in disorderly confusion.

That Asari was a sun-god follows from his identification with Merodach.

Here and here only could have been the link which bound the two deities

together.(256) But in passing into Merodach he lost his own personality.

Henceforth the son of Ea and the god of Babylon are one and the same.