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 The published texts did not suffice for such a work; they needed to be supplemented from that great mass of unpublished cuneiform documents with which the rooms of our museums are filled.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.

It was but gradually that he attained his high position in the Babylonian pantheon. Ea and Asari were gods of the south; Babylon lay in the northern half of the country. There must therefore have been some special reason for the close connection that grew up between them. I know of no other that would account for it except the one I gave many years ago—that Babylon was a colony from Eridu. In this case we could understand why its local deity should have been a son of Ea, and how accordingly it became possible to identify him with that particular son of the god of Eridu whose attributes resembled his own.

It is difficult at present to trace the history of Merodach beyond the age of the dynasty of Khammurabi. It was then that Babylon became an imperial city, and the power of its god grew with the power of its rulers. The dynasty was Semitic, though of foreign origin; and we may gather from the names of the first two kings that the ancestral god of the family had been Ṡamu(257) or Shem. But with the possession of Babylon the manners and religion of Babylonia were adopted; the fourth king of the dynasty bears a Babylonian name,(258) and his grandson ascribes his victories to the god of Babylon.

Merodach is invested by Khammurabi with all the attributes of a supreme Semitic Baal. His solar character falls into the background; he becomes the lord of gods and men, who delivers the weak and punishes the proud. The office of judge, which belonged to him as the sun-god, is amplified; the wisdom he had derived from Ea is made part of his original nature; his quality of mercy is insisted on again and again. Like the Semitic Baal, he is the father of his people, the mighty king who rules the world and occupies the foremost place in the council of the gods. Already the son of Khammurabi declares that the older Bel of Nippur had transferred to Merodach the sovereignty of the civilised world; the power of Nippur and its priesthood had passed to Babylon, and its god had to make way for a younger rival. As long as Babylon remained the capital of the kingdom, the Bel or “lord” of Babylonia was Merodach. The god followed the fortunes of his State.

The sanctity that had lingered for so many centuries around the temple of Nippur now passed to Ê-Saggil, the temple of Merodach. The priests of Merodach inherited the rights and functions of the priests of En-lil. From henceforth it was Merodach and his priests who could make and unmake kings; it was only the prince who had “taken the hand of Bel” of Babylon, and thereby been adopted as his son, that could claim legitimate rule. The descendants of the conquerors who had carried Babylonian culture to the lands of the West, derived their title to dominion not from Nippur, but from Babylon, and it was forgotten that the title had ever had any other source. The lordship of the world had indeed been transferred to a new god and a new city; Zeus had supplanted his father Kronos.

A sort of pæan in praise of Merodach, which is supposed to form part of the Epic of the Creation, describes how the god of Babylon received the names, and therewith the attributes and powers, of the older deities. In the great assembly of the gods he was greeted as their Zi or “Life,”(259) then as Ea under his name of “god of divine life,” then as Hadad or the god of “the good wind,”(260) and finally as Sin with “the divine crown,” in whose name he became “the merciful one who brings back the dead to life.” The ceremony was not concluded until he had received all “the fifty names of the great gods,” whose virtues and essence had thus, as it were, passed into himself. Not only was he their heir, he also absorbed their whole being, and so became one with his father, who is made to say: “He is become even as myself, for Ea is (now) his name.”

In these words we are brought very near to the Egyptian doctrine which transmuted one god into another, and saw in them only so many forms of the same divinity. But the stage of pantheism was never reached in Babylonia. The Semitic element in Babylonian religion was too strong to admit of it; the attributes and character of each deity were too clearly cut and defined, and the Semitic mind was incapable of transforming the human figures of the gods into nebulous abstractions. The god was too much of a man, moving in too well marked a sphere, to be resolved into a mere form or manifestation. Merodach might receive from the other gods their attributes and the power to exercise them, but it was delegation and not absorption. The other gods still retained the attributes that belonged to them, and the right to use them if they would. Merodach was their vicegerent and successor rather than themselves under another form.

Hence it is that the human element in the Babylonian god predominated over the abstract and divine. His solar attributes fell into the background, and he became more and more the representative of a human king who rules his people justly, and whose orders all are bound to obey. He became, in fact, a Semitic Baal, made in human form, and consequently conceived of as an exaggerated or superhuman man. The other gods are his subjects, not forms under which he can reveal himself; they retain their individualities, and constitute his court. There is no nebulosity, no pantheism, in the religion of Semitic Babylonia; the formless divinity and the animal worship of Egypt are alike unknown to it. As is the man, so is the god, for the one has been made in the likeness of the other.

Nevertheless the solar origin of Merodach left its impress upon the theology of the State. It had much to do with that process of identifying one god with another, which, as we have seen, tended to approximate the doctrines of Babylonia to those of Egypt. Though the individual gods were distinguished and marked off from one another like individual men, it was yet possible to get as it were behind the individual traits, and find in certain of them a common element in which their individual peculiarities were lost. The name, so the Babylonian believed, was the essence of the person or thing to which it was attached; that which had no name did not exist, and its existence commenced only when it received its name. A nameless god could not exist any more than a nameless man, and a knowledge of his name brought with it a knowledge of his real nature and powers. But a name was transferable; it could be taken from one object and given to another, and therewith the essential characteristics which had belonged to the first would become the property of the other.

When the name was changed, the person or thing was changed along with it. To give Merodach another name, therefore, was equivalent to changing his essential characteristics, and endowing him with the nature and properties of another god. The solar character which belonged to him primitively gave the first impulse to this transference and change of name. There were other solar deities in Babylonia, with distinct personalities of their own, for they were each called by an individual name. But the sun which they typified and represented was the same everywhere, and the attributes of the solar divinity differed but little in the various States of Semitic Babylonia. It was easy, therefore, to assign to the one the name of another, and the assignment brought with it a change of personality. With the name came the personality of the god to whom it originally belonged, and who now, as it were, lost his individual existence. It passed into the person of the other deity; the two gods were identified together; but it was not by the absorption of the one into the other but by the loss of individual existence on the part of one of them. It was no resolution of two independent beings into a common form, but rather the substitution of one individual for another.

This process of assimilation was assisted by the Babylonian conception of the goddess. By the side of the god, the goddess was little more than a colourless abstraction which owed its origin to the necessities of grammar. The individual element was absent; all that gave form and substance to the goddess was the particular name she happened to bear. Without the name she had no existence, and the name itself was but an epithet which could be interchanged with another epithet at the will of the worshipper. The goddesses of Babylonia were thus like the colours of a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting and passing one into another. As long as the name existed, indeed, there was an individuality attached to it; but with the change of name the individuality changed too. The individuality depended more on the name in the case of the goddess than in the case of the god; for the goddess possessed nothing but the name which she could call her own, while the god was conceived of as a human lord and master with definite powers and attributes. There was, it is true, one goddess, Istar, who resembled the god in this respect; but it was just the goddess Istar who retained her independent personality with as much tenacity as the gods.

When once the various sun-gods of Babylonia had been assimilated, or identified, one with the other, it was not difficult to extend the process yet further. As the city of Merodach increased in power, lording it over the other States of the country, and giving to their inhabitants its own name, so Merodach himself took precedence over the older gods of Babylonia, and claimed the authority and the attributes which had belonged to them. Their names, and therewith their powers, were transferred to him; the supremacy of En-lil, the wisdom of Ea, the glory of Anu, alike became his. The “tablets of destiny,” which conferred on their possessor the government of the visible world, were taken from the older Bel and given to his younger rival; the wisdom of which Merodach had once been the interpreter now became his own; and, like Anu, his rule extended to the farthest regions of the sky. But in thus taking the place of the great gods of earth and heaven, Merodach was at the same time the inheritor and owner of their names. If the tablets of destiny had passed into his possession, it was because he had assumed along with them the name of Bel; if Ea and Anu had yielded to him their ancient prerogatives, it was because he had himself been transformed into the Ea and Anu of the new official theology. The Babylonian hymn in honour of Merodach, when it declares that the fifty names of the great gods had been conferred upon him, only expresses in another form the conviction that he had entered into the heritage of the older gods.

As time went on, and Babylon continued to be the sovereign city of the kingdom, the position of its god became at once more exalted and more secure. The solar features in his character passed out of sight; he was not only the giver of the empire of the world to his adopted son and vicegerent, the king of Babylon, he was also the divine counterpart and representative of the king in heaven. The god had made man in his own image, and he was now transformed into the likeness of men. Two ideas, consequently, struggled for the mastery in Babylonian religion—the anthropomorphic conception of the deity, and the belief in his identification with other gods; and the result was an amalgamation of the two. Merodach was the divine man, freed from the limitations of our mortal existence, and therefore able not only to rule over the other gods, but also, like the magician, to make their natures his own. The other gods continued to exist indeed, but it was as his subjects who had yielded up to him their powers, and of whom, accordingly, he could dispose as seemed to him good. Originally the first among his peers, he ended—at least in the belief of the native of Babylon—in becoming supreme over them, and absorbing into himself all the attributes and prerogatives of divinity.

It was not, however, till the closing days of Babylonian independence that an attempt was made to give outward and visible expression to the fact. Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon and the nominee of its priesthood, took the images of the gods from their ancient shrines and carried them to Babylon. There, in the temple of Merodach, they formed as it were his court, bowing in reverence before him, when, on the festival of the New Year, he announced the destinies of the future. It was an effort to centralise the religion of the country, and give public proof of the supremacy of the god of Babylon. Like the parallel endeavour of Hezekiah in Judah, the attempt of Nabonidos naturally aroused the hostility of the local priesthoods; and, when Cyrus invaded the country, there was already a party in it ready to welcome him as a deliverer, and to maintain that Merodach himself had been angered by the sacrilegious king. The attempt, indeed, came too late, and Nabonidos was too superstitious and full of respect for the older sanctuaries and gods of Babylonia to carry it out in other than a half-hearted way. But it indicated the tendency of religious thought, and the direction in which the official worship of Merodach was irresistibly bearing its adherents. Merodach, like his city, was supreme, and the older gods were surely passing away.

The tendency was checked, however, by the long continuity of Babylonian history. Babylonian records went back far beyond the days when Babylon had become the capital of the kingdom. It was remembered that there had been other centres of power, in ages when as yet Babylon was but an obscure village. It was never forgotten that the god of Nippur had once made and unmade kings, that Akkad had been the seat of an empire, or that Ur had preceded Babylon as the capital of the ruling dynasty. Babylonian history did not begin with the rise of Babylon to power, much as the priests of Babylon wished to make it do so; and the chronological schemes which made a native of Babylon the first ruler of mankind, or traced to Babylon the first observations of astronomy, were but fictions which a little acquaintance with history could easily refute. The earlier cities of the land were proud of their traditions and their temples, and were not inclined to give them up in favour of the _parvenu_ city of Merodach; their religious corporations were still wealthy, and their sanctuaries still commanded the reverence of the people. Wholly to displace and efface them was impossible, as long as history continued to be written and the past to be remembered. The sun-god of Sippara, the moon-god of Ur or Harran, even En-lil of Nippur, all remained the rivals of Merodach down to the latest days of Babylonian existence. Nabonidos himself was forced to conform to the prevailing sentiment; he bestowed almost as much care on the temple of the moon-god at Harran, and the temple of the sun-god at Sippara, as upon that of Merodach at Babylon, though, it is true, he tells us that it was Merodach who bade him restore the sanctuary of Sin, while the sun-god of Sippara might be considered to be Merodach himself under another name.(261)

It was thus history which prevented the rise of anything like monotheism in Babylonia. It was impossible to break with the past, and the past was bound up with polytheism and with the existence of great cities, each with its separate god and sanctuary and the minor divinities who revolved around them. At the same time the tendency to monotheism existed; and could the Babylonian have blotted out the past, it might have ended in the worship of but one god. As it was, the language of the later inscriptions sometimes approaches very nearly that of the monotheist. When Nebuchadrezzar prays to Merodach, his words might often have been those of a Jew; and even at an earlier date the moon-god is called by his worshipper “supreme” in earth and heaven, omnipotent and creator of all things; while an old religious poem refers, in the abstract, to “the god” who confers lordship on men. As was long ago pointed out by Sir H. Rawlinson, Anu, whose written name became synonymous with “god,” is identified with various cosmic deities, both male and female, in a theological list;(262) and Dr. Pinches has published a tablet in which the chief divinities of the Babylonian pantheon are resolved into forms of Merodach.(263) En-lil becomes “the Merodach of sovereignty,” Nebo “the Merodach of earthly possessions,” Nergal “the Merodach of war.” This is but another way of expressing that identification of the god of Babylon with the other deities of Babylonian belief which, as we have seen, placed him at the head of the divine hierarchy, and, by depriving them of their attributes and powers, tended to reduce them into mere angel-ministers of a supreme god.

There was yet another cause which prevented the religion of Babylonia from assuming a monotheistic form. As we have seen, the majority of the Babylonian goddesses followed the usual Semitic type, and were little else than reflections of the male divinity. But there was one goddess who retained her independence, and claimed equal rank with the gods. Against her power and prerogatives the influence of Semitic theology contended in vain. The Sumerian element continued to exist in the mixed Babylonian nation, and, like the woman who held a position in it which was denied her where the Semite was alone dominant, the goddess Istar remained the equal of the gods. Even her name never assumed the feminine termination which denoted the Semitic goddess; Semitised though she might be, she continued to be essentially a Sumerian deity.

Many years ago, in my Hibbert Lectures, I first drew attention to the fact that Istar belonged to the non-Semitic part of the Babylonian population, and in both name and attributes was foreign to Semitic modes of thought. The best proof of this is to be found in the transformations she underwent when her worship was carried by Babylonian culture to the more purely Semitic peoples of the West. In Arabia and Moab she became a male deity; the ideas and functions connected with her were incompatible in the Semitic mind with the conception of a female divinity. Even in Babylonia itself there were those who believed in a male Istar;(264) and the official theology itself spoke of an androgynous deity, of an Istar who was at once a goddess and a god.(265) In Canaan, where her female nature was accepted, she was changed into a Semitic goddess; the feminine suffix was attached to her name, and her attributes were assimilated to those of the native goddess Ashêrah. In Assyria, too, we can see the same process going on. The name of Istar with the feminine termination of Semitic grammar becomes a mere synonym of “goddess,” and, as in Canaan, the Istars, or rather the Ashtoreths, mean merely the goddesses of the popular cult, the female counterparts of the Baalim or “Baals.” It was only the State religion, which had its roots in Babylonia, that prevented Istar of Nineveh or Istar of Arbela from becoming a Canaanitish Ashtoreth.

This was the fate that had actually befallen some of the old Sumerian deities. In the Sippara of Semitic days, for example, the wife of the sun-god was the goddess Â. But  had once been the sun-god himself, and texts exist in which he is still regarded as a god. Sumerian grammar was genderless; there was no distinction in it between masculine and feminine, and the divine names of the Sumerian pantheon could consequently be classified by the Semite as he would. He had only to apply a feminine epithet to one of them, and it forthwith became the name of a goddess. Sippara already had its sun-god Samas: there was no room for another, and  accordingly became his wife. But in becoming his wife she lost her individuality; her attributes and powers were absorbed by Samas, and in the later Semitic theology she serves only to complete the divine family or triad.

Istar succeeded in escaping any such effacement or degradation. Her worship was too deeply rooted in Babylonia, and too intimately associated with the religious traditions of the past. The same historical reasons which prevented monotheism from developing out of Babylonian polytheism prevented Istar from degenerating into an Ashtoreth. At times she came perilously near to such a fate: in the penitential psalms we find the beginnings of it; and, when Babylon became the head of the kingdom, the supremacy of Merodach threatened the independence and authority of Istar even more than it threatened those of the other “great gods.” But the cult of Istar had been fixed and established long before Merodach was more than a petty provincial god; she was the goddess and patroness of Erech, and Erech had once been the capital of a Babylonian empire. It was needful that that fact should be forgotten before Istar could be dethroned from the position she held in the religion of Babylonia, whether official or popular.

All attempts to find a Semitic etymology for the name of Istar have been a failure. We must be content to leave it unexplained, and to recognise the foreign character both of the name and of the goddess whom it represented. In Babylonia the name was never Semitised; the character of the goddess, on the other hand, was adapted, though imperfectly, to Semitic modes of thought. She took upon her the attributes of a Baal, and presided over war as well as over love. One result of this mingling of Semitic and Sumerian ideas was the difficulty of fitting her into the family system of Semitic theology. She could not have a wife, for she was a goddess; it was equally difficult to assign to her her shadow and counterpart, which was contrary to all the preconceptions of the Semitic mind. Generally, therefore, if not officially, she was conceived of as a virgin, or at all events as a goddess who might indulge in amours so long as they did not lead to regular marriage. Even Tammuz was the bridegroom rather than the husband of her youth, and he too had been banished to the darkness of the underground world long before Istar herself had interfered with the affairs of men. She has been described as the female principle corresponding with the male principle in the world: but the description is incorrect; she was rather the male principle in female form.

Istar at the outset was the spirit of the evening star. In days, however, when astronomy was as yet in its infancy, the evening and the morning stars were believed to be the same. It was only in aftertimes that an endeavour was made to distinguish between the Istar of the evening and the Istar of the morning. Originally they were one and the same, the herald at once of night and day. It was on this account that Istar was associated with Ana, the sky. The sky was her father, for she was born from it at sunset and dawn; and if other traditions or myths made her the daughter of the moon-god, they were not accepted at Erech, the centre and source of her cult.

In virtue of her origin she formed a triad with Samas and Sin. The sun, the moon, and the evening star divided, as it were, the heavens between them, and presided over its destinies. They were the luminaries that regulated the seasons of the year and determined the orderly course of the present creation. Istar represents “the stars ” of Genesis that were made with the sun and moon. But in the Babylonian system the triad of Istar, Sin, and Samas was not made, they were deities that were born. Before them was the older and higher triad of Anu, Bel, and Ea,—the sky, the earth, and the water,—the three elements of which the whole universe was formed.

How the spirit of the evening star came in time to be the goddess of love, is not difficult to understand. Even modern poets have sung of the evening as the season of lovers, when the work and business of the day are over, and words of love can be whispered under the pale light of the evening star. But this alone will not explain the licentious worship that was carried on at Erech in the name of Istar. It was essentially Semitic in its character, and illustrates that intensity of belief which made the Semite sacrifice all he possessed to the deity whom he adored. The prostitution that was practised in the name of Istar had the same origin as the sacrifice of the firstborn, or the orgies that were celebrated in the temples of the sun-god.

At Erech, Istar was served by organised bands of unmarried maidens who prostituted themselves in honour of the goddess. The prostitution was strictly religious, as much so as the ceremonial cannibalism formerly prevalent among the South Sea Islanders. In return for the lives they led, the “handmaids of Istar” were independent and free from the control of men. They formed a religious community, the distinguishing feature of which was the power of indulging the passions of womanhood without the disabilities which amongst a Semitic population these would otherwise have brought. The “handmaid of Istar” owned allegiance only to the goddess she served. Her freedom was dependent on her priesthood, but in return for this freedom she had to give up all the pleasures of family life. It was a self-surrender which placed the priestess outside the restrictions of the family code, and was yet for the sake of a principle which made that family code possible. Baal, the lord of the Semitic family, claimed the firstborn as his right, and Istar or Ashtoreth similarly demanded the service of its daughters.

It was the same in Canaan as at Erech. Did the rites, and the beliefs on which the rites were based, migrate from Babylonia to the West along with Babylonian culture, or were they a common Semitic heritage in which Erech and Phœnicia shared alike? It is difficult to give a precise answer to the question. On the one hand, we know that the Ashtoreth of Canaan was of Babylonian birth, and that in days far remote the theology of the Canaanite was profoundly influenced by that of Babylonia; on the other hand, the rites with which Istar was worshipped were confined in Babylonia to Erech; it was there only that her “handmaids” and eunuch-priests were organised into communities, and that unspeakable abominations were practised in her name. The Istar who was adored elsewhere was a chaste and passionless goddess, the mother of her people whom she had begotten, or their stern leader in war. It does not seem likely that a cult which was unable to spread in Babylonia or Assyria should nevertheless have taken deep root in Phœnicia, had there not already been there a soil prepared to receive it. Erech was essentially a Semitic city; its supreme god Anu had all the features of the Semitic Baal, “the lord of heaven”; and its goddess Istar, Sumerian though she may have been in origin, like Anu himself, had clothed herself in a Semitic dress.

Moreover, there was another side to the worship of Istar which bears indirect testimony to the Semitic origin of her cult at Erech. By the side of the Istar of the official faith there was another Istar, who presided over magic and witchcraft. Her priestesses were the witches who plied their unholy calling under the shadow of night, and mixed the poisonous philtres which drained away the strength of their hapless victims. The black Istar, as we may call her, was a parody of the goddess of love; and the rites with which she was adored, and the ministers by whom she was served, were equally parodies of the cult that was carried on at Erech. But the black Istar was not only a parody of the goddess of the State religion, she was also the Istar of the popular creed, of the creed of that part of the population, in fact, which was least intermixed with Semitic elements and least influenced by Semitic beliefs. It was amongst this portion of the nation that the old Sumerian animism lingered longest and resisted the purer teaching of the educated class. The Semitic conceptions which underlay the worship of Istar at Erech were never thoroughly assimilated by it; all that it could do was to create a parody and caricature of the official cult, adapting it to those older beliefs and ideas which bad found their centre in the temple of En-lil. The black Istar was a Sumerian ghost masquerading in Semitic garb.

As Bel attracted to himself the other gods, appropriating their names and therewith their essence and attributes, so Istar attracted the unsubstantial goddesses of the Babylonian pantheon. They became mere epithets of the one female divinity who maintained her independent existence by the side of the male gods. One by one they were identified with her person, and passed into the Istarât, or Istars, of the later creed. Like the Baalim, the Istarât owed what separate individuality they possessed to geography. On the theological side the Istar of Nineveh was identical with the Istar of Arbela; what distinguished them was the local sphere over which they held jurisdiction. The difference between them was purely geographical: the one was attached to a particular area over which her power extended, and where she was adored, while the other was the goddess of another city—that was all. It was the same goddess, but a different local cult. The deity remained the same, but her relations, both to her worshippers and to the other gods, were changed. There is no transmutation of form as in Egypt, but a change of relations, which have their origin in geographical variety.

In Babylonia, however, Istar was not so completely without a rival as she was in Assyria. There was another city of ancient fame which, like Erech, was under the protection of a goddess rather than of a god. This was one of the two Sipparas on the banks of the Euphrates, which is distinguished in the inscriptions from the Sippara of Samas as the Sippara of Anunit. The feminine termination of the name of Anunit indicates that here again we have a goddess who, in the form in which we know her, is essentially Semitic. But it is only in the form in which we know her that such is the case. The origin of Anunit goes back to Sumerian times. She was in the beginning merely an Anunna or “spirit” of the earth, as sexless as the other spirits of Sumerian belief, and lacking all the characteristics of a Semitic divinity.(266) It was not till Sippara became the seat of a Semitic empire that the Anunna or Sumerian “spirit” was transformed into Anunit the goddess. The transformation here was accompanied by the same outward change as that which turned the Babylonian Istar into the Ashtoreth of Canaan. For a time it seemed as though Anunit rather than Istar would become the supreme goddess of Semitic cult; but the political predominance of Sippara passed away with the fall of the empire of Sargon of Akkad, and historical conservatism alone preserved the name and influence of its goddess. As time went on, Anunit tended more and more to sink into the common herd of Babylonian goddesses, or to be identified with Istar. As long as the Sumerian element continued to be strong in the Babylonian people and their religion, Anunit retained the position which the mixture of the Semite and Sumerian had created for her; with the growing dominance of the Semitic spirit, her independence and individuality departed, and she became, like Beltis or Gula, merely the female complement of the god. Perhaps the process was hastened by the grammatical termination that had been added to her name.

Wherever, in fact, Semitic influence prevailed, the goddess, as opposed to the god, tended to disappear. It was but a step from the conception of a god with a colourless counterpart, whose very existence seemed to be due to the necessities of grammar, to that of a deity who absorbed within himself the female as well as the male principles of the universe, and who stood alone and unmated. A goddess who depended for her existence on a grammatical accident could have no profound or permanent hold on the belief of the people; she necessarily fell into the background, and the prerogatives which had belonged to her were transferred to the god. Istar herself, thanks to the masculine form of her name, became a god in Southern Arabia, and was identified with Chemosh in Moab, while even in Babylonia and Assyria she assumed the attributes of a male divinity, and was adored as the goddess of war as well as of love.(267) In Assyria, indeed, her warlike character predominated: she took the place of the war-gods of Babylonia, and armed herself with the falchion and bow.

I shall have hereafter to point out how this tendency on the part of the goddess to vanish, as it were, out of sight, leaving the god alone in possession, resulted in Assyria in raising its supreme god Assur to something of the position occupied by Yahveh in Israel. Assur is wifeless; now and again, it is true, a wife is assigned to him by the pedantry of the scribes, but who it should be was never settled; and that he needed a wife at all, was never acknowledged generally. Like Chemosh in Moab, Assur reigns alone; and though the immemorial influence of Babylonia kept alive the worship of Istar by the side of him, it was Assur and Assur only who led the Assyrian armies to victory, and in whose name they subdued the disobedient. It was not until the kings of Assyria became kings also of Babylon that Istar encroached on the rights of Assur, or that an Assyrian monarch betook himself to her rather than to the god of his fathers in the hour of his necessity. As long as the capital remained at the old city of Assur, none but the god Assur might direct the counsels and campaigns of its princes, or confer upon them the crown of sovereignty. When Tiglath-pileser III. acknowledged himself the son of Bel-Merodach, and received from his hands the right to rule, it was a sign that the older Assyrian dynasty had passed away, that the kingdom had become a cosmopolitan empire, and that the venerable traditions of Babylon had subjugated its conquerors from the north. The mixed races of Babylonia had overcome the purer Semites of Assyria, Istar had prevailed against Assur, and Semitic monotheism sought a home in the further West.

Lecture V. Sumerian And Semitic Conceptions Of The Divine: Assur And Monotheism.

In the preceding lectures I have assumed that the conception of the deity which we find in the later historical monuments of Babylonia and Assyria was of Semitic origin, differing radically from that formed of the godhead by the earlier Sumerian population. But it will doubtless be asked what basis there is for such an assumption; why may we not suppose that the later conception has developed naturally and without any violent break from older beliefs which were equally Semitic? Why, in short, must we regard the animism which underlay the religion of Babylonia as Sumerian, and not rather as the earliest form of Semitic faith?

The first and most obvious answer to the question would be, the fact that the older names of the superhuman beings who became the gods of the later creed are not Semitic, but Sumerian. En-lil of Nippur is the Sumerian En-lila, “lord of the ghost(s)”; when he becomes a Semitic god he receives the Semitic title of Bilu, Baal, “the lord.” And the further fact that in many cases the Sumerian name continued to be used in Semitic times, sometimes slightly changed, sometimes adapted to the needs of Semitic grammar, proves not only that the Sumerian preceded the Semitic, but also that the Sumerian cult on its literary and philological side was assimilated by the Semitic settlers in Babylonia. The gods and goddesses of Babylonia were Sumerian before they were Semitic; though they wear a Semitic dress, we have to seek their ancestry outside the Semitic world of ideas.

As we know them, they are clothed in human form. The deities whose figures are found on the seal-cylinders of Babylonia or engraved on the walls of the Assyrian palaces are all alike in “the likeness of man.” Bel-Merodach is as much a man as the king whom he adopted as his son; the sun-god who rises between the twin mountains of the dawn steps forth as a human giant to run his course; and Istar is a woman in mind and thought as well as in outward form. There are no animal gods in Babylonia, no monstrous combinations of man and beast such as meet us in the theology of Egypt. Not but that such combinations were known to the Babylonians. But they belonged to the primeval world of chaos; they were the brood of Tiamât, the dragon of lawlessness and night, the demons who had been banished into outer darkness beyond the world of light and of god-fearing men. Like the devils of medieval belief, they were the divine beings of an alien faith which the gods of the new-comers had exiled to the limbo of a dead past. Even the subterranean Hades of Semitic Babylonia recognised them not. The gods worshipped by the Semite were Baalim or “Lords,” like the men whom they protected, and whose creators they were believed to be.

Wherever the pure Semite is found, this belief in the anthropomorphic character of the deity is found also. Perhaps it is connected with that distinguishing characteristic of his grammar which divides the world into the masculine and the feminine, the male and the female. At any rate the Semite made his god in the likeness of men, and taught, conversely, that men had been made in the likeness of the gods. The two beliefs are but the counter sides of the same shield; the theomorphic man implies an anthropomorphic god. The god, in fact, was but an amplified man with amplified human powers; his shape was human, so too were his passions and his thoughts. Even the life that was in man was itself the breath of the god. That man was not immortal like the gods, was but an accident; he had failed to eat of the food of immortality or to drink of the waters of life, and death therefore reigned in this lower world. The gods themselves might die; Tammuz, the spouse of Istar, had been slain by the boar’s tusk of angry summer, and carried into the realm of Hades,(268) and the temple of Merodach at Babylon was also known as his tomb. As the gods were born, so could they die; they could marry also and beget children, and they needed meat and drink like the sons of men. Indeed, the world of the gods was a duplicate and counterpart of the world of mankind. On “the mountain of the world,” the Babylonian Olympos, the supreme god held his court; around him were ranged his subjects and servants, for there were servants in heaven as there were on earth; celestial armies went forth at his bidding, and there were wars among the gods as among men. Even theft was not unknown among them; a legend tells us, for instance, how the god Zu stole the tablets of destiny which were hung like the Urim and Thummim on the breast of “father Bel,” and therewith acquired for awhile the right and power to control the fate of the universe. As far back as we can trace the history of Semitic religion, whether in Babylonia, in Canaan, or in Arabia, its fundamental conception is always the same; the gods are human, and men are divine.

It is not surprising, therefore, that as soon as the Semitic element becomes paramount in Babylonia, the king becomes a god. At Babylon he was made the adopted son of Bel-Merodach by taking the hand of the deity, and thereby became himself a Bel, a ruler of “the people of Bel” over whom he was henceforth to exercise undisputed lordship. In earlier days, Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic empire in Western Asia, and his son Naram-Sin, were explicitly deified. Naram-Sin is even addressed as “the god of Akkad”;(269) and a seal-cylinder found by Gen. di Cesnola in Cyprus describes its owner as “the servant of the god Naram-Sin.”(270) The title of “god” is assumed by the Semitic successors of Sargon, to whatever city or dynasty they belonged; even the Sumerian princes in Southern Babylonia followed the example of their Semitic suzerains, and Gudea, the high priest of Lagas, built temples to his own godhead, where for long centuries his cult continued to be observed, and sacrifices and offerings to be made to him.(271) The occupation of Babylonia by the Arab or Canaanite dynasty to which Amraphel belonged, made no difference in the divine honours paid to the king; he still assumed the title of “god,” and his subjects adored him by the side of Bel. But a change came with the conquest of Babylonia by Kassite hordes from the mountains of Elam; the foreign kings ceased to be divine, and the title of “god” is given to them no more. As the doctrine of the divine right of kings passed away in England with the Stuarts, so too the belief in the divinity of the king disappeared in Babylonia with the fall of the Semitic dynasties. Nothing could show more plainly its essentially Semitic origin, and the little hold it possessed upon the non-Semitic part of the population. The king was a god only so long as he was a Semite, or subject to Semitic influence and supremacy.

The apotheosis of the king is thus coeval with the rise of Semitic domination in Babylonia. In the older Sumerian epoch we look in vain for any traces of it. Man was not yet divine, for the gods were not yet human. There was as yet no Semitic Bel, and En-lil of Nippur was but a “lord of ghost(s).”

But we have better testimony to the fact than the ghosts of Nippur. Behind the human figures of the Semitic gods the primitively pictorial character of the cuneiform signs enables us to discern the lineaments of figures that belong to a wholly different sphere of religious thought. They are the figures not of men, but of brute beasts. The name of En-lil was denoted by a composite sign which represented the word _elim_, “a ram”;(272) that of Ea by the ideograph which stood for _dara_, “the antelope.”(273) En-lil, accordingly, was once a ram; Ea, an antelope. There are other deities which reveal their first shapes in similar fashion. The wife of Hadad, for example, was Azaga-ṡuga, “the milch-goat” of En-lil, from whom the primitive Sumerian shepherd derived his milk.(274) Merodach himself, or rather his Sumerian prototype at Eridu, was once Asari-elim, “the princely ram”;(275) a striking title when we remember that Osiris, too, was addressed in Egypt as Ati, “the prince,” and identified with the ram of Mendes. Even Zu, the divine thief who stole the tablets of destiny, was the storm-bird, the forefather alike of the roc of the _Arabian Nights_ and of the Chinese storm-bird, “which, in flying, obscures the sun, and of whose quills the water-tuns are made.”

In many cases, however, the original forms of the Babylonian divinities survived only in the animals upon whose backs they were depicted as standing, or with whom the gem-cutter associated them on seals.(276) Now and again an attempt was made to combine them with the human figure. Thus Ea is at times represented as clothed in the skin of a fish, a fitting symbol of the relation between the newer and older religions of Babylonia and the antagonistic views of the godhead entertained by the races that dwelt there. At other times the animal form is relegated to that great company of demons and inferior spirits amongst whom room was found for the multitudinous ghosts of Sumerian belief. Where it is not altogether excluded from the world of gods and men, it exists only as the humble retainer of one of the human gods. As Merodach was accompanied by his four divine dogs, so Ea was attended by sacred bulls. They guarded the approach to the “field” and “house of Eden,” like the colossal figures, with bull-like bodies and the heads of men, that guarded the gates of the palace or temple. They were, in fact, the cherubim who forbade approach to the tree of life (or knowledge),—that sacred palm which an old Babylonian hymn tells us was planted beside the pathway of Ea in Eridu, where the god had his house in the centre of the earth, pouring from his hands the waters of fertility that flowed down in the twofold streams of the Tigris and Euphrates.(277) In later art, however, the bull-like form disappeared, and the guardians of the sacred tree were represented in human shape, but with the heads of eagles. The change of form was due to the same striving to humanise the superhuman beings of Sumerian belief as that which had given a man’s head to the colossal bulls; where the divine being had become a god in the Semitic sense of the word, all traces of his bestial origin were swept away; where he remained as it were only on the margin of the divine world, the bestial element was thrust as far as possible out of sight, and combined with the features of a man. The cherub was allowed to retain his bull’s body or his eagle’s head, but it was on condition that he never rose to the rank of a god, and that human members were combined with his animal form.

The secondary creatures of the divine world of the Babylonians thus resembled, in outward form, the gods of Egypt. But whereas in Egypt it was the gods themselves who joined the head of the beast to the body of the man, in Babylonia it was only the semi-divine spirits and monsters of the popular creed who were thus partly bestial and partly human. The official theology could not banish them altogether; they became accordingly the servants and followers of the gods, or else the rabble-host of Tiamât, the impersonation of chaos and sin. Like the devils and angels of medieval belief, they were included among the three hundred spirits of heaven and the six hundred spirits of earth.(278) The spirits of heaven formed “the hosts” of which the supreme deity was lord, and whom he led into battle against his foes; Nebo was the minister and lieutenant of Merodach and “the hosts of the heaven and earth,” therefore it was his duty to muster and drill.(279) The Anunna-ki or “spirits of earth” had their habitation in the subterranean world of Hades, where they sat on a throne of gold guarding the waters of life, while the Igigi or angels dwelt rather with the gods in the heaven of light and blissfulness. It was on this account that Assur-nazir-pal calls Nin-ip “the champion of the Igigi,” and that elsewhere the god receives the title of “chief of the angels.” But it was only in the later ages of Babylonian religion, when the Semitic conception of divinity had become predominant, that a distinction was made between the spirits of the earth and the air. It was only for the Semites that there were spirits of the underworld and angels of heaven; the Sumerian had known no difference between them; they were all alike Anunnas or spirits, and Nin-ip had been lord, not of the Igigi alone, but of the Anunna-ki as well.(280) He had, in fact, been one of them himself; he was the minister and attendant of En-lil, and it was never forgotten that, like the Anunna-ki, he was the “offspring of Ê-kur,” the name at once of the temple of Nippur and of the underground world of Hades. Sometimes he is said to have sprung from Ê-sarra, “the house of the (spirit)-hosts.” He had been a ghost in Nippur before he was transformed into a Semitic god.

But he had been a ghost who was associated with the dawn, and he thus became identified in the early Semitic age with the rising sun. His solar character raised him to the rank of a Baal, and, consequently, of a god. His older attributes, however, still clung to him. He was a sun-god who had risen out of the earth and of the darkness of night, and in him, therefore, the darker and more violent side of the sun-god was reflected.(281) He became essentially a god of war, and as such a special favourite of the Assyrian kings. He it was who carried destruction over the earth at the time of the Deluge, while the Anunna-ki followed him with their blazing torches; and he is the brother of En-nugi, the god from whose hands there is no escape. With the spread of solar worship, the solar features of Nin-ip naturally grew more marked. At times he was the god of the noonday as well as of the dawn, for it was at noon that the rays of the sun were fiercest and most deadly to man; at times he was assimilated to his fellow sun-god Merodach, and made a son of Ea. The syncretic epoch of Babylonian religion had truly arrived when Ea and En-lil were thus interchanged, and the teaching of Nippur and Eridu united in the solar cult!

But we have glimpses of a time when Nin-ip was not yet a god in human form, much less a solar Baal. His name is a title merely, and originally denoted the sexless spirit, who was indifferently “lord” and “lady of the veil.”(282)

The veil was worn in sign of mourning, for the head was covered in sleep and death. Like the cloak which enfolded the shade of Samuel, it symbolised the denizen of the underworld. At first it would seem to have been merely a veil that covered the head and face, like the _keffîya_ of the modern Arab; in course of time it was extended to the cloak in which the sleeper or the dead man could be wrapped. But in either case it was a symbol of the world below, and as such became in the Semitic age the garment of the mourner. The god who was “lord of the veil” must once have dwelt beneath the earth, and been himself one of those spirits of darkness whose faces were veiled from the sight of the living.

Nin-ip, then, must have been one of the Anunna-ki, a spirit of the earth and the land of Hades, before he assumed the form of a Semitic Baal, and clothed himself with the attributes of the sun-god. And the shape in which he appeared to his worshippers was that of a swine. We are told that Nin-ip was one with Nin-sakh, “the lord of the swine”(283) and the servant of El-lil, who was adored at Lagas in Sumerian days, and to whom a temple was erected even at Erech. That the swine should be connected with the underground world of the dead, is not surprising. We find the same connection in Keltic mythology. There, too, the swine are the cattle of Hades, and it was from the subterranean fields of Hades that they were transported by Pryderi to the earth above.(284) The swine turns up the ground in his search for food; even to-day he is used to hunt for truffles, and primitive man saw in his action an attempt to communicate with the spirits of the underworld.(285)

From the earth-spirit with the veiled face, who incarnated himself in the swine, the distance is great to the solar hero and warrior god of the Semitic age. In fact, the distance is too great to be spanned by any natural process of evolution. It is a distance in kind and not in degree. It presupposes fundamentally different conceptions of religion, animism on the one side and anthropomorphic gods on the other. If we are to listen to fashionable theories of the origin of religion, we start in the one case with the fetish, in the other case with the worship of ancestors. The difference is racial: wherever we find the Semite, in all periods of his history, his gods are human and not made in the form of the beast.

But the Semite, though he moulded the later religion of Babylonia, could not transform it altogether. The Sumerian element in the population was never extirpated, and it is probable that if we knew more of the religion of the people as opposed to the official theology, we should find that it remained comparatively little affected by Semitic influence. The witchcraft and necromancy that flourished is a proof of this; even the State religion was compelled to recognise it, and, like Brahmanism in the presence of the native cults of India, to lend it its sanction and control. It is instructive to observe what a contrast there was in this respect between the official religion of Babylonia and that of the more purely Semitic Israelites. Witchcraft and necromancy were practised also in Israel, but there they were forbidden by the law and suppressed by the head of the State. In Babylonia, however, the local deities were for the most part of Sumerian origin, and in spite of their Semitic colouring and dress not unfrequently retained their old Sumerian names. Babylonian religion could not wholly repudiate its origin and parentage; the superstructure might be Semitic, but its basis was Sumerian. Like the Sumerian words which had been adopted into the language, the names of the gods remained to testify to the fact that the people and their religion were alike mixed. And with the names went early beliefs and legends, fragments of folk-lore and ritual which had descended from a non-Semitic past. The official creed found a niche for each of them as best it could, but the assimilation was never more than partial, and from time to time we meet with practices and conceptions which are alien to the official faith.

There were many expedients for getting rid of the multitudinous spirits of the ancient creed who had not been transmuted into Semitic deities. They might, as we have seen, be herded together in the indistinguishable crowd of spirits of heaven and earth that formed the angel-hosts of the gods of light, or else be transformed into demons in the train of Tiamât, the impersonation of chaos. Some of them might be set apart as the special servants and messengers of the gods, and occupy the place of archangels in the celestial hierarchy. But it was also possible to call in the aid of cosmology, and turn them into elemental powers representing successive stages in the history of creation. They thus continued to belong to that inchoate period of Babylonian religion when as yet the Semitic gods had not come into existence, and at the same time they could be identified with those gods in the exercise of their creative power. In the language of later metaphysic, they thus became the successive thoughts of the creator realising themselves in the successive acts of the creation, like the æons of Gnosticism which emanate one from the other as the realised thoughts of God. The idea is doubtless a late one, and belongs to an age of philosophy; but it represents an attempt to grapple with the difficulties presented by the opposing Sumerian and Semitic elements in Babylonian religion, and to reconcile them together. It presupposes that identification of one god with another which the solar cult and the Semitic conception of the goddess had made possible, and so takes us one step further in the direction of monotheism. The divine or superhuman beings of the Sumerian creed are not merely identified with a particular god, but are even transformed into the male and female principles which his government of the world or the act of creation compels him to exhibit in concrete form.(286)

Before Babylonian theosophy could arrive thus far, two things were necessary. The gods had to be arranged in a divine hierarchy, and the identification of one with the other had to become possible. The hierarchical arrangement followed from the Semitic conception of divinity. If Baal were a counterpart of the human father, there would be a divine family and a divine court modelled on the pattern of those of his worshippers. The god would have not only his wife and children, but his slaves and ministers as well. The deities of heaven would thus fall into orderly groups of higher and lower rank; the higher gods would tend to separate themselves more and more from those of subordinate degree, and the latter to sink into the position of second-rate intelligences, who stood midway between the gods and men, and depended on “the great gods” for their offices and existence.

The conception of a divine messenger or angel who carried the orders of the higher god from heaven to earth and interpreted his will to men, goes back to an early period in the history of Babylonian religion. We can trace it to the time when the Sumerian first began to be affected by Semitic influence. The _sukkal_ or “angel”-minister plays a prominent part in primitive Babylonian theology, but it is noticeable that he is usually a son of the god whose messages he conveys to gods and men. Asari or Merodach is at once the son and the minister of Ea; Nin-ip, of En-lil. The fact points to an age when Sumerian animism had already been succeeded by Semitic Baalism; the spirit or ghost had become a god in human shape, who begat children and required an envoy.

When Merodach became the god of Babylon, and with the rise of his city to political power entered the circle of the supreme gods, he in his turn needed a messenger. The latter was found in the god of the neighbouring city of Borsippa. The growth of Babylon was accompanied by the decay of Borsippa, which in time was reduced to a mere suburb of the rival town. The god of the suburb was necessarily annexed by the god of the city which had absorbed it, and as necessarily became his follower and servant. Khammurabi, to whom Babylon owed its position and influence, even transferred the ancient temple of the god of Borsippa to the god of Babylon, and included him among the inferior deities to whom chapels were erected in the great sanctuary of Merodach.(287) But the god of Borsippa had once been as independent and supreme in his own city as Merodach was at Babylon. He had been addressed as “the maker” of the universe and the irrigator of the fields, and the origin of the cuneiform system of writing was ascribed to him. The Semites called him the Nabium or “Prophet,” and it was under this title of Nabium or Nebo that he became the minister of Merodach. The name was appropriate in his twofold character of interpreter of the will of Bel and patron of literature, and was carried by Babylonian conquest into the distant West. There Moses died in Moab on the summit of Mount Nebo, and cities bearing the name stood within the borders of Reuben and Judah.

It was doubtless the association of Nebo with Merodach that caused him, like Thoth in Egypt, to become the patron of literature and the god of the scribes. The culture-god was as it were divided into two; while Merodach retained the functions peculiar to a Semitic Baal, Nebo watched over the library and school, and encouraged the study of the script which had been invented by him. The older claims of Ea fell into the background and were forgotten; it was no longer the god of Eridu, but Nebo, who had written the first book, and instructed mankind in the elements of culture. The marshal’s staff, which Nebo had wielded as organiser of “the hosts of heaven and earth,” now became the rod of the scribe, and a consort was created for him in the person of Tasmit or “Hearing.” In Assyria, where the worship of Assur prevented any development of that of his rival Merodach, Nebo became a special favourite of the literary class, who derived their knowledge and inspiration from Babylon. Assur-bani-pal never wearies of telling us how Nebo and Tasmit had “made broad his ears and enlightened his eyes,” so that he had collected and republished the books and tablets of the kings who had gone before him.

As minister of Merodach, Nebo passed into the solar circle. In Egypt he would have been absorbed by the more influential god, but in Babylonia the Semitic conception of Merodach as a Baal who required his minister and envoy like an earthly king, stood in the way of any such identification. He consequently retained his personality, and it was another god who was identified with him. This was Nusku, once the fire which blazed up into flame and purified the sacrifice. With the spread of the solar cult Nusku became a local sun-god, and was regarded as the god of the burning sun of noon. In Sumerian days, however, while he was still the spirit of the fire, he had been necessarily the servant and associate of En-lil; and when En-lil became the Semitic Bel of Nippur, Nusku followed his fortunes and was made his messenger. After this his identification with Nebo was easy. Nebo, too, was the messenger and interpreter of Bel, though it was the younger Bel of Babylon who had supplanted the older Bel of Nippur. As Bel-Merodach took the place of En-lil, so too did Nebo take the place of Nusku. The priests of Babylon knew of one Bel only, and the minister of Bel must be one and the same whether his name were Nusku or Nebo. That Nusku had originally been an independent deity was, however, never forgotten. The past history and religion of the country could not be ignored, and the priesthood were forced to erect a separate shrine to Nusku within the precincts of the temple of Nebo itself. Only thus could they be certain that the god would not avenge himself for being defrauded of his dues.

The history of Nebo is an instructive illustration of the successive changes that passed over the religion of Babylonia. We first have the ghost of Sumerian times, who becomes the god of a special city in the days when Semitic influence began to make itself felt. Then the god is transformed into a Semitic Baal, and with the political rise of the neighbouring city of Babylon is degraded into an attendant and retainer of the mightier god. As interpreter of the will of the culture-god he deprives Ea of his ancient prerogatives, and his title of “Prophet” becomes his name. Henceforth he is a purely Semitic divinity, and a wife is found for him in the shadowy abstraction “Hearing.” Under the influences of the solar cult, he is identified with the ancient Sumerian fire-spirit who had himself become a sun-god, and eventually he is adopted in Assyria as the patron of the learned class, and the divine representative of Babylonian learning.

But the history of Nebo also illustrates one of the directions in which the striving after a monotheistic faith displayed itself. Not only was a separate god, Nusku, amalgamated with Nebo, Nebo himself, while still keeping his independent personality, sank into a subordinate position which may be compared with that of an archangel in Christian belief. Babylonian religion came to distinguish between a limited number of “great gods” and the inferior deities who formed their court. Indeed, it went even further than this. From the days of Khammurabi onward there was a tendency to exalt Bel-Merodach at the expense of all his brother gods. The development of Babylonian religion, in fact, went hand in hand with that of the Babylonian State. The foundation of an empire had made the Babylonian familiar with the conception of a supreme sovereign, under whom there were vassal kings, and under them again a dependent nobility. The same conception was extended to the celestial hierarchy. Here, too, Bel-Merodach sat supreme, while the other gods “bowed reverently before him,” retaining, indeed, their ancestral rights and power within the limits of their respective sanctuaries, but acknowledging the supremacy of the one sovereign Bel. It was no longer in honour of En-lil that the inhabitants of Babylonia were called “the people of Bel,” but because they were all alike the children and adorers of Bel of Babylon.

But Babylonian religion never advanced further. It is true that the tablet published by Dr. Pinches, to which I have already alluded in the last lecture, identifies the chief gods of the pantheon with Merodach in his various phases and functions; it is also true that Nabonidos, the last Babylonian king, shocked the consciences and violated the rights of the local priesthoods by bringing the images of their gods into the central sanctuary; but such speculations and efforts remained isolated and without effect. It was otherwise, however, in Assyria. There the deities for the most part, like the culture and language, had been imported from the south; there were no time-honoured temples and venerable traditions to contend against; and, above all, there was a national god who represented the State rather than a Semitic Baal, and was therefore a symbol of the unity which bound the State together.

The supreme god of Assyria was Assur; the other gods were of Babylonian origin. And in the name of Assur we have the name of the country itself and its primitive capital. Assur, in short, was the deified city of Assur, the divine State which from the days of its successful revolt from Babylonia was predominantly military, with all the union and discipline of a military organisation. Such at least was the view taken of the god in the historical age of Assyria, though some modern scholars have doubted whether, like Nineveh, which derived its name from the goddess Ninâ, it was not originally rather the city that took its name from the god than the god from the city.

Such doubts, however, are set at rest by an examination of the proper names found in the Babylonian contracts of the early Semitic period, more especially in those of the age of Khammurabi. Many of them are compounded with the names of cities which are treated as deities, and are preceded by the prefix of divinity. Thus we have Sumu-Upi (Bu. 91-5-9. 2182. 16), like Ṡumu-Rakh or Sumu-Râ and Samuel, as well as Upi-rabi (Bu. 91-5-9. 377. 25), where the deified Upi or Opis plays exactly the same part as the deified rivers Euphrates and Tigris in other similarly compounded names. Between the deified city and the deified river no distinction was drawn. Both alike were impersonations of the god. So too in the second tablet of the _Surpu_ series (_WAI._ iv. 59. 35, 38), Eridu and Babylon are invoked to deliver the sick man by the side of Ea and Merodach and various other gods, as well as certain of the stars. Between the ordinary gods of Babylonia and the deified city no distinction is made.(288)

Had the city taken its name from the god, it would be difficult to find a satisfactory etymology for it. The spelling of the name is against our connecting it with the word _asiru_, “he who blesses” or “consecrates,” from which the Assyrian _asirtu_, “sanctuary,” is derived, like the name of the Canaanitish goddess Ashêrah.(289) On the other hand, the native Assyrian etymology is as inadmissible as the endeavours of our eighteenth century lexicographers to find Greek or Latin derivations for Anglo-Saxon words. The Assyrian scribes saw in Assur merely the old elemental deity Ansar, “the firmament,” who was himself nothing more than the Sumerian spirit of the “heavenly host.” It is wisest not to imitate them, but, as in the case of Merodach and Istar, to leave the origin of the name Assur unexplained.

The kings of Assyria were originally high priests of Assur. In other parts of the Semitic world the high priest similarly preceded the king. The father-in-law of Moses was high priest of Midian, and the high priests of Saba in Southern Arabia developed into kings.(290) There were high priests also in Babylonia, who took their titles not only from the gods they served, but also from the cities over which they ruled. The peculiarity in the case of Assyria, however, was that there the god and the city were one and the same. When, therefore, the high priest of Assur assumed the title of king, he still retained his priestly functions under another title. He was priest, but no longer high priest. Assyria was a monarchy, not a theocracy; it was founded on military force, not on priestly influence. The king accordingly was not a representative and vicegerent of the god, like a Babylonian prince; he represented the god Assur only because he represented the city of Assur. It was through the city of Assur that the god manifested himself as it were to men.

One of the consequences of this fact was that Assur was a national as opposed to a merely local god. Wherever the power of the city extended, there the power of the god necessarily extended as well. When Assur became the capital of a kingdom, the whole land which owned its authority received its name and accepted the supremacy of its god. The local cults made way for the national cults; it was not only in Assur itself that the god had his temple; wherever a city called itself Assyrian, the worship of Assur held the first place. There were no old sanctuaries and cults to displace, as in Babylonia; the deities who were adored in the cities of Assyria were of Babylonian origin, like Ninâ and Istar; and when once Assyria had achieved its independence, and realised that it had a national life of its own, they were unable to maintain themselves against the national god.

This national god had given his people their freedom and right to rule. He it was who had led their armies to victory, and had vanquished the hostile deities of Babylonia. He was thus identified with the army to which Assyria owed its existence, and with the king who was its leader in war. Wherever the army went or the king established himself, Assur went also. He lost, therefore, the last relics of his association with a particular locality, and became the god of the whole people. From every point of view he was national and not local.

Freed from the limitations of locality, he was consequently freed from the limitations of form. Bel-Merodach was necessarily human in form, with all the limitations of humanity; it was only where his image was that he could be present in visible shape. But Assur was not confined to the human image that represented him. He could also be represented by a symbol, and where the symbol was he was too. The symbol was a standard, on which an archer was depicted rising from a winged sun. It was carried with the armies of Assyria from place to place, like the ark in which the Israelites of the age of Samuel saw a symbol of the presence of their national God. The winged sun refers us to Egypt; so too does the standard on which the emblem of Assur was borne. The Asiatic conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty had brought Egypt and Assyria into contact; the Assyrian king paid tribute to the Pharaoh, and doubtless depended on him for support against Babylonia. It was the period when Assyria was first feeling itself an independent nation; the authority of Babylonia had been shaken off, and the god of Babylon had been supplanted by Assur. We need not be surprised, therefore, if Assur consented to borrow from Egypt the symbol which henceforth distinguished him from the Babylonian gods, and with the symbol went the theological ideas of which it was the expression.

These theological ideas were already deeply tinctured by the theories of the solar cult. The winged solar disc is evidence that Assur was assimilated to Amon-Ra of Egypt. But the assimilation stopped there. The Assyrians were too purely Semitic even to comprehend the nebulous pantheism of the Egyptian solar school; Assur remained an anthropomorphic god, with very definite attributes and sharply-cut features. The archer who rises above the disc of the sun significantly indicates the contrast between the theology of Egypt and Assyria. Above the sun-god is the human warrior, the lord of hosts, the god of battles, the divine leader of the armies of Assur. There was no room in the practical Assyrian mind for a formless divinity, with its infinite transformations and elusive shape. The Assyrian needed a soldier’s god, at once human and clearly defined.

Nevertheless this human god was recognised as one with the sun-god. Or rather, perhaps, the sun was regarded as his visible manifestation, the mark or symbol under which he displayed himself. Assur was thus essentially a Semitic Baal, but a warlike Baal, who was the god of a nation and not of a particular place.

Where the nation and its army were, accordingly, their god was as well. And when Assyria claimed to rule the whole civilised world, the power and authority of its god became world-wide. It was in his name that the Assyrian troops went forth to fight, and it was “through trust in” him that they gained their victories. Those who resisted them were his enemies, those who submitted were incorporated into his empire, and became his subjects and worshippers. All other gods had to yield to him; he was not only paramount over them, but to worship them instead of him was an act of impiety. The sacrifice might continue to be made to them and the prayer offered, but it was on condition that the first-fruits of both sacrifice and prayer were given to Assur.

This, however, was not all. Assur was not only jealous of other gods, there was no goddess who could share with him his power. In the eyes of the Assyrian people he was wifeless, like Yahveh of Israel or Chemosh of Moab. It is true that some Assyriologists, with more zeal than knowledge, have found for him a wife, but they are not agreed as to who she was. Sometimes we have been told it was Serua, sometimes Istar, sometimes Belit. The very fact that such a difference of opinion exists is sufficient to condemn the whole supposition. It is based on the pedantry of certain of the Assyrian scribes, who, educated in the literature and religion of Babylonia, were naturally anxious to fit their national god into the Babylonian system of theology. The gods of Babylonia had each his wife; they were each the head of a divine family, and consequently the chief god of Assyria must be the same. But it was difficult to find for him a female consort. Once or twice the help of the grammar is invoked, and the feminine Assurit is made to take her place by the side of Assur. But she was too evidently an artificial creation, and accordingly Belit was borrowed from Bel-Merodach, or Nin-lil from Bel of Nippur, and boldly claimed as the wife of Assur. But this too was acceptable neither to Babylonians nor to Assyrians, and, as a last resource, Istar, the virgin goddess, was transformed into a married wife. It might have been thought that the idea, once started, would have met with ready acceptance; for Istar was the goddess of Nineveh, as Assur was of the older capital which was superseded by Nineveh in the later days of the Assyrian empire. That it did not do so is a proof how firmly rooted was the wifelessness of Assur in the Assyrian mind; he was no Babylonian Bel who needed a helpmeet, but a warrior’s god, who entered the battle wifeless and alone.

I can but repeat again of him what I said years ago in my Hibbert Lectures: “Assur consequently differs from the Babylonian gods, not only in the less narrowly local character that belongs to him, but also in his solitary nature. He is ‘king of all the gods’ in a sense in which none of the deities of Babylonia were. He is like the king of Assyria himself, brooking no rival, allowing neither wife nor son to share in the honours which he claims for himself alone. He is essentially a jealous god, and as such sends forth his Assyrian adorers to destroy his unbelieving foes. Wifeless, childless, he is mightier than the Babylonian Baalim; less kindly, perhaps, less near to his worshippers than they were, but more awe-inspiring and more powerful. We can, in fact, trace in him all the lineaments upon which, under other conditions, there might have been built up as pure a faith as that of the God of Israel.” That none such was ever built, may be accepted as a sign and token that between the Semites of Assyria and those of Israel there lay a difference which no theories of evolution are able to explain.

Lecture VI. Cosmologies.

Man was made in the likeness of the gods, and, conversely, the gods are in the likeness of man. This belief lies at the root of the theology of Semitic Babylonia, and characterises its conception of divinity. It follows from it that the world which we see has come into existence like the successive generations of mankind or the products of human art. It has either been begotten by the creator, or it has been formed out of pre-existing materials. It did not come into being of itself; it is no fortuitous concurrence of atoms; no self-evolved product out of nothing, or the result of continuous development and evolution. The doctrines of spontaneous generation and of development are alike foreign to Babylonian religious thought. That demanded a creator who was human in his attributes and mode of work, who could even make mistakes and experiments, and so call into existence imperfect or monstrous forms which further experience was needed to rectify. There was an earlier as well as a later creation, the unshapely brood of chaos as well as the more perfect creations of the gods of light.

As we have seen, the culture of primitive Babylonia radiated from two main centres, the sanctuary of Nippur in the north, and the seaport of Eridu in the south. The one was inland, the other maritime; and what I may term the geographical setting of the two streams of culture varied accordingly. The great temple of Nippur was known as Ê-kur, “the house of the mountain-land”; it was a model of the earth, which those who built it believed to be similarly shaped, and to have the form of a mountain whose peak penetrated the clouds. Its supreme god was the lord of the nether earth, his subjects were the demons of the underworld, and the theology of his priests was associated with sorcery and witchcraft, and with invocations to the spirits who ruled over the world of the dead.

Eridu, on the contrary, was the dwelling-place of the god of the deep. Its temple, Ê-Saggila, “the house of the high head,” was, we are told, “in the midst” of the encircling ocean on which the whole earth rested, and in it was the home of Ea, “the lord of the holy mound.”(291) Its god was the author of Babylonian writing and civilisation, and his son and interpreter was Aṡari, “the benefactor of man.” While the theology of Nippur concerned itself with the dead, that of Eridu was pre-eminently occupied with the living. Asari is invoked as the god who raised the dead to life, and the arts which make life pleasant were the gifts of Ea himself. It is perhaps not without reason that, while En-lil of Nippur appears as the destroyer of mankind, Ea is their creator and instructor. He not only created them, but he taught them how to live, and provided for them the spells and remedies which could heal the sick and ward off death.

Like Khnum of Egypt, he was called “the potter,” for he had moulded mankind from the clay which his waters formed on the shores of the Persian Gulf.(292) Nor was it mankind only that was thus made. The whole world of created things had been similarly moulded; the earth and all that dwelt upon it had risen out of the sea. The cosmology of Eridu thus made water the origin of all things; the world we inhabit has sprung from the deep, which still encircles it like a serpent with its coils.

But the deep over which the creator-god presided was a deep which formed part of that orderly framework of nature wherein the gods of light bear rule, and which obeys laws that may not be broken. It is not the deep where the spirit of chaos held sway, and of which she was an impersonation; that was a deep without limits or law, whose only progeny was a brood of monsters. Between the deep of Ea and the chaos of Tiamât the cosmology of historical Babylonia drew a sharp line of distinction; the one excluded the other, and it was not until the deep of Tiamât had been, as it were, overcome and placed within bounds, that the deep wherein Ea dwelt was able to take its place.

The two conceptions are antagonistic one to the other, and can hardly be explained, except on the supposition that they belong to two different schools of thought. The brood of Tiamât, it must be remembered, were once the subjects of En-lil of Nippur, and the Anunna-ki, or “spirits of the earth,” though they became the orderly ministers of the gods of light, nevertheless continued to have their dwelling-place in the underground world, and to serve its mistress Allat. The motley host that followed Tiamât in her contest with Bel-Merodach were essentially the ghosts and goblins of the theology of Nippur; and it is with the latter, therefore, that we must associate the theory of the divine world with which they are connected. The world of Nippur was a world from which the sea was excluded; it was a world of plain and mountain, and of the hollow depths which lay beneath the surface of the earth. The cosmology of Nippur would naturally concern itself with the land rather than with the sea; the earth and not the water would have been the first in order of existence, and habitation of the gods would be sought on the summit of a Mount Olympus rather than in the depths of an encircling ocean.(293)

In the chaos of Tiamât, accordingly, I see the last relics of a cosmology which emanated from Nippur, and was accepted wherever the influence of Nippur prevailed. It has been modified by the cosmological ideas of Eridu; and in the story of the struggle between Tiamât and Merodach an attempt has been made to harmonise the two conflicting conceptions of the universe, and to weld them into a compact whole. The world of Tiamât has first been transformed into a watery abyss like that which the theologians of Eridu believed to be the origin of the universe, and then has been absorbed by the deep over which Ea held sway. The creator Ea has taken the place of the spirit of destruction, the culture-god of the dragon of darkness.

But a curious legend, which has been much misunderstood, still preserves traces of the old cosmology of the great sanctuary of Northern Babylonia. It describes the war made against a king of Babylonia by the powers of darkness, the gnome-like beings who dwelt “in the ground,” where Tiamât had suckled them, and where they had multiplied in the cavernous depths of a mountain land. They were, we are told, composite monsters, “warriors with the bodies of birds, men with the faces of ravens,” over whom ruled a king and his wife and their seven sons.(294) Year after year the war continued, and, in spite of charms and incantations, host after host sent forth from Akkad was annihilated by the unclean and superhuman enemy. The Babylonian king was in despair; in vain he appealed to the gods, and declared how “terror and night, death and plague, earthquake, fear and horror, hunger, famine, and destruction,” had come upon his unfortunate people. “The plain of Akkad” seemed about to become the prey of the demons of the night. How it was rescued from the danger that threatened it we do not know; the story is unfortunately broken, and the end of it has not been found. But the origin and character of the superhuman enemy is not difficult to discover; their dwelling-place is in the tomb-like recesses of the mountains, their mother was Tiamât herself, and they have the monstrous shapes of the ghosts and spirits of the ancient animism of Nippur.(295)

The legend was fitly preserved in the sanctuary of Nergal, the god of the dead, at Kutha. It too has undergone the harmonising process of later times: the cosmologies of Nippur and Eridu are again set in antagonism, one against the other, and there is a first creation as well as a second engaged in the same struggle as that which under a different form is described in the legends of Eridu and Babylon. But the antagonists in it are alike the inhabitants of the dry land; there is no watery abyss from which they have sprung, whether it be the chaotic deep of Tiamât or the ocean home of the god of culture. The conceptions on which it rests belong to the inland plain of Babylonia rather than to the shores of the sea. Influenced though it has been by the cosmology of Eridu, the elements of which it is composed go back to an inland and not to a maritime State.

It will be seen that our knowledge of the cosmology of Nippur is still scanty and uncertain. The world which it presupposed had the form of a mountain, on the peak of which the gods lived among the clouds of heaven, while the cavernous depths below it were peopled with hosts of spirits and demons, the shades of the dead and the ghosts of a primitive animism. There was no encircling ocean, no abysmal deep on which it floated, and from which it had been produced. What its origin, however, was believed to be we do not yet know, or to what creative _Zi_ or _Lil_ it was held to owe its existence. For an answer to these questions we must wait until the ancient libraries of Nippur have been thoroughly excavated and explored.(296)

It is otherwise with the cosmology of Eridu. We know a good deal about it, thanks to the theologians of Babylon, whose god Merodach was the successor and representative of the god of Eridu. It is true that its form has been changed and modified in part for the greater glory of Merodach and his city, that Merodach has even taken the place of Ea as the creator, and that the cosmology of Nippur—or at all events of a similar school of thought—has been combined with that of Eridu, with the result that there are two creations, the first chaotic, and the second that of the present world. But it is still easy to disentangle the earlier from the later elements in the story, and to separate what is purely Babylonian from what belongs to Eridu.

One of the versions of the story that have come down to us has been preserved in a spell, of which, like verses of the Bible in modern times, it has been used to form a part. Its antiquity is shown by the fact that it is written in the ancient language of Sumer. It is thus that it begins—

“No holy house, no house of the gods in a holy place had as yet been built, no reed had grown, no tree been planted, no bricks had been made, no structure formed, no house had been built, no city founded, no city built where living things could dwell. Nippur was unbuilt, its temple of Ê-kur was unerected; Erech was unbuilt, its temple of Ê-ana was unerected;(297) the deep sea was uncreated, Eridu unbuilt. The site of (its) holy house, the house of the gods, existed not, all the earth was sea, while in the midst of the sea was a water-course. In those days was Eridu built and the temple of Ê-Saggil founded, Ê-Saggil wherein dwells the divine king of the holy mound in the midst of the deep;— Babylon was built, Ê-Saggil completed;— the spirits of the earth were created together, they called it by the mighty name of the holy city, the seat of their well-being.(298) Merodach(299) tied (reeds) together to form a weir in the water, he made dust and mixed it with the reeds of the weir, that the gods might dwell in the seat of (their) well-being.(300) Mankind he created,— the goddess Aruru created the seed of mankind with him,(301)— the cattle of the field, the living creatures in the field, he created; the Tigris and Euphrates he made, and set them in their place, giving them good names. Moss and seed-plant of the marsh, reed and rush he created, he created the green herb of the field, the earth, the marsh, the jungle, the cow and its young, the calf, the sheep and its young, the lamb of the fold, the grove and the forest, the goat, (and) the gazelle multiplied (?) for him. Bel-Merodach(302) filled a space at the edge of the sea, [there] he made an enclosure of reeds, he constructed [a site?], he created [the reeds], he created the trees, he laid [a platform] in the place, [he moulded bricks], the structure he formed; [he built houses], he founded cities, [cities he founded and] filled them with living things; Nippur he built, Ê-kur he erected, Erech he built, Ê-ana he erected,(303) [the deep he created, Eridu he built].”

It is evident that the poem was written by one who lived on the marshy shores of the Persian Gulf, and had watched how land could be formed by tying the reeds in bundles and building with them a weir. It was in this way that the first cultivators of Eridu protected their fields from the tide, or reclaimed the land from the sea. None but those who had actually seen the process could have devised a cosmology which thus applied it to the creation of the world. To the question—“How did this world come into existence?” the primitive inhabitant of Eridu seemed to have a ready answer: he too was able to create new land, out of which the rush and the herb could grow, where the cattle could be pastured, and the house built. What he could do, the gods had doubtless done at the beginning of time; all things must have come from the primeval deep, and the earth itself was but an islet rescued from the tides and created by obstructing their ebb and flow.

But it is also evident that the old poem has been revised and re-edited by the priesthood of Babylon. Ê-Saggil, the temple of Bel-Merodach of Babylon, has been confounded with the earlier Ê-Saggil of Eridu, and the creator-god Ea has been supplanted by Merodach. The supplanter, however, cannot conceal his foreign origin. The “enclosure” or “dwelling-place,” “at the edge of the sea,” must have been made in the first instance by the god of the deep, not by the sun-god of Babylon. Merodach had nothing to do with the sea and marshland, with cities that stood on the margin of the ocean, or reeds that grew by its shores. He was the god of an inland city, and he symbolised the sun and not the sea.

It is possible that even before its alteration at the hands of the theologians of Babylon, the old cosmological poem of Eridu had been modified in accordance with the requirements of a theology which resulted from a fusion of Sumerian and Semitic ideas. The doctrine of the triad is already presupposed by it; Nippur, Erech, and Eridu, with their sanctuaries of Bel, Anu, and Ea, already represent Babylonia, and the temples of Bel and Anu even take precedence of that of Ea. At the same time the parallelism between Nippur and Erech on the one side, and Eridu on the other, is imperfect. The uncreated “deep,” on the margin of which Eridu stood, has nothing corresponding with it in the two preceding lines, while the place of the temples of Nippur and Erech is occupied by the name of the city of Eridu. It seems clear, that the reference to the two great sanctuary-cities of Northern and Central Babylonia is an interpolation, which breaks and injures the sense. Originally, we may conclude, the poem named Eridu only; its author knew nothing of the other shrines of Babylonia; for him the temple of Ea at Eridu was the house of all “the gods.”

Ea, under the mask of Merodach, is the creator of mankind, as of all things else. In this act of creation the goddess Aruru is coupled with him; we have no materials at present for explaining why she should have been introduced, or whether the introduction formed part of the original legend. It is not the only passage, however, in which she appears as a creatress. According to the Epic of Gilgames, she had created the great hero of Babylonia, and it was she also who moulded Ea-bani, the companion of Gilgames, out of clay which she had kneaded with her hands. Like Ea, therefore, she was a modeller in clay, and there was good reason for associating her with the divine potter who had made man. Had she been a god she would doubtless have been identified with him; as it was, she had to remain his companion and associate, whose name could not be forgotten even by a worshipper of Ea. Probably she was the goddess of some Babylonian city where she played the part that Ea played at Eridu; it may be that her sanctuary was at Marad, which claimed, as it would seem, to be the birthplace of Gilgames.

The name of the first man was Adapa, “the son of Eridu.” Ea had created him without a helpmeet; he had endowed him with wisdom and knowledge, but had denied to him the gift of immortality. Each day he baked the bread and poured pure water into the bowl; at night he drew the bolts of the gates of Eridu, and at dawn he sailed forth in his bark to fish in the waters of the Persian Gulf. Once, so the story ran, the south wind upset his skiff, and in revenge he broke its wings. But the south wind was a servant of Anu, and the god of the sky demanded the punishment of the daring mortal. Ea, however, intervened to save the man he had created. He clad Adapa in a mourner’s robe, and showed him the road to heaven, telling him what he was to do in the realm of Anu, but forbidding him to eat or drink there. The gate of heaven was guarded by the gods Tammuz and Nin-gis-zida, who asked him the meaning of the mourner’s garment which he wore.(304) When he answered that it was for their own selves, because they had vanished from the earth, their hearts were softened, and they became his intercessors with Anu. Anu listened, and forgave; but that a mortal man should behold the secrets of heaven and earth was so contrary to right, that he ordered the food and water of life to be offered him. Adapa, however, remembered the commands of Ea, and, unlike the biblical Adam, refused the food of immortality. Man remained mortal, and it was never again in his power to eat of the tree of life. But in return, sovereignty and dominion were bestowed upon him, and Adapa became the father of mankind.

The legend is a Babylonian attempt to explain the existence of death. It is like, and yet unlike, the story in Genesis. The biblical Adam lost the gift of immortality because his desire to become as God, knowing good and evil, had caused him to be driven from the Paradise in which grew the tree of life. Adapa, on the other hand, was already endowed with knowledge by his creator Ea, and his loss of immortality was due, not to his disobedience, but to his obedience to the commands of the god. Adam was banished from the Garden of Eden, “lest he should put forth his hand and take of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”; while in the Babylonian legend it was Anu himself who was reluctant that one who had entered the gate of heaven should remain a mere mortal man. Babylonian polytheism allowed the existence of divided counsels among the gods; the monotheism of Israel made this impossible. There was no second Yahveh to act in contradiction to the first; Yahveh was at once the creator of man and the God of heaven, and there was none to dispute His will. There is no room for Anu in the Book of Genesis; and as Ea, the creator of Adapa, was unwilling that the man he had created should become an immortal god, so Yahveh, the creator of Adam, similarly denied to him the food of immortal life.

That there is a connection between the Biblical story and the Babylonian legend is, however, rendered certain by the geography of the Biblical Paradise. It was a garden in the land of Eden, and Edin was the Sumerian name of the “plain” of Babylonia in which Eridu stood. Two of the rivers which watered it were the Tigris and Euphrates, the two streams, in fact, which we are specially told had been created and named by Ea at the beginning of time. Indeed, the name that is given to the Tigris in the Book of Genesis is its old Sumerian title, which survived in later days only in the religious literature. Even the strange statement that “a river went out of Eden,” which “was parted and became into four heads,” is explained by the cuneiform texts. The Persian Gulf was called “the Salt River,” and, thanks to its tides, was regarded as the source of the four streams which flowed into it from their “heads” or springs in the north. On early Babylonian seals, Ea, the god of the sea, is depicted as pouring sometimes the four rivers, sometimes only the Tigris and Euphrates, from a vase that he holds in his hands. Years ago I drew attention to a Sumerian hymn in which reference is made to the garden and sacred tree of Eridu, the Babylonian Paradise in the plain of Eden. Dr. Pinches has since discovered the last line of the hymn, in which the picture is completed by a mention of the rivers which watered the garden on either side. It is thus that the text reads—

“In Eridu a vine(305) grew over-shadowing; in a holy place was it brought forth; its root was of bright lapis, set in the world beneath. The path of Ea was in Eridu,(306) teeming with fertility. His seat (there) is the centre of the earth; his couch is the bed of the primeval mother.(307) Into the heart of its holy house, which spreads its shade like a forest, hath no man entered. In its midst is Tammuz, between the mouths of the rivers on both sides.”(308)

The sacred tree of the garden of Eridu was, however, not the tree of life. It was rather the tree of knowledge. This is shown by an inscription of Eri-Aku or Arioch, in which he describes himself as “the executor of the oracle of the sacred tree of Eridu.” Perhaps it is to the same tree that reference is made in a magical text, in which a man possessed of “the seven evil spirits” is healed with the help of “the tree which shatters the power of the incubus, and upon whose core the name of Ea is recorded.”(309) But Ea was not only the god of wisdom, he was also the god of “life,” and the trees of both wisdom and life might therefore be fitly placed under his protection.

When Babylon became the supreme head of Babylonia under Khammurabi and his successors, the creative functions of Ea were usurped by Merodach. A long poem celebrating the glories and power of Merodach, his struggle with chaos and creation of the world, and, finally, his formal investiture with the names and prerogatives of Ea, has been preserved to us in part. Ever since its discovery by Mr. George Smith it has been known as the Epic of the Creation, and the parallelism between the first tablet composing it and the first chapter of Genesis has long attracted attention. But the poem is of late date. It belongs to an age of religious syncretism and materialistic philosophy; the mythological beings of popular belief are resolved into cosmological principles, and the mythological dress in which they appear has a theatrical effect. The whole poem reminds us of the stilted and soulless productions of the eighteenth century, in which commonplace ideas and a prosaic philosophy masquerade as Greek nymphs or Roman gods. It is only here and there, as in the description of the contest with Tiamât, or in the concluding lines,—if, indeed, they belong to the poem at all,—that it rises above the level of dull mediocrity.

But mediocre as it may be from a literary point of view, it is of considerable value to the student of Babylonian cosmology. The author is fortunately not original, and his materials, therefore, have been drawn from the folk-lore or the theology of the past. A welcome commentary on the first tablet has been preserved, moreover, in the _Problems and Solutions of First Principles_, written by the philosopher Damascius, the contemporary of Justinian, whose accuracy and acquaintance with Babylonian sources it proves. Unfortunately the tablet is broken, and the final lines of it are consequently lost—

“When above unnamed was the heaven, the earth below by a name was uncalled, the primeval deep was their begetter, the chaos of Tiamât was the mother of them all. Their waters were embosomed in one place, the corn-stalk was ungathered, the marsh-plant ungrown. At that time the gods had not appeared, any one of them, by no name were they called, no destiny [had they fixed]. Then were the [primeval] gods created, Lakhmu and Lakhamu came forth [the first]. Until they grew up ... Ansar and Kisar were created ... Long were the days ... Anu [Bel and Ea were made].”

To the Babylonian, name and existence were one and the same. Nothing could exist unless it had a name, and whatever had a name necessarily existed. That the heaven and earth were unnamed, therefore, was equivalent to saying that they were not yet in being. The words with which the Book of Genesis begins are a curious contradiction of the statement of the Babylonian cosmologist. But the contradiction illustrates the difference between the Hebrew and the Babylonian points of view. The Hebrew was not only a monotheist; he believed also that everything, even from the beginning, had been made by the one supreme God; the Babylonian, on the contrary, started with a materialistic philosophy. There are no gods at the outset; the gods themselves have been created like other things; all that existed at first was a chaos of waters. The Babylonian cosmology is that of Genesis without the first verse.

The word I have rendered “chaos” is _mummu_. Damascius explains it as νοητὸς κόσμος, “the world of thought” or “ideas.” It is a world which has as yet no outward form or content, a world without matter, or perhaps more probably a world in which matter is inseparable from thought. And for this reason it is formless; matter as yet had assumed no shape, there is no single part of it which is so defined and separated from the rest as to receive a name and thereby to exist. There is nothing but a dark and formless deep, which can be imagined but not pictured or described.

The chaos, however, is a chaos of waters. Once more, therefore, we are taken back to Eridu and the shores of the Persian Gulf, and to the cosmology which saw in the water the origin of all things. But the cosmology itself has been strangely changed. There is no longer a creator god, no longer an Ea, who, like Yahveh, existed before creation, and to whom the earth and its inhabitants owe their existence. He has been swept aside, and an atheistic philosophy has taken his place. The mythological garb of the larger part of the poem cannot disguise the materialism of its preface; in the later tablets of it Tiamât may once more be the dragon of popular imagination, but the first tablet is careful to explain that this is but an adaptation to folk-lore and legend, and that Tiamât is really what her name signifies, the chaos of waters.

The process of creation is conceived of under the Semitic form of generation. The Deep and the chaos of waters become male and female principles, from whom other pairs are generated. The process of generation easily passed into the emanation of the Gnostic systems of theosophy under the influence of Greek metaphysics. But the poet of Babylon remained true to his Semitic point of view; for him creation is a process of generation rather than of emanation; and though the divine or superhuman beings of the old mythology have become mere primordial elements, they are still male and female, begetting children like men and gods.

To find the elemental deities or principles that could thus form links in the chain of evolution, it was necessary to fall back on the spirits or ghosts of the early Sumerian cult who were essentially material in their nature, and had nothing in common with the Semitic Baal. Lakhmu and his consort were part of the monstrous brood of Tiamât; they represented the first attempts to give form and substance to the universe. But the form was still chaotic and immature, suitably symbolised by beings, half human and half bestial, which had descended to Semitic Babylonia from Sumerian animism, and whose memory was kept alive by religious art.

Lakhmu and Lakhamu were followed by An-sar and Ki-sar, the upper and lower firmament. The one originally denoted the spirit-world of the sky, the other the spirit-world of the earth.(310) They were not gods in the Semitic sense of the term. But the Babylonian theologians transformed them into abstractions, or rather into Platonic archetypes of the heaven and earth. Their appearance meant that the world had at last taken form and substance; the reign of chaos was over, and limits had been set which should never again be overpassed. The earth and the sky bounded and defined one another; the age of formlessness was ended, and an orderly universe was being prepared fit to receive the present creation.

But the work of preparation was a long one, and not until it was finished could the gods of Semitic Babylonia be born. But even they have ceased to be gods for the philosophic cosmologist. They are replaced and represented by the triad of Anu, Bel, and Ea, who thus become mere symbols of the sky, the earth, and the water, the elements which Babylonian philosophy regarded as constituting the present world. Doubtless, did we possess the rest of the tablet, we should read how the other “great gods” were sprung from them.

The later tablets of the Epic, which are devoted to the glorification of Merodach, are for the most part of little interest for the cosmologist. They describe at wearisome length and with tedious reiteration the challenge of Tiamât to the gods, the arming of Merodach, and his victory over the dragon. Religions and mythological conceptions of all kinds have been laid under contribution, and confusedly mingled together. It was necessary that Merodach, the supreme god of Babylon, should have been the creator of the world; and it was therefore also necessary that the creative acts of the other creator gods of Babylonia should be transferred to him, however diverse they may have been. Hence, in the course of the poem, Merodach is described as destroying and creating by his word alone,—a cosmological conception which reminds us of that of the Egyptian school of Hermopolis, while after the destruction of Tiamât he is said to have cut her in half like a flat fish, forming the canopy of heaven with one half, above which the “fountains of the great deep” were kept firmly barred. This is in flagrant contradiction with the cosmogony of the Introduction, but it is probable that it was derived from Nippur, where En-lil was perhaps described as creating the heavens and earth in a similar fashion. When the creative functions of En-lil were usurped by Merodach, the old myth was transferred to the god of Babylon; and accordingly, in the pæan which seems to form the end of the Epic, Bel of Nippur is declared to have bestowed upon Merodach his name of “lord of the earth,” and therewith the powers and functions which accompanied it.

The struggle between Tiamât, the dragon of darkness, and Merodach, the god of light, must originally have symbolised the dispersion of the black rain-cloud and raging tempest by the rays of the sun. But the author of the poem evidently regards it from a cosmological point of view. For him it is the victory of order over chaos, of the present creation over the formless world of the past, and of fixed law over anarchy and confusion. The conception of a law, governing the universe and unable to be broken, lay deep in the Babylonian mind. Even the gods could not escape it; they too had to submit to that inexorable destiny which distinguished the world in which we live from the world of chaos. All they could do was to interpret and reveal the decrees of fate; the decrees themselves were unalterable. It was not Bel who issued them; they were contained in the tablets of destiny which he wore on his breast as the symbol of his supremacy, and which enabled him to predict the future. These were, indeed, the Urim and Thummim which, like the high priest of Israel, he was privileged to consult.(311) What they did was not to make him the arbiter of fortune, but its interpreter and seer. He learned from them how the laws of the universe were going to work, what destiny had in store for it, and how, therefore, it was needful to act. It does not even seem that his prevision extended beyond a year; at all events, when Bel of Nippur had yielded up his rights to Bel of Babylon, we are told that the latter had to sit each New Year’s day in the mystic “chamber of the fates,” determining the destiny of mankind during the ensuing year.

The victory over Tiamât was followed by the assignment of particular posts in the sky to Anu, Bel, and Ea. This again harmonises but ill with the cosmology of the preface to the poem; but the astronomers had long since divided the heaven between the gods of the Babylonian triad, and the honour of first doing so is accordingly assigned to Merodach. Then comes an account of the creation of the heavenly bodies—

“He prepared the stations of the great gods; the stars corresponding to them he established as constellations; he made known the year, and marked out the signs of the zodiac. Three stars he assigned to each of the 12 months, from the beginning of the year till (its) close. He established the station of Jupiter that they might know their bounds, that they should not sin, should not go astray, any one of them. The stations of Bel and Ea he fixed along with it. He opened gates on both sides, he strengthened (their) bolts on the left hand and the right; in the middle he set a staircase.(312) He made the moon appear illuminating the night; he established it as the luminary of night that the days might be known.”

Here it will be noticed that, as in Genesis, the heavenly bodies are regarded as already in existence. What the creator did was to establish them in their stations, and appoint them to mark and register time. In fact, as soon as Ansar—the upper firmament—appeared, they appeared also, though in an embryonic form. Merodach is thus an arranger rather than a creator, the founder of astronomy and the calendar rather than the maker of the stars. It is significant, however, that there is no reference to the sun; the sun-god could hardly fix for himself the laws he had to obey.

It has usually been supposed that the account of the orderly arrangement of the stars was followed by that of the creation of animals. But the tablet on which the latter is found is a mere fragment, and Professor Zimmern may be right in thinking that it belongs to a different story of the creation. At any rate, the creation in it is assigned to “the gods” generally “in their assembly” rather than to Merodach alone. On the other hand, as we have seen, the author of the Epic did not hesitate to introduce into it cosmological myths and ideas which agreed but badly together, and it is not likely that he would have omitted to notice the creation of animate things.

But a description of the creation of the world, or even of the great struggle between the gods of light and the dragon of darkness, was not the main purpose of the Babylonian poem. This was the glorification of the god of Babylon. The story of the creation was introduced into it because it was necessary that the supreme god of the universe should also be its creator, and it was for the same reason that the overthrow of the powers of darkness and anarchy was assigned to Merodach alone. He usurped and absorbed the prerogatives and attributes of the older gods; their virtues, as it were, passed to him along with their sovereignty and kingdom. The fact is very plainly expressed in what appears to be the concluding tablet of the Epic. Here the names, and therewith the essential natures, of the other deities are formally handed over to Bel-Merodach of Babylon. Henceforward he is acknowledged in heaven as well as in earth, the supreme Bel or Baal of Semitic faith, the father of gods and men. Ea, the lord of the deep, and Bel of Nippur, “the lord of the earth,” alike yield up to him their powers; he assumes their names and titles; and, thanks to the centralising influence of Babylon, Babylonian religion approaches monotheism as nearly as its local character ever allowed it to do. The creator alone could rightfully claim the worship of the creatures he had made.

But it was an approach merely; the final step was never taken, even by the more speculative theologians of Babylonia, which swept away the polytheism of the local cults, and left Merodach without a rival.

Herein lies the great contrast between the Babylonian and the Hebrew conceptions of the creation. The Hebrew cosmology starts from the belief in one God, beside whom there is none else, whether in the orderly world of to-day or in the world of chaos that preceded it. On its forefront stand the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” There was chaos, it was true, but it was a chaos which had no existence apart from God, who was its absolute master to carve and fashion as He would. The deep, too, was there; but the deep was neither the impersonation of Tiamât nor the realm of Ea; the breath of the one God brooded over it, awaiting the time when the creative word should be uttered, and the breath of God should become the life of the world. The elements, indeed, of the Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the creative word itself was a Babylonian conception, as the story of Merodach has shown us; but the spirit that inspires the cosmology is the antithesis of that which inspires the cosmologies of Babylonia. Between the polytheism of Babylonia and the monotheism of Israel a gulf is fixed which cannot be spanned.

The Babylonian Epic of the Creation, as we may continue to call it, sums up and incorporates the various cosmological systems and fancies that had been current in the country. They are thrown into a mythological form with a philosophical introduction. We may therefore regard it as embodying the latest and most fully elaborated attempt of the Babylonian mind to explain the origin of things. It is probably not much older than the age of the Second Assyrian empire, though the materials out of which it has been composed go back to the earliest days of Babylonian antiquity. But it exemplifies the three principles or fundamental ideas upon which Babylonian cosmology rested—the belief that water is the primal element, the belief in a lawless chaos from which the present world has, as it were, been rescued after a long and fierce struggle between the powers of darkness and light, and a belief in generation as the primary creative force. The doctrine that in water we must see the source of all things—a doctrine that made its way through the cosmologies of Phœnicia and Israel into that of the Greek philosopher Thales—can be traced back to the days when Eridu was the seaport of Babylonia, and its inhabitants reclaimed the marshlands from the sea, and speculated on the origin of the soil on which they dwelt. The belief in the two creations of darkness and light, of confusion and law, may have arisen from the first contact between the teaching of Nippur and that of Eridu, and the endeavour to reconcile the antagonistic conceptions that underlay them, and the contrary systems of creation which they presupposed. The belief, finally, in generation as a motive force was part of the religious heritage that was common to the Semitic race. Semitic religion centred in a divine family which corresponded to the family of the worshipper on earth; the gods were fathers and mothers, and begat children like the human parents, after whom they were modelled. In so far, therefore, as the universe was divine, it too must have been evolved in the same fashion; it was only when it ceased to partake of the divine nature, and to assume its present form, that the god could deal with the materials of which it consisted, as the potter dealt with his clay; or could even create by the simple word of his mouth, like the man who similarly created the names of things, and therewith the things themselves which the names denoted. With the rise of philosophic speculation the process of divine generation became a process of emanation. The gods passed into mere symbols, or rather cosmic principles and elements; they retained, indeed, their double nature as male and female; but that was all. The human element that once was in them disappeared, the concrete became the abstract. Mummu Tiamât was explained as the world of immature ideas,—the simple “apprehension,” we might almost say, of the Hegelian philosophy,—and the first of the “Æons” of the later Gnosticism was thus started on its way. Babylonian religion had been narrowly local and anthropomorphic; under the guidance of a cosmological philosophy it tended to become an atheistic materialism. The poet who wrote the introduction to the Epic of the Creation could have had but little faith in the gods and goddesses he paraded on the scene; in the self-evolved universe of the schools there was hardly room even for the creator Merodach himself.

Lecture VII. The Sacred Books.

Every organised religion has had its sacred books. They have been as indispensable to it as an organised priesthood; indeed, Mohammedanism is a proof that the sacred book is more necessary to its existence than even a priesthood. The sacred book binds a religion to its past; it is the ultimate authority to which, in matters of controversy, appeal can be made, for it enshrines those teachings of the past upon which the faith of the present professes to rest. It remains fixed and permanent amid the perpetual flow and ebb of human things; the generations of men pass quickly away, rites and ceremonies change, the meaning of symbols is forgotten, and the human memory is weak and deceitful; but the written word endures, and the changes that pass over it are comparatively few and slight.

Babylonia possessed an organised religion, a religion that was official, and to a large extent the result of an artificial combination of heterogeneous elements; and it too, therefore, necessarily possessed its sacred books. But they differed essentially from the sacred books of ancient Egypt. The Egyptian lived for the future life rather than for the present, and his sacred books were Books of the Dead, intended for the guidance of the disembodied soul in its journey through the other world. The interest and cares of the Babylonian, on the contrary, were centred in the present life. The other world was for him a land of shadow and forgetfulness; a dreary world of darkness and semi-conscious existence to which he willingly closed his eyes. It was in this world that he was rewarded or punished for his deeds, that he had intercourse with the gods of light, and that he was, as is often said in the hymns, “the son of his god.” What he needed, accordingly, from his sacred books was guidance in this world, not in the world beyond the grave.

The sacred books of Babylonia thus fall into three classes. We have, first, the so-called magical texts or incantations, the object of which was to preserve the faithful from disease and mischief, to ward off death, and to defeat the evil arts of the witch and the sorcerer. Secondly, there are the hymns to the gods; and, lastly, the penitential psalms, which resemble in many respects the psalms of the Old Testament, and were employed not only by the individual, but also in seasons of public calamity or dismay. We owe the first discovery of this sacred literature to the genius of François Lenormant; he it was who first drew attention to it and characterised its several divisions. It was François Lenormant, moreover, who pointed out that its nearest analogue was the Hindu Veda, a brilliant intuition which has been verified by subsequent research.

Unfortunately our knowledge of it is still exceedingly imperfect. We are dependent on the fragmentary copies of it which have come from the library of Nineveh, and which resemble the torn leaves, mixed pell-mell together, that alone remain in some Oriental library from vanished manuscripts of the Bible and the Christian Fathers. Until the great libraries of Babylonia itself are thoroughly explored, our analysis and explanation of the sacred literature of the country must be provisional only; the evidence is defective, and the conclusions we draw from it must needs be defective as well.

Moreover, the purely ritual texts, which stand to the hymns in the same relation that the Atharva-Veda stands to the Ṛig-Veda, have as yet been but little examined. Their translation is difficult and obscure, and the ceremonies described in them are but half understood. The ritual, nevertheless, constituted an important part of the sacred literature, and its rubrics were regarded with at least as much reverence as the rubrics of the Anglican Prayer-book. Doubtless the actual words of which they consisted did not possess the same magical or divine power as those of the incantations and hymns, they were not—in modern language—verbally inspired, but they prescribed rites and actions which had quite as divine and authoritative an origin as the hymns themselves. They were, furthermore, the framework in which the hymns and spells were set; and they all formed together a single act of divine worship, the several parts of which could not be separated without endangering the efficacy of the whole.

That the incantations were the older portion of the sacred literature of Chaldæa, was perceived by Lenormant. They go back to the age of animism, to the days when, as yet, the multitudinous spirits and demons of Sumerian belief had not made way for the gods of Semitic Babylonia, or the sorcerer and medicine-man for a hierarchy of priests. Their language as well as their spirit is Sumerian, and the _zi_ or “spirit” of heaven and earth is invoked to repel the attack of the evil ghost, or to shower blessings on the head of the worshipper. They transport us into a world that harmonises but badly with the decorous and orderly realm of the gods of light; it is a world in which the _lil_ and the _utuk_, the _galla_ and the _ekimmu_, reign supreme, and little room seems to be left for the deities of the Semitic faith. The gods themselves, when they are introduced into it, wear a new aspect. Ea is no longer the creator and culture god, but a master of magic spells; and his son Asari displays his goodness towards mankind by instructing them how to remove the sorceries in which they have been involved, and the witcheries with which they are tormented.

But it must be borne in mind that the incantations do not all belong to the same age. The description I have just given holds good only of the oldest part of them. The Sumerian population continued to exist in Babylonia after the Semitic occupation of the country, and Sumerian animism continued to exist as well. By the side of the higher Semitic faith, with its gods and goddesses, its priesthood and its cult, the ancient belief in sorcery and witchcraft, in spells and incantations, and in the ghost-world of En-lil, flourished among the people. And as in India, where Brahmanism has thrown its protection over the older cults and beliefs of the native tribes, assimilating them as far as possible, or explaining them in accordance with the orthodox creed; so too in ancient Babylonia, the primeval animism of the people was tacitly recognised by the religion of the State, and given an official sanction. There was no declaration of hostility towards it such as was made by the religion of Israel; on the contrary, the old incantations were preserved and modernised, and the sanctity with which they had been invested allowed to remain unimpaired. At the same time, they were harmonised, so far as could be, with the official creed. The gods of the State religion were introduced into them, and to these gods appeal was made rather than to “the spirit of heaven” and “the spirit of earth.” The spirits and ghosts of the night existed, indeed, but from henceforth they had to be subservient to the deities of the official faith. It was no longer the medicine-man, but the priest of the Semitic deity, who recited the incantation for the suppliant and the sufferer.

We can almost trace the growth of what I will term the Book of Incantations down to the time when it assumed its final form. It was no Book, however, in the proper sense of the term, and it is doubtful whether all the collections which might have been comprised in it were ever combined together. But it is convenient to speak of it in the singular, so long as we remember that this is merely a mode of speech.

As a matter of fact, each great sanctuary seems to have had its own collection. These were added to from time to time; some of them were amalgamated together, or parts belonging to one collection were incorporated into another. Spells which had been found effective in warding off disease or preventing evil, were introduced into a collection which related to the same subject, whatever may have been their source, and the list of gods invoked was continually being enlarged, in the hope that some one at least among them might give the sufferer relief. The older collections were modified in accordance with the requirements of the State religion, and the animism that inspired them accommodated to the orthodox belief; while new collections came into existence which breathed the later Semitic spirit, and were drawn up under the supervision of the Babylonian priesthood. Hymns and even penitential psalms were embodied in them, like the verses of the Bible or the Quran, which are still used as charms in Christian and Mohammedan countries; and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the hymn that served merely as an incantation and the hymn that was chanted in the service of the gods. Indeed, incantatory formulæ are not unfrequently intermixed with the words of the hymn or psalm, producing that grotesque and embarrassing medley of exalted spiritual thought and stupid superstition which so often meets us in the religious literature of Babylonia. How late some of the collections are in the history of Babylonian religion, may be judged from the fact that a time came when the old Sumerian language was no longer considered necessary to ensure the efficacy of the charm, and collections of incantations were made in the Semitic language of later Babylonia.

Criticism will hereafter have to sift and distinguish these collections one from the other, and, above all, determine the earlier and later elements contained in each. At present such a task is impossible. Few, if any, of the collections have come down to us in a perfect state; there are many more, doubtless, which future research will hereafter bring to light; and as long as we are dependent solely on the copies made for the library of Nineveh, without being able to compare them with the older texts of the Babylonian libraries, the primary condition of scientific investigation is wanting. Nevertheless there are certain collections which stand out markedly from among the rest. They display features of greater antiquity, and the animism presupposed by them is but thinly disguised. It is comparatively easy to separate in them the newer and older elements, which have little in common with each other. Most of them point to Eridu as the source from which they have been derived, though there are others the origin of which is probably to be sought at Nippur.

In these older incantations the gods of the official cult are absent, except where their names have been violently foisted in at a later date, and their place is taken by the spirits or ghosts of early Sumerian belief. The _Zi_ or “spirit of the sky,” “the spirit of the earth,” “the spirit of Ansar and Kisar,” such are the superhuman powers that are invoked, and to whom the worshipper turns in his extremity. Even when we come across a name that is borne by one of the deities of the later Babylonian religion, we find that it is the name not of a god, but of a denizen of the ghost-world. “O spirit of Zikum, mother of Ea,” we read in one place; “O spirit of Nina, daughter of Ea”; “O spirit, divine lord of the mother-father of En-lil; O spirit, divine lady of the mother-father of Nin-lil”; “O spirit of the moon, O spirit of the sun, O spirit of the evening star!” There is as yet neither Bel of Nippur, nor Sin and Samas and Istar; the sorcerer knows only of the spirits that animate the universe, and bring good and evil upon mankind. Nothing can be more striking than the enumeration of the divine powers to whom the prayer is directed, in an incantation of which I have given the translation in my Hibbert Lectures (p. 450 sqq.)—

“Whether it be the spirit of the divine lord of the earths; or the spirit of the divine lady of the earths; or the spirit of the divine lord of the stars; or the spirit of the divine lady of the stars; or the spirit of the divine lord of progenies; or the spirit of the divine lady of progenies; or the spirit of the divine lord of ...; or the spirit of the divine lady of ...; or the spirit of the divine lord of the holy mound (Ea); or the spirit of the divine lady of the holy mound (Damkina); or the spirit of the divine lord of the dayspring of life; or the spirit of the divine lady of the dayspring of life; or the spirit of the divine chanter of the spirit-hosts (En-me-sarra); or the spirit of the divine chantress of the spirit-hosts.”(313)

Even the word “divine,” which I have used here in default of anything better, imports theological ideas into the texts which were really foreign to them. The original means nothing more than “superhuman” or perhaps “non-human”; the Sumerian term is _dimmer_, of which _dimme_, “a ghost,” and _dimmea_, “a spectre,” are but other forms; and the ideograph by which it is symbolised is an eight-rayed star.(314) “The divine lord” and “divine lady” of the incantation are but the _lil_ and its handmaid under another guise; they are merely the ghost-like spirits who display themselves at night in the points of light that twinkle and move through the sky.

The theologians of a later day amused themselves by cataloguing the Sumerian names of the spirits invoked in the ancient incantations, and transforming them into titles of the deities of the official pantheon. The same process had been followed in the Semitic translations which were added to the incantatory texts. The spirit of the sun became Samas, the spirit of the evening star became Istar. En-lil of Nippur was transmuted into Bel, and Nin-lil, the lady of the ghost-world, into Bilat or Beltis. The process was facilitated by the changes undergone at Eridu by the magical texts themselves, even before the days of Semitic influence. Maritime intercourse with other lands had already deeply affected the theology of Eridu; the crude animism of an earlier epoch had made way for the conception of a culture-god who taught men the elements of civilisation, and wrote books for their instruction. He was still a “spirit” rather than a god in the Semitic sense of the word, but he was a spirit who had emerged above the rest, who had acquired those family ties which formed the very foundation of civilised life, and to whom the creation of the world was due. Ea was not indeed a Baal, but he was already on the way to become a god in human form.

At the same time, both Ea and his son Asari still appear in animal shape. Asari is, it is true, “the benefactor of man,” but he is also “the mighty one of the princely gazelle,” and even “the gazelle” himself; while Ea is “the antelope of the deep,” or more simply “the antelope.”(315) At other times he is the “lord of the earth” which he has created, or the “king” of that “holy mound” of waters which rose up against the sky like a mountain, and behind which the sun appeared at dawn. The titles that he bears point unmistakably to Eridu. Here alone Ea was the creator of the earth, and here too, in the temple of the god, was a likeness of that “holy mound” whereon the future destinies of mankind were declared. The oldest incantations which have come down to us must have been composed at Eridu in the days of its Sumerian animism.

There are other divine or semi-divine names in them which tell the same tale. The pure waters which heal the sick and destroy the power of witchcraft are brought by the water-spirit Nin-akha-kudda, “the mistress of spells,” whom the theologians of a later time transformed into a daughter of Ea. Bau, too, the heifer of the city of Isin,(316) appears along with the water-spirit. Like Zikum, she was the mother of Ea and “the generatress of mankind,” and she shared with Asari the honours of the New Year’s festival. But Bau, it would seem, was not originally from Eridu. She had come there from a neighbouring city, and her presence in the incantations is a proof that even in these oldest monuments of a sacred literature we are still far from the beginnings of Babylonian religion.

At Nippur it was the ghosts and vampires, who had their habitation beneath the ground, that were objects of terror to the men who lived upon it. At Eridu the demons were rather the raging winds and storm-clouds which lashed the waters of Ea into fury, and seemed for a time to transform his kingdom into a chaos of lawless destruction. The fisherman perished in his bark, while the salt waves inundated the land and ravaged the fields of the husbandman. It was here, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, that the story of the great flood was perhaps first thrown into literary form, and that conception of the universe grew up which found its last expression in the legend of the struggle between Merodach and the forces of anarchy. At any rate it was here that the spirits of evil were pictured as the seven evil demons in whom the tempest was, as it were, incarnated—

“Seven are they, seven are they, in the hollow of the deep seven are they! Gleams (?) of the sky are those seven. In the hollow of the deep, in a palace, they grew up. Male they are not, female they are not. Destructive whirlwinds are they. Wife they have not, child they beget not; compassion and mercy they do not know. Prayer and supplication hear they not. Horses bred in the mountains are they. Unto Ea are they hostile. The throne-bearers of the gods are they. To work mischief in the street they settle in the highway. Evil are they, evil are they! Seven are they, seven are they, seven twice again are they!”

The seven evil spirits played an important part in the demonology of ancient Eridu, and echoes of it survive in the later literature. They were even transmuted into a god, and unified in his person under the name of “the divine seven”;(317) while the last month of the year, the stormy Adar, was dedicated to them. But in earlier days it needed all the wisdom of Ea to counteract their wicked devices. The fire-god himself was sent to drive them from their victims, and to disclose their nature and origin—

“In the mountain of the sunset, it is said, “those seven were born;” in the mountain of the sunrise those seven grew up; in the hollows of the earth they have their dwelling; on the high-places of the earth their names are proclaimed. As for them, in heaven and earth they have no dwelling, hidden is their name. Among the sentient gods they are not known. Their name in heaven and earth exists not. Those seven from the mountain of the sunset gallop forth, those seven in the mountain of the sunrise are bound to rest. In the hollows of the earth they set the foot; on the high-places of the earth they lift the neck. They by nought are known; in heaven and earth there is no knowledge of them.”

The hymn or incantation which thus describes them belongs to a late period in the history of Babylonian religion. The animism of primitive times has been replaced by the gods and goddesses of the later official faith. But the belief in the seven evil spirits still lingered, not only in the popular mind, but also in the ranks of the official hierarchy; and it was still remembered that they had been at the outset the spirits of the tempest, born in the clefts of the ravine or on the stormy mountain-top, from whence they issued like wild horses. The flame of sacrifice could alone avert their onset, and incantations were still composed under official sanction, with the help of which they might be driven away. The fact shows to how late an epoch the composition of spells and incantatory hymns may come down, even when the atmosphere they breathe is still that of Eridu, and the language in which they are written is still the sacred Sumerian. But there are collections of magical hymns and formulæ which are even yet later in date. The eight books of the so-called Maqlû or “Burning” collection are written throughout in Semitic Babylonian;(318) and though two out of the nine books of another collection—that of the Surpu or “Consuming Fever”—are bilingual, they have been clearly translated from the more original Babylonian into Sumerian, like the Latin exercises of to-day.(319) The official canon of the magical texts, in fact, was long in formation, and did not assume its final shape until the age of Khammurabi or later, even though its roots go back to the earliest period of Babylonia, to the age of animism and the medicine-man, when the Sumerian was still dominant in the land, and the Semitic nomad or trader was content to learn from him the elements of civilisation.

The official canon had been collected together from all sides. Most of the great sanctuaries of the country had probably contributed to it; in most, if not in all, of them there must have been magical rituals which had grown up under the care and supervision of the priesthood, and in which the old beliefs of the people were disciplined and harmonised with the dogmas of the State creed. Up to the last, one of the classes into which the priesthood was divided was known as the Êni or “Chanters,” whose name was derived from the Sumerian _ên_, “an incantation.” It is this word which is prefixed to the charms and incantatory hymns that constitute so integral a part of the magical texts; and though in course of time it came to denote little more than “recitation,” it was a recitation which possessed magical powers, and for which, therefore, a special training was necessary. A single mistake in pronunciation or intonation, a single substitution of one word for another, was sufficient to destroy the charm and necessitate the repetition of the ceremony. Some of the incantations had even to be recited in a whisper, like certain parts of the Roman missal; and a whole series or collection is accordingly termed the ritual of “the whispered charm,” reminding us of the passage in the Book of Isaiah where the prophet refers to “the wizards that peep and that mutter.”(320)

By the side of the “Book of Incantations”—whether it ever existed or not—there was another sacred book containing hymns to the gods. Here, again, it is more than doubtful whether the various collections of hymns compiled for use in the great sanctuaries of the country were ever combined together and incorporated into a single volume. The tendency to religious centralisation and unification in Babylonia was arrested before it could produce in religion what the seventy-two books of the “Illumination of Bel” were for astronomy and astrology, a compilation in which the observations of the past were collected and brought together.(321) Babylon, despite its political predominance, never succeeded in absorbing the religious cults of the more venerable sanctuaries of the country; the historical conservatism of the people was too strong, and even Nabonidos was forced to lavish gifts on the shrine of the sun-god at Sippara as well as upon that of Merodach at Babylon. The priesthood of Babylon were content to be chief among their peers; there was no monotheistic zeal to sweep away the rival temples, and the intensely localised character of Babylonian religion prevented the rise of monotheism. And without religious centralisation a common service-book and canon are not very probable. Perhaps, moreover, the hymns to the gods were too long in detaching themselves from the magical ritual, and too late in acquiring a sacred character of their own, to attain the same degree of divine authority as the incantations. Many of them are not only in Semitic Assyrian, but were composed as late as the reigns of the last Assyrian kings, while even those which are bilingual seem to have been in many cases the work of Semitic poets, the Sumerian text being a translation from the Semitic into the sacred language of theology.

At the same time, Lenormant was not far wrong in comparing the religious hymns of Chaldæa with those of the Rig-Veda. Like the latter, they belong to different periods of time, and comprise poems as unlike one another as war-songs and incantations and philosophic addresses to the gods. Moreover, as in the case of the incantations, there were collections of hymns addressed to the god or gods of the sanctuary in whose service they were used. Thus many of them belong to a collection that must have been made for the temple of the sun-god at Sippara or Larsa; all alike are addressed to the sun-god, the supreme judge of mankind; and the language that is used of him is the same in each. Other hymns celebrate the moon-god of Ur, while others belong to Nippur or to the sanctuary of Merodach at Babylon. The hymn to the god was as much a necessary portion of divine service as the incantation or the ceremonial rite.

The ritual texts tell us how and when it was employed. Thus on the festival of the New Year the service in the temple of Bel-Merodach was opened by a hymn in honour of his ark; and on the second of Nisan the priest was ordered to go down to the Euphrates at the beginning of the first hour of the night, and then, after putting on the prescribed vestment, and taking the waters of the river in his hand, to “enter into the presence of Bel,” and there recite a long hymn in praise of the god. The hymn closed with a prayer—

“Show mercy to thy city of Babylon; to Ê-Saggil thy temple incline thy face; grant the prayers of thy people the sons of Babylon!”

But there is yet another proof of the sacred character that attached itself to the hymns. Many of them were employed as incantations. Not only were they introduced into the magical texts, like the verses of the Bible when used as charms, but the magical element was inserted in the hymn itself. The address to the deity was combined with spells and incantations, producing a confused medley of spiritual expressions and grovelling superstition that is at once repellent and grotesque to our modern notions. The hymn, moreover, is prefaced by the word _ên_ or “incantation,” which makes its words as authoritative and unalterable as the rest of the magical ritual. The same sacredness that invests the latter invests also the hymn. The hymn, in short, is as much verbally inspired as the incantation or spell; indeed, between the hymn and the incantation no clear line of demarcation was drawn by the Babylonian, and it is questionable whether he would have recognised that there was any such line at all.

It was in the use that was made of them, and not in their essential nature, that the hymn to the god and the incantation differed from one another. And as animism preceded the official religion of Babylonia, and the belief in spirits preceded the worship of the gods, so too did the incantation precede the hymn. The sacredness that was acquired by the hymn was originally reflected from the incantation; it was not the contents of the hymn, but the actual words of which it was composed, that gave it its sacred and authoritative character, and consecrated its employment by the priestly caste.

It is accordingly with good reason that I have described the hymns, like the incantations proper, as verbally inspired. The inspiration lay in the words more than in the sense they conveyed; an error of pronunciation was more fatal than a misunderstanding of their meaning. As long as the words were recited correctly, it mattered little whether either priest or people understood precisely what they meant.

I have already in an earlier lecture quoted some lines from the hymn to the moon-god which was probably composed for the services in the great temple of Ur. The hymns in honour of the sun-god are much more numerous, and formed part of a collection which seems to have been made by the priests of Bit-Uri, the temple of the sun-god at Sippara. The sun-god they celebrate is the incorruptible “judge of mankind,” the rewarder of the innocent and the punisher of the guilty, who sees all that is done on earth, and acts towards those who call upon him with justice and mercy.

“O lord, we read in one of them,(322) “illuminator of the darkness, opener of the sickly face,” merciful god, who setteth up the fallen, who helpeth the weak, unto thy light look the great gods, the spirits of earth all gaze upon thy face. Tongues in unison like a single word thou directest, smiting their heads they look to the light of the mid-day sun. Like a wife thou standest, glad and gladdening. Thou art their light in the vault of the far-off heaven. Thou art the object of their gaze in the broad earth. Men far and near behold thee and rejoice!”

The language of another hymn is in a similar strain—

“Direct the law of the multitudes of mankind! Thou art eternal righteousness in the heavens! Thou art of faithful judgment towards all the world! Thou knowest what is right, thou knowest what is wrong. O sun-god, righteousness hath lifted up its foot! O sun-god, wickedness hath been cut down as with a knife! O sun-god, the minister of Anu and Bel art thou! O sun-god, the judge supreme of heaven and earth art thou!

O lord of the living creation, the pitiful one (who directest) the world! O sun-god, on this day purify and illumine the king the son of his god! Whatever worketh evil in his body let it be taken away! Cleanse him like the goblet of the Zoganes! Illumine him like a cup of ghee; like the copper of a polished tablet let him be made bright! Release him from the ban!”(323)

The last words illustrate that strange mixture of spiritual thought and the arts of the sorcerer to which I have more than once alluded. The hymns to the sun-god were not yet emancipated from the magical beliefs and ceremonies in which they had had their origin; they were still incantations rather than hymns in the modern sense of the word. The collection to which they belonged must have been used by the class of priests known as “Chanters” or “Enchanters,” who had succeeded to the sorcerers and medicine-men of the pre-Semitic past; and the fact explains how it is that in many of them we have an alternating antiphonal service, portions of them being recited by the priest and other portions by the worshipper. In some instances, indeed, the verses seem to have been alternately intoned by the priest and the assistant ministers, like the canticles or psalms in the Christian worship of to-day. The practice had its origin in the magical ritual, where the sorcerer first recited the incantation, and then called upon the individual to repeat it once or oftener after him. It is another proof of the intimate connection that existed between the hymns and the incantations out of which they had sprung; like the Veda or the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of ancient Chaldæa mixed magic and the spiritual worship of the gods together in a confusion which seems to us difficult to understand.

It was the same with the penitential psalms which constitute the third division of the sacred literature of Babylonia. In many respects they resemble the psalms of the Old Testament. Like them they are intended for public use, in spite of their individualistic form; the individual represents the community, and at times it is the national calamity and the national sin to which reference is made. After the revolt and reconquest of Babylon by Assur-bani-pal, when the city was still polluted by the corpses of those who had perished by famine or the sword, the prophets(324) ordered that its shrines and temple-roads should be purified, that its “wrathful gods and angry goddesses” should be “appeased by prayers and penitential psalms,” and that then, and only then, the daily sacrifices in the temples should be offered once more.(325) Doubtless the penitential psalms were in the first instance the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of the individual; it was his sufferings that they depicted, and his sins that they deplored; but as soon as they had been introduced into the worship of the temple, and become part of the public cult, the individual element in them fell into the background, and in the sins and sufferings of the individual both priest and laity saw those of the whole community.

Like the Hebrew psalms, again, they express the belief that sin is the cause of suffering and calamity, and that it can be removed by penitence and prayer to the offended deity. But whereas the Hebrew monotheist knew of one God only who could inflict punishment and listen to the repentant words of the sinner, the Babylonian polytheist was distracted by the uncertainty as to what particular divinity he had offended, and to whom, therefore, his penitent appeal should be addressed. In the penitential psalms, accordingly, it is the vague and general “god” and “goddess” that are invoked, rather than a particular deity. It is only occasionally that the names of special gods are introduced, and then a long list of them is sometimes given, in the hope that among them might be the divinity whose anger had been excited, and whose wrath the sufferer was eager to appease.

Sin, it must be remembered, in the eyes of the Babylonian included a good deal more than moral wrong-doing. There were ritual sins as well as moral sins, offences against the ceremonial law as well as against the moral or spiritual code. The sin was not unfrequently involuntary, and the sufferer did not even know in what particular respect he had offended against the divine laws. It may have been the eating of forbidden food, such as that which drove Adam and Eve from the sinless garden of Paradise. Or, again, it may have been a real sin, a sin of thought and word committed in the secrecy of the heart. “Was he frank in speaking,” it is asked in a confession which is put into the mouth of a suppliant, “but false in heart? Was it ‘yes’ with his mouth, but ‘no’ in his heart?” So far as the punishment was concerned, little distinction was made between moral and ceremonial sin; both were visited alike, and the sin of ignorance was punished as severely as the sin that was committed with deliberate intent.

The recitation of the penitential psalms was accompanied by fasting. “Food I have not eaten,” the penitent is made to say, “pure water I have not drunk.” And, as in the case of the incantations and hymns, the recitation was antiphonal. Portions of the psalms were recited by the priest, who acted as the mediator between the penitent and the offended deity; other portions by the penitent himself, or a choir of attendant ministers. The ideas which had been associated with the use of the incantations still dominated the public cult. Indeed, the penitential psalm sometimes very nearly approaches the incantation in character. On the one side, it is difficult to distinguish from the psalm a confession like that from which I quoted just now, and which nevertheless forms part of a magical ritual; on the other side, the psalm itself at times degenerates into the language of magic. Babylonia never shook off the influence of those collections of incantations which constituted its first sacred book, and gave it its first conception of a divinely-inspired literature; up to the last the descendants of the old medicine-man occupied a recognised place in the priestly hierarchy, and the “Chanter” and “Augur” stood on the same footing as the “prophet” and the “priest.”

Perhaps it was the same influence which demanded that the language of the penitential psalm should be the extinct Sumerian. That some of the psalms went back to Sumerian times and were composed by Sumerians in their own tongue, I have little doubt; but it seems also unquestionable that many of the psalms which have come down to us were of Semitic origin, the Sumerian version attached to them being really a translation of the original Semitic text. At all events, penitential psalms were written in later times in Assyria, whose authors either did not care or did not know how to provide them with a Sumerian text. It may be that they did not possess the same sacred authority as the older psalms, but, like the latter, they were used in the public services of the northern kingdom with the authorisation of the king. The king in Assyria, it must be remembered, exercised the influence that was wielded by the priesthood in the southern kingdom. The Assyrian psalms, in fact, were like our modern hymns; the sanctity that surrounded the older penitential psalms of Babylonia was indeed denied them, but they better suited the newer age and the character of the Assyrian people, and there was no omnipotent priesthood to forbid their introduction into the public cult. They stood, it is true, outside the sacred canon of Babylonia, in the sense that no dogmas of religion could be built on them, and it is probable that they never received the sanction of the Babylonian priests; but for all that the spirit they breathe is that of the older psalms; and had the Assyrian empire lasted longer, it is possible that they too might have become a sacred book.

I will conclude my lecture with one of the penitential psalms, which, we are told, might be addressed “to any god”—

“The heart of my lord is wroth; may it be appeased! May the god that I know not be pacified! May the goddess whom I know not be pacified! May the god I know and (the god) I know not be pacified! May the goddess I know and (the goddess) I know not be pacified! May the heart of my god be appeased! May the heart of my goddess be appeased! May the god and the goddess I know and I know not be pacified! May the god (who has smitten me be pacified)! May the goddess (who has smitten me be pacified)! The sin that (I sinned) I knew not; the sin (that I committed I knew not). The word of blessing (may my god pronounce upon me); a name of blessing (may the god I know and I know not) record for me! The word of blessing (may the goddess pronounce upon me)! Food I have not eaten, pure water I have not drunk. An offence against my god unknowingly have I committed; an offence against my goddess unknowingly I have wrought. O lord, my sins are many, my transgressions are great! O my god, my sins are many, my transgressions are great! O my goddess, my sins are many, my transgressions are great! O god whom I know and whom I know not, my sins are many, my transgressions are great! O goddess whom I know and whom I know not, my sins are many, my transgressions are great! The sin that I sinned I knew not, the transgression I committed I knew not. The offence I committed I knew not, the offence that I wrought I knew not. The lord in the wrath of his heart has regarded me; god has visited me in the anger of his heart; the goddess has been violent against me, and has put me to grief. The god whom I know and whom I know not has oppressed me, the goddess whom I know and whom I know not has brought sorrow upon me. I sought for help, and none took my hand; I wept, and none stood at my side; I cried aloud, and there was none that heard me. I am in trouble and hiding, and dare not look up. To my god, the merciful one, I turn myself, I utter my prayer, the feet of my goddess I kiss and water with tears. To the god whom I know and whom I know not I utter my prayer. O lord, look upon (me; receive my prayer)! O goddess, look upon (me; receive my prayer)! O goddess whom I know (and whom I know not, receive my prayer)! How long, O god, (must I suffer)? How long, O goddess, (shall thy face be turned from me)? How long, O god whom I know and whom I know not, shall the anger (of thy heart continue)? How long, O goddess whom I know and whom I know not, shall the wrath of thy heart be unappeased? Mankind is made to wander, and there is none that knoweth. Mankind, as many as have a name, what do they know? Whether he shall have good or ill, there is none that knoweth. O lord, cast not away thy servant! Overflowing with tears, take him by the hand! The sins I have sinned, turn to a blessing; the transgressions I have committed may the wind carry away! Strip off my manifold transgressions as a garment. O my god, seven times seven are my transgressions; forgive my sins! O my goddess, seven times seven are my transgressions; forgive my sins! O god whom I know and whom I know not, seven times seven are my transgressions; forgive my sins! O goddess whom I know and whom I know not, seven times seven are my transgressions; forgive my sins! Forgive my sins, and let me humble myself before thee. May thy heart be appeased as the heart of a mother who has borne children! May it be appeased as that of a mother who has borne children, as that of a father who has begotten them!”

Lecture VIII. The Myths And Epics.

A lecture on the myths of Babylonia may perhaps seem out of place in a course, the subject of which is Babylonian religion. But religion has its mythology as well as its theology, and sometimes the mythology has had a good deal to do with moulding or even creating its theology. Moreover, the myths of Babylonia were intimately connected with its worship of the gods. They all related, so far as we know, to the gods and spirits, or else, to what Greek theology would have called heroes and demi-gods. They embody religious beliefs and practices; they contain allusions to local cults; above all, they not unfrequently reflect the popular conception of the divine.

Only we must beware of basing theological conclusions on their unsupported evidence. They have come to us in a literary form, and students of folk-lore know how little trustworthy, even for the purposes of the folk-lorist, a tale is which has undergone literary remodelling. It is difficult to distinguish in it what is peculiar to the individual author or the literary circle in which he moves, and what is really the belief of the people or the traditional heritage of the past. In fact, all mythology, whether literary or otherwise, suffers from the mixture within it of old and modern ideas. The old ideas may be preserved in it like the fossils in a geological formation, or they may have been coloured and explained away in accordance with the conceptions of a later age; but in either case they are mingled with the beliefs and notions of after generations, which our ignorance necessarily prevents us from separating with the requisite care. In dealing with the history of religion, therefore, we ought to treat the language of a literary myth with extreme caution, and refrain from drawing any far-reaching inferences from the statements we find in it.

This is more especially true of the literary epics of ancient Babylonia. They seem to have been numerous; at all events fragments of a good many have been saved for us out of the wreckage of the past. But they belong for the most part to the same period, the age of national revival which began with the reign of Khammurabi, and continued for several centuries after his death. It is possible that Sin-liqi-unnini, the author of the great Epic of Gilgames, was a contemporary of Abraham; the story of Adapa, the first man, was already in existence, and had become a standard classic, when the Tel el-Amarna letters were written in the fifteenth century B.C. Behind all these poems lay a long-preceding period in which the myths and legends they embody had taken shape and formed the subject of numberless literary works. The Epic of Gilgames is, for instance, but the final stage in the literary development of the tales and myths of which it is composed; older poems, or parts of poems, have been incorporated into it, and the elements of which it consists are multiform and of various origin. The story of the Deluge, which constitutes the eleventh book, has been foisted into it by an almost violent artifice, and represents a combination of more than one of its many versions which were in circulation in Babylonia. When the early libraries of the country have been explored, we shall know better than we do now how far the story in the form we have of it in the Epic is original, and how far the author has freely borrowed from his predecessors, using their language or combining their work.

As a rule, the subject of a Babylonian poem is either some single god or some single hero. When the god or hero is merely a central figure around whose adventures those of other gods or heroes are made to revolve, the poem becomes an Epic. It still retains its mythological shape, and the world in which it moves is a world of supernatural powers, a divine fairyland in which the gods play the part of men. But there is none of the dull and crass euhemerism which distinguishes the Egyptian tales of the gods. The gods do not become mere men with enlarged human powers; they remain divine, even though their actions are human and the stage on which they move is human also. It was the pantheism of the Egyptian, in conjunction with the deification of the Pharaoh, that made him rationalise the stories of his gods; in Babylonia there was no such temptation; each deity retained his individual character, and from the outset he had worn the likeness of a man. But it was a likeness only, behind which the divinity revealed itself, though the likeness necessarily caused the revelation to be made through individual features, clearly cut and sharply defined. Bel was no human king possessed of magical powers, who had once sat on the throne of Babylon; he remained the god who could, it is true, display himself at times to his faithful worshippers, but whose habitation was in the far-off heavens, from which he surveyed and regulated the actions of mankind. The gods of Babylonian mythology still belonged to heaven and not to earth, and its heroes are men and not humanised gods.

I have already referred to the story of the first man, Adapa, and his refusal of the gift of immortality. The story, as we have it, has received a theological colouring; like the narrative of the Fall in the Book of Genesis, it serves to explain why death has entered the world. Man was made in the likeness of the gods, and the question therefore naturally arose why, like them, he should not be immortal. The answer was given, at any rate by the priests of Eridu, in the legend of Adapa and his journey to the sky.

There was yet another story which illustrated the punishment of human presumption,—the attempt of man to be as a god,—and is thus a parallel to the story of the tower of Babel. It is the legend of Etana and the eagle, who tempts the hero to ascend with him to the highest heavens and there visit the abodes of the gods. Borne accordingly on the breast of the bird, Etana mounts upwards. At the end of two hours the earth looks to them like a mere mountain, the sea like a pool. Another four hours and “the sea has become like a gardener’s ditch.” At last they reach “the heaven of Anu”; but even there they refuse to stay. Higher still they ascend to the heaven of Istar, so that the sea appears to them “like a small bread-basket.” But before they can reach their destination the destined penalty overtakes the presumptuous pair. The eagle’s wings fail him, and he falls through space, and both he and his burden are dashed to the ground.

With this story of Etana there has been coupled a legend, or rather fable, of the eagle itself, which the mutilated state of our copies of it renders extremely obscure. The eagle had devoured the young of the serpent, who accordingly appealed to the sun-god, the judge of all things, for justice. By the sun-god’s advice the serpent creeps into the carcase of a dead ox, and there, when the eagle comes to feed upon the putrifying flesh, seizes his enemy, strips him of his feathers, and leaves him to die of hunger and thirst. This must have happened after the fall of the eagle from heaven; and we may therefore conjecture that, while his human companion was killed, like Icarus, by the fall, the punishment of the eagle was deferred. But it came finally; not even the most powerful of the winged creation could venture with impunity into the heaven of the gods.

While the celestial seat of Istar was beyond the reach of man, Istar herself sought Tammuz, the bridegroom of her youth, in the underground realm of Hades, in the hope that she might give him to drink of the waters of life which gushed up under the throne of the spirits of the earth, and so bring him back once more to life and light. The poem which told of her descent into Hades was sung at the yearly festival of Tammuz by the women, who wept for his untimely death. Like Baldyr, the youngest and most beautiful of the gods, he was cut off in the flower of his youth, and taken from the earth to another world. But while the myth embodied in the poem, and illustrated by numberless engraved seals, makes him descend into Hades, the older belief of Eridu, where he had once been a water-spirit,—“the son of the spirit of the deep,”—transferred him to the heaven above, where, along with Nin-gis-zida, “the lord of the upright post,” he served as warder of the celestial gate. In my Hibbert Lectures I have dealt so fully with the story of Tammuz in the various forms it assumed, as well as with the myth of Istar’s pursuit of him in the world below, that I need not dwell upon it now. All I need do is to insist upon the caution with which we should build upon it theories about the Babylonian’s conception of the other world, and the existence he expected to lead after death.

The description of Hades with which the poem begins was borrowed from some older work. We meet with it again almost word for word in what is probably one of the books of the Epic of Gilgames. The fact illustrates the way in which the poets and epic-writers of Babylonia freely borrowed from older sources, and how the classical works of Chaldæa were built up out of earlier materials. Perhaps if reproached with plagiarism, their authors would have made the same answer as Vergil, that they had but picked out the pearls from the dunghill of their predecessors. At all events the description of Hades is striking, though it must be remembered that it represents only one of the many ideas that were entertained of it in Babylonia—

“To the land from which there is no return, the home of [darkness], Istar, the daughter of Sin, [turned] her mind, yea, the daughter of Sin set her mind [to go]; to the house of gloom, the dwelling of Irkalla, to the house from which those who enter depart not, the road from whose path there is no return; to the house where they who enter are deprived of light; a place where dust is their nourishment, clay their food; the light they behold not, in thick darkness they dwell; they are clad like bats in a garb of wings; on door and bolt the dust is laid.”

Through the seven gates of the infernal regions did Istar descend, leaving at each some one of her adornments, until at last, stripped and helpless, she stood before the goddess of the underworld. There no mercy was shown her; the plague-demon was bidden to smite her with manifold diseases, and she was kept imprisoned in Hades like the ordinary dead. But while the goddess of love thus lay bound and buried, things in this upper world fell into confusion. Neither men nor cattle produced offspring, and the gods in heaven took counsel what should be done. Ea accordingly created an androgyne, to whom the name was given “Bright is his light.” Before him the gates of Hades opened, and the darkness within them was lighted up. The infernal goddess was forced to obey the orders of heaven; and though she cursed the messenger with deadly imprecations, the spirits of the earth were seated on their golden throne while Istar was sprinkled with the water of life, and she then returned once more to the world of light.

Ereskigal, the goddess of Hades, forms the subject of yet another poem, fragments of which were found at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt, where the poem had been used as a text-book for the students of the Babylonian language and script. The poem recounts how she refused to come to a feast which the gods had prepared in heaven, and how Nergal invaded her dominions, broke through the gates that shut them in, and, seizing Ereskigal by the hair, dragged her from her throne. But she begged for mercy, and Nergal consented to be her husband, and to rule with her over the realm of the dead. The “tablet of wisdom” was transferred to him, and she became a Semitic Baalat, the mere reflection of her “lord.” The Sumerian “queen of Hades” gave place to a Semitic Bel.

The “tablet of wisdom” was distinct from the “tablets of destiny,” which gave their possessor a foreknowledge of the future course of events. The possession of the latter implied supreme rule over gods and men; it brought with it the right to be “Bel” in the fullest sense of the word. Like the Urim and Thummim, they were hung upon the breast; and in the Epic of the Creation, Tiamât is described as delivering them to her demon husband Kingu, who thereby became the acknowledged ruler of the world. The victory of Merodach over the powers of darkness transferred to him the mystic tablets; from henceforth he was the Bel who had made, and who directed, the existing universe; and once each year, at the New Year’s festival, he sat enthroned above the mercy-seat in his temple at Babylon, declaring the destinies of the coming year. But before the tablets were given to Bel-Merodach of Babylon, they had belonged to the older Bel of Nippur and Dur-ili; and a myth told how Zu, the storm-bird, had stolen them while Bel was “pouring forth the pure water and mounting his throne” at the beginning of day. “I will take,” he had said, “the divine tablets of destiny, even I; the laws(326) of all the gods will I decree; my throne will I establish and issue my commands, and direct all the angels (of heaven).” The thief flew with his spoil to Mount Sâbu; and Anu called in vain upon his brother gods to pursue and smite him, and recover the stolen treasure. It was only at last by the help of stratagem that the nest of Zu was found, and the tablets restored to Bel.

A myth of more transparent meaning is that which told of the ravages wrought in land after land by Urra, the Pestilence. The description of the plague-god reminds us of that angel of pestilence whom David saw with his hand stretched forth over Jerusalem. No moral considerations moved him; just and unjust, the sinner and the innocent, were alike involved in a common destruction. Babylon was the first to be smitten, then Erech; and Merodach and Istar mourned vainly over the ruin of their people. Then Isum, the angel-messenger of Urra, was sent on a longer mission. The pestilence spread over the whole civilised world; Syria and Assyria, Elamite and Bedâwin, Kurd and Akkadian equally suffered. The vineyards of Amanus and the Lebanon were rooted up, and those who cultivated them perished from the earth. For “unnumbered years” the scourge lasted, for Urra had “planned evil because of former wickedness,” and it was long before his rage was appeased, and the world returned to its normal state.

Similarly transparent is the story of the assault of the seven evil spirits upon the moon, resulting in its eclipse and threatened extinction. En-lil in despair sends his messenger, the fire-god, to Ea for advice and help, which are accordingly given, and the moon-god is saved. The poem, however, is of a much older date than those we have hitherto been considering. It goes back to the time when magic still held a foremost place in the official religion of Babylonia; when Aṡari, the son of Ea, had not as yet become Bel-Merodach of Babylon; and when the cult of Ea had not been obscured by those of younger deities. In fact, it forms part of one of the incantation texts, and is described as the sixteenth book of the series on evil spirits. But the divine triads already make their appearance in it; Ea does not stand alone, but shares his powers with En-lil and Anu, while below them is the triad of Sin, Samas, and Istar. We may look upon the story as belonging to the age which saw the transformation of Sumerian animism into the syncretic State religion of later days; the Semitic gods are there, but they still retain in part the functions which distinguished them when they were “spirits” and nothing more.

Between the legend of the assault upon the moon-god and the Epic of Gilgames the distance is great. Centuries of thought and development intervene between them, and there is a difference not only in degree, but also in kind. While one reminds us of the legends of Lapps or Samoyeds, the other finds its parallel in the heroic tales of Greece. Gilgames is a hero in the Greek sense of the term; he is not a god, at least for the poet of the Epic, even though he lived like Achilles and Odysseus in days when the gods took part in visible form in the affairs of men. So far as we know, it is the masterpiece of Babylonian epical literature,—a proof that however deficient the pure-blooded Semite may have been in epical and mythological genius, the mixed race of Babylonia was in this respect the rival of the Greek. Like the story of the Trojan War, the story of Gilgames attracted to it epical and mythological elements from all sides, and became a veritable treasure-house of Babylonian mythology.

Its author divided it into twelve books. Long ago it was noticed that the arrangement has an astronomical basis, and that the adventures of the hero described in some at least of the books are made to correspond with the current names of the months of the year. Thus the love and revenge of Istar are the subject of the sixth book, answering to the name of the sixth month, that of “the mission of Istar”; while the episode of the Deluge is introduced into the eleventh book, where it fitly corresponds with the eleventh month Adar, “the month of the curse of rain.” It is true that the correspondence between the subject of the book and the name of the month cannot be traced in all cases, but it must be remembered that each month had many names, especially in the age of Khammurabi, and that the poet would have more especially in his mind the religious festivals which distinguished the months of the year. As was pointed out by Sir H. C. Rawlinson, he must have regarded Gilgames, if not as a solar hero, at all events as a representative of the sun-god. Not only is the Epic divided into twelve books, but in the seventh, when the summer solstice is passed and the year begins to wane, the hero is smitten with a sore disease. It is not until the twelfth and last book is reached, that, after bathing in the waters of the ocean which encircles the world, he is healed of his sickness, and restored once more to health and strength.

But the solar character of Gilgames did not originally belong to him. His name, like those of most of the Babylonian heroes, had come down from Sumerian times, when as yet the gods did not exist, and the world of living things was divided between “spirits” and men.(327) And Gilgames was a man, the creation of the goddess Aruru, whose original birthplace seems to have been Marad, and of whom a tale was told which may be the prototype of that of Akrisios and Perseus.(328) He was the Hêraklês of Babylonia, the embodiment of human strength, who saves his country from its foes, and destroys the monstrous beasts that infest it,—a mighty prince, though not an actual king. There is no reason why he should not have been like Cyrus, a historical personage round whose name and deeds myths afterwards gathered; an early inscription recording the restoration of the wall of Erech states that it had been originally built by the deified Gilgames.(329)

The Epic begins with a description of his rule at Erech, “the seat” of his power. Between him and the inhabitants of the city there seems to have been little goodwill. He had not left, they complained, the son to his father or the wife to her husband. It may be that the legend contains a germ of historical truth, and goes back to the days when Erech was still a battleground between Sumerian and Semite.(330) At any rate the gods, we are told, heard the cry of the people, and Aruru was instructed to create a rival to Gilgames, who might overcome him in the contest of strength. The goddess accordingly kneaded clay with her hands, and made it in the form of Ea-bani, half-man and half-beast. His body was covered with hair; “he knew neither kin nor country”; “with the gazelles he ate the grass” of the field, and “satisfied his thirst with the cattle.” On the seals he is represented as a satyr with a goat’s legs and human head.

Vainly “the Huntsman” endeavoured to capture him. Ea-bani broke through the nets that were laid for him; and it was only when one of the courtesans of Istar was sent to entice him that he yielded to the temptation, and left his gazelles and cattle to lie with her seven nights. When once more he turned back to them, they fled from him in terror; he had become a man, knowing good and evil, and between him and the brute beasts there was nothing more in common. He listened accordingly to the courtesan, and went with her to Erech, “the seat of Gilgames, the giant in strength, who like a wild ox is stronger than the strongest men.” There Gilgames had dreamed three dreams relating to him; and Ea-bani, on hearing the interpretation of them, gave up his design of wrestling with the hero, and became instead his fast friend and ally.

The third book of the Epic describes the expedition of the two heroes against the tyrant Khumbaba, whose home was in the cedar-forest of Elam. They found a way into its magical depths, gazing in wonder at the height of the trees, and beholding the mountain of the cedars, “the mystic” seat of the gods, the shrine of Irnini; “before the mountain the cedars lifted up their luxuriant foliage; deep was their shadow and full of pleasaunce.” Khumbaba was overcome and slain; but Gilgames once more dreamed a dream, wherein the heavens thundered, the lightning flashed, and the earth shook, and which portended disaster to Ea-bani and his friend.

The sixth and following books describe how the dream was fulfilled. Istar saw and loved Gilgames in the strength of his manhood, and asked him to be her bridegroom. “If thou wilt be my husband,” she declared—

“I will let thee ride in a chariot of lapis-lazuli and gold, thou shalt harness each day great mules (to thy yoke); the odours of cedar shall enter our house ... Kings, lords, and princes [shall bow] at thy feet; [the increase] of mountain and plain shall they bring thee in tribute.”

Gilgames, however, rejected the offer of the goddess in scorn, and taunted her with her fickleness and cruelty and the miserable end of all who had loved her in the past—

“Tammuz, the spouse of thy youth, thou ordainest weeping for him year by year. The bright-coloured wood-pigeon didst thou love; thou didst smite him and break his wings; in the woods he sits and cries, ‘O my wings!’ Thou didst love a lion perfect in might; seven times seven didst thou dig for him a pit. Thou didst love a horse, glorious in battle; whip and spur and bridle didst thou decree for him. Fourteen hours didst thou make him gallop; weariness and thirst didst thou lay upon him; for his mother, the goddess Silili, thou ordainest weeping. Thou didst love the shepherd Tabulu, who poured out the salt continually for thee; day by day did he slay for thee the sucklings. Thou didst smite him, and change him into a wolf. His own shepherd-boys drove him away, and his own dogs bit his flesh. Thou didst love Isullanu, the gardener of thy father, who was ever bringing thee fruit; day by day he made bright thy dish; thou didst lift thine eyes to him, and speak softly to him: ‘Isullanu mine, let us eat the gourds together; put forth thine hand and touch one ...’ Isullanu answered her: ‘Of me what requirest thou? Has my mother not baked, have I not eaten, that I should eat such food? Thorns and thistles are hidden therein’ (?). When thou didst hear these his words, thou didst smite him, and change him into a column (?), and didst plant him in the midst of [the garden?].”

Istar flew to her father Anu in heaven, and demanded from him vengeance upon Gilgames for the slight he had put upon her. Accordingly a monstrous bull was created, which ravaged the country, and threatened the life of Gilgames himself. But Gilgames was more than a match for the monster. With the help of Ea-bani the bull was slain, and its huge horns carried in triumph through the streets of Erech; while Istar stood in impotent rage on the walls of the city, lamenting the death of the bull, and calling on her harlot priestesses to weep over it with her.

But the death of “the divine bull” had evil consequences for the two heroes. The curse of Istar falls upon them; Gilgames himself is smitten with a grievous sickness, and Ea-bani dies after lingering in pain for full twelve days. Gilgames is inconsolable; vainly he protests against the law of death which carries away the strong equally with the weak, the hero equally with the common man. The ninth book thus begins—

“Gilgames for his friend Ea-bani weeps bitterly and lies outstretched upon the ground. “’Shall I not die like Ea-bani? Grief has entered my body; I fear death, and lie outstretched upon the ground.’ ”

Accordingly he determines to visit Xisuthros,(331) the hero of the Deluge, who dwelt beyond the river of death, whither he had been translated without dying, and learn from him the secret of immortality.

The road was long and difficult; mortal man had never trodden it before. But there was divine blood in Gilgames; and as the Greek Hêraklês forced his way to Hades, so he too forced his way beyond the limits of our human world. First he had to pass the twin mountains of Mas, in the northern desert of Arabia, which guard the daily rising and setting of the sun, whose summit touches the “zenith of heaven,” while “their breast reaches downwards to Hades.” Men with the bodies of scorpions guarded the gateway of the sun, the horror of whose aspect was “awesome,” and whose look “was death.” But “the scorpion-man” and his “wife” recognised that the stranger was partly divine, and he was allowed to pass in safety through the open doors. Once beyond them he entered a region of thick darkness. For the space of twelve double hours he groped his way through this land without light, when suddenly he emerged from it into the bright light of day. Here grew a marvellous tree, whose fruit was the precious turquoise(332) and lapis-lazuli, which hung from it like clusters of grapes.

At last Gilgames reached the shore of the ocean, which, like a serpent, encircles the earth. Here Ṡiduri, or Ṡabitum “the lady of Saba,”(333) sat upon “the throne of the sea.” But she locked the gate of her palace, and forbade him to cross the ocean; none had ever passed over it except the sun-god in his nightly voyage from west to east. Once more, however, the element of divinity that was in Gilgames prevailed; Ṡabitum acknowledged that he was more than a mere man, and allowed his right to seek his ancestor beyond the river of death. Arad-Ea, the pilot of Xisuthros, was summoned; trees were cut and fashioned into a boat, and for a month and fifteen days Gilgames and his pilot pursued their voyage over the sea. Then “on the third day” they entered “the waters of death.” The hero was bidden to cling to the rudder and to see that the deadly water did not touch his hand. Twelve strokes of the oar were needed before the rapids were safely passed, and the boat reached the shore that lay beyond the realm of death. Here Gilgames beheld Xisuthros “afar off” “at the mouth of the rivers.” At once he communicated to him the object of his journey: how and why had Xisuthros escaped the universal law of death? The answer is contained in the eleventh book of the Epic, which recounts the story of the great Deluge.

Ever since its discovery by George Smith in 1872, the Babylonian story of the Deluge, which has thus been introduced into the Epic of Gilgames, has attracted the special attention of both scholars and the public. On the one side it agrees with the story of the Deluge handed down to us by the copyists of the Chaldæan historian Berossos, and so is a witness to his trustworthiness; on the other side, its parallelism with the account of the Deluge in the Book of Genesis is at once striking and startling. But the version of the story embodied by Sin-liqi-unnini in his Epic was but one out of many that were current in Babylonia. We have a fragment of another which so closely resembles that of the Epic, as to have been long believed to form part of it; indeed, it is possible that it comes from a variant copy of the Epic itself. Fragments of another version have lately been found by Dr. Scheil in a Babylonian tablet which goes back to the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi.(334) Even the version contained in the Epic seems to be a combination of two earlier ones, or rather to be based upon at least two different versions of the legend. The story, in fact, must have been of immemorial antiquity in Babylonia; Xisuthros and his ship are depicted upon some of the earliest seals, and Babylonian chronology drew a sharp line of division between the kings who had reigned before and after the Flood. In the Epic Xisuthros is a native of Surippak on the Euphrates, but the story must originally have grown up at Eridu on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Like the story of the struggle with Tiamât, it typifies the contest between the anarchic elements of storm and flood and that peaceful expanse of water in which the fishermen of Eridu plied their trade, and out of which the culture-god had ascended. It is significant that up to the last it was En-lil of Nippur who was represented as sending the Flood that destroyed mankind, while Xisuthros was saved by Ea.

The Babylonian story of the Deluge has been so often translated and is so well known, that there is no need for me to repeat it here. It is sufficient to note that Xisuthros, like Noah, owed his preservation to his piety. In the final scene, when Bel (En-lil) is enraged that any one should have escaped from the destruction he had brought upon mankind, Ea pacifies him with the words: “Punish the sinner for his sins, punish the transgressor for his transgressions; be merciful that he be not [utterly] cut off, be long-suffering that he be not [rooted out].” The Deluge was a punishment for sin, and it was only just, therefore, that the righteous man should be saved.

The translation of Xisuthros with his wife to the paradise beyond the grave is evidently regarded by the author of the Epic as a further reward for his piety. But we may suspect that this was not its original cause. In the myth of Adapa, the first man, we find Anu laying down that the mortal who has penetrated into the secrets of the gods must receive the gift of immortality and become as one of the gods himself, and it would seem that the same idea inspired the belief in the translation of the second father of mankind. Xisuthros too had learned the secret counsels of the gods; with the help of Ea he had outwitted Bel, and it was therefore needful that the gift of immortality should be conferred on him, and that he should dwell like them in the land which death cannot reach.

True to his primeval character, En-lil of Nippur was the author of the Deluge. His ministers, Nin-ip, Nusku, and En-nugi, carry out his commands, while “the spirits of the earth lift up their torches.” But the poet of the Epic has spoilt the primitive symmetry of the picture by introducing the triad into it along with the storm-god Hadad of later times, and so making the destruction of mankind not the work of En-lil alone, but of the gods generally in common council. The result has been a want of coherence in the elements of the story; Istar(335) consents to the death of the children she has borne, only to repent of it subsequently when she sees them filling the sea “like fish,” and to weep with the rest of the gods over the havoc that has been wrought. Perhaps Professor Jastrow is right in his suggestion that two separate versions of the story have been united together, in one of which it was the single city of Surippak and its inhabitants that were destroyed, while in the other the Deluge was universal. However that may be, Ea disclosed the determination of En-lil to his faithful servant, “the son of Ubara-Tutu.” According to one part of the story, the disclosure was made through a dream; according to another part, by a device similar to that which gave the Phrygian Midas his ass’s ears. The god whispered the meditated deed of Bel and the means of escaping it to one of those reed-huts which stood by the shore of the Persian Gulf, and in which Xisuthros—despite the fact that he is called “a man of Surippak”—was born. The rustling reeds communicated to him the secret, and he in turn told his “lord Ea” that he had understood the message.

The ship was built, and by the advice of Ea the too-inquisitive inquirers were informed that the builder was transferring his allegiance from Bel, the lord of the land, to Ea, the god of the sea.(336) All sorts of provisions were stored in it, together with “the seed of life,” each after its kind—“cattle of the field, wild beasts of the field, and the sons of the craftsmen.” Then the helm was placed in the hands of Buzur-Sadi-rabi, the steersman, the door of the ark was closed, and the storm broke upon the earth. For seven days and nights it raged; man and his works were swept away, and the ark alone survived with its living freight. When at last Xisuthros opened his window and looked out, a desolate waste of waters was all that could be seen. Above it the lofty peak of the mountain of Nizir(337) in the north-east finally appeared; here the ship grounded, and seven days afterwards Xisuthros sent forth a dove to see if the earth were dry. But the dove “went to and fro, and returned.” Next he sent forth a swallow, which returned also to the ark; and lastly a raven, which “ate, waded and croaked, and did not return.” So the Chaldæan Noah knew that the waters of the Flood had subsided: and accordingly he opened the door of the ark and let the animals within it depart towards “the four quarters of heaven.” Then he offered sacrifice on the summit of the mountain, setting beside it vases of smoking incense ranged “seven by seven.” The gods smelt the sweet savour of the offering, and rejoiced that there were men still left to prepare it for them. They gathered, we are told, “like flies above the offerer,” while Beltis lifted up “the bow that Anu had made.”

En-lil alone refused to be reconciled. He vented his wrath at the escape of Xisuthros and his family upon the Igigi or angels, who, as spirits, were more under his control than the gods. But Ea took the blame upon himself, and, after declaring that the righteous must not suffer with the guilty, persuaded Bel to promise that though he might send the wild beast, the famine, and the pestilence upon mankind, the earth should never again be visited by the waters of a flood. Then Bel entered the ship, blessed Xisuthros and his wife, and translated them to the other world.

After hearing the story, Gilgames fell into a deep sleep, which lasted six days and seven nights, while the wife of Xisuthros prepared magic food, which she placed at the head of the sleeper. When he awoke he ate it, and his sickness departed from him. But his skin was still covered with sores, and it was therefore necessary that he should bathe in the purifying waters of the ocean before the full strength and beauty of his youth came back to him.

Xisuthros now tells him of the plant of immortality which grows, covered with thorns, at the bottom of the ocean. The hero accordingly ties heavy stones to his feet, and dives for it; and though the thorns pierce his hands, he brings a branch of it to the surface, and prepares to carry it to the world of men. But the gift of immortality was not for men to possess. On his voyage home Gilgames stops awhile at a fountain of cool water, and while he bathes in it a serpent perceives the odour of the plant, and steals it away. Vainly the hero laments its loss, the plant that “changes age into youth ” could never be brought to a world the law of which is death.

Man must die, but what is the lot of the dead? This is the question which forms the burden of the twelfth and last book of the Epic. Gilgames wanders from temple to temple, asking the god of each if the earth has seized hold of Ea-bani, and if so, what is his fate below. But the gods are silent; they give neither answer nor sign. At last, however, he reaches the shrine of Nergal, the god of the dead, and Nergal causes the earth to open and the spirit of Ea-bani to ascend out of it like a cloud of dust. And then the answer is given. He who has friends to care for him will “lie on a couch and drink pure water”; the hero too—

“who is slain in battle, as you and I have seen, his father and his mother support his head, and his wife [weeps] over him. But he whose body lies forsaken in the field, as thou and I have seen, his ghost rests not in the earth. He whose ghost has none to care for him, as thou and I have seen, the garbage of the pot, the refuse of food, which is thrown into the street, must he devour.”

With this dreary and materialistic picture of the other world the Epic comes to an end. It is a curious contrast to the life in the fields of Alu to which the Egyptian worshipper of Osiris looked forward; and there is little need to wonder that the mind and religious cult of the Babylonian should have been centred in the present life. The Hades in which he was called upon to believe was more dreary even than the Hades of the Homeric Greeks.

The Epic of Gilgames forces two questions upon our attention, both of which have been often discussed. The one is the relation of the story of the Deluge contained in it to the Biblical narrative of the Flood, the other is the relation of Gilgames himself to the Greek Hêraklês. From the outset it has been perceived that the connection between the Babylonian and Hebrew stories is very close, and that the Babylonian is the older of the two. The birds, for instance, sent out by Xisuthros are three instead of two, as in the Biblical narrative, though the number of times they were despatched is the same in both cases; and the ship of the Babylonian version has been replaced by an ark in the Old Testament account. In fact the Babylonian story has been modified in Palestine and under Western influences. In an inland country an ark was naturally substituted for a ship, more especially as the latter contained a house with window and door; even in Babylonia itself, in the processions of the gods, an ark came to take the place of the ship of primitive Eridu. The olive branch, again, with which the dove returned, according to the Book of Genesis, points to Palestine, where the olive grew; while the period of the rainfall has been transferred from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in Babylonia, to the “second month” of the Hebrew civil year, our October and November, when the “former rains” began in Canaan. Similarly, the subsidence of the waters is extended in the Hebrew narrative to the middle of the “seventh month,” when the “latter rains” of the Canaanitish spring are over.

But the most remarkable fact brought to light by a comparison of the Babylonian story with that of Genesis is, that the resemblances between them are not confined to one only of the two documents into which modern criticism has separated the Biblical narrative. It is not with the so-called Elohistic, or the so-called Yahvistic, account only that the agreement exists, but with both together as they are found at present combined, or supposed to be combined, in the Hebrew text.(338) The fact throws grave doubt on the reality of the critical analysis. As I have said elsewhere:(339) “Either the Babylonian poet had before him the present ‘redacted’ text of Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian story upon the mutual understanding standing that the one should insert what the other omitted. There is no third alternative.”

The Palestinian colouring of the Biblical version of itself excludes the supposition that the story was borrowed by the Jews in the age of the Babylonian exile. Such a supposition, indeed, would be little in accordance with the feelings of hatred felt by the captives towards their Babylonian conquerors and the religious beliefs and traditions of the latter. But the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets has shown that the culture and literature of Babylonia had made its way to Palestine and even to Egypt long before the Mosaic age. The great literary works of Chaldæa were already known and used as text-books in the West, and, like the story of the first man Adapa, a portion of which was found in Egypt, the story of the Deluge and the second founder of the human race must also have been known there. Gunkel has made it clear(340) that the conceptions and beliefs which underlie the history of the Flood, and find their expression in the statement that “the fountains of the great deep” were broken up, are not only of Babylonian origin, but are also met with in the earliest fragments of Old Testament literature. Before the Israelites entered Canaan, the cosmological ideas of Babylonia had already made their way to it, and been adapted to the geographical conditions of “the land of the Amorites.”

The story of a deluge was known to Greece as well as to Palestine. There, too, it had been sent by Zeus as a punishment for the impiety of mankind; and Deukalion, the Greek Noah, saved himself and his family in a ship.(341) The peak of Parnassos played the same part in the Greek legend that the mountain of Nizir played in the Babylonian; and the stones thrown on the ground by Deukalion which became men, remind us of the images of clay moulded by the goddess Mami in the mutilated Babylonian myth of Atarpi, which similarly become men and women.

But it is not so much with the episode of the Deluge as with the whole story of Gilgames and his adventures that Greek mythology claims connection. The desire of finding the biblical Nimrod in the cuneiform tablets long seduced Assyriologists into the impossible attempt to identify him with Gilgames; it is not, however, to the Biblical Nimrod, but to the Greek Hêraklês, that the Babylonian hero is related. The curious parallelism between the twelve labours of Hêraklês and the twelve adventures of Gilgames may be an accident; but it is no accident that Gilgames and Hêraklês should alike be heroes who are not kings, and that both alike should be tormented with a deadly distemper which destroyed the flesh. Khumbaba is the tyrant Geryon, the bull slain by Gilgames is the Kretan bull slain by Hêraklês, and the Nemæan lion reappears in the lion which Gilgames is so often represented on the seals as strangling to death. As Hêra persecuted Hêraklês, so Istar persecuted Gilgames; the journey of the Greek hero into Hades is paralleled by the journey of Gilgames beyond the waters of death; and the tree which he found on the shores of the sea with its fruit of precious stones is the magical tree of the Hesperides with its golden apples which grew in the midst of the western ocean.

It is true that there are many elements in the legend of Hêraklês which are not derived from Babylonia. But it is also true that, like the cosmogonies of Hesiod or the cosmological philosophy of Thales, there are also elements in it for which we must claim a Babylonian origin. Probably they made their way to Greek lands at the same time as the Cyprian cult of Aphroditê or the myth of Adônis, whose name indicates the road along which the culture of Babylonia had travelled. Recent archæological discoveries have revealed the fact that in the days when Canaan was a Babylonian province, a civilisation already existed in the Ægean, and that an active intercourse was carried on between Egypt and Asia on the one hand, and the islands and shores of the Mediterranean on the other, in which Krete took a leading share. Light is only just dawning on what until lately was the “prehistoric” past of the European peoples; before long a new world will doubtless be disclosed to us, such as that which the decipherment of the cuneiform texts has brought to light.

It is not only in the mythology of primitive Greece that we can trace the influence of the legends embodied in the Epic of Gilgames. The adventures of Gilgames in search of immortality form part of the story of that mythical Alexander who grew up in literature by the side of the Alexander of history. He too had to make his way through a land of thick darkness, and he too finally failed in his endeavour to secure the “waters of life.”(342) Man is and must remain mortal; this is alike the teaching of the old poet of Chaldæa and of the romance which the contact of Eastern and Western thought called into existence in classical days.

Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple.

The temple of the god was the centre and glory of every great Babylonian city. The Babylonian States had been at the outset essentially theocratic; their ruler had been a high priest before he became a king, and up to the last he remained the vicegerent and adopted son of the god. It was round the temple that the city had grown and its population clustered. The artisans worked for it, and the agricultural labourers tilled its fields. The art of Babylonia originated within the temple precincts; it was for its adornment that the enamelled tiles were first made, and wood or stone or metal carved into artistic shapes, while the endowments which thus fostered the craftsman’s art were derived from landed property or from the tithes paid to the priests upon the produce of the soil. The culture of Babylonia was with good reason traced back to the god Ea.

The place occupied in Assyria by the army was filled in Babylonia by the priesthood. The priests could make and unmake their kings. The last monarch of Babylonia, Nabonidos, was a nominee of the priests of Babylon; it was from them, and not from the rights of heritage, that he had derived his title to the throne. The great sanctuaries of the country influenced its destinies to the last. The influence of Nippur and Eridu, in fact, was wholly religious; we know of no royal dynasties that sprang from them. Even Nabonidos, with all his centralising zeal on behalf of Merodach of Babylon, was constrained to lavish gifts and honours on the sun-god of Sippara, at all events in the early part of his reign.

We must therefore look upon the temple as the oldest unit in the civilisation of Babylonia. Babylonian culture begins with the temple, with the worship of a deity or a spirit, and with the ministers attached to the cult. Centuries before En-lil of Nippur had developed into a Semitic Bel, an earthly dwelling-house had been provided for him which became in time the temple of a god. Its first name, Ê-kur, “the house of the earth” or “mountain,” continued always to cling to it, even though the original meaning of the name was forgotten, and it had come to signify a temple in the later sense of the word.

The temple was the sign and token of the reclamation of the primitive Babylonian swamp. Before it could be erected, it was needful to construct a platform of solid earth and brickwork, which should rise above the pestiferous marsh, and serve as a foundation for the building. The Sumerians called the platform the ki-gal or “great place”; it was the first place of human or divine habitation wrested from the waters of the swamp, and it marked the triumph of civilised man over nature. Emphatically, therefore, it was a “great place,” a solid resting-place in a world of water and slime.

On the platform the temple buildings were piled. There was no stone in Babylonia; it was a land of mud, and of mud bricks, accordingly, baked in the sun, the temple of the god was constructed. What was lost in beauty or design was gained in solidity. The Babylonian temples were huge masses of brick, square for the most part, and with the four corners facing the four cardinal points. It was only exceptionally that the four sides, instead of the four corners, were made to front the four “winds.”

These masses of brick were continually growing in height. The crude bricks soon disintegrated, and the heavy rains of a Babylonian winter quickly reduced them to their primeval mud. Constant restorations were therefore needed, and the history of a Babylonian temple is that of perpetual repairs. Efforts were made to keep the walls from crumbling away by building buttresses against them, and the bricks were cemented together with bitumen. But all precautions were in vain. A period of national decay inevitably brought with it the decay also of the temples, and a return of prosperity meant their restoration on the disintegrated ruins of the older edifice. The artificial platform became a _tel_ or mound.

But the growth in height was not displeasing to the priestly builders. The higher the temple rose above the level of the plain, the better they were pleased. A characteristic of the Babylonian temple, in fact, was the _ziggurat_ or “tower” attached to each, whose head it was designed should “reach to heaven.” The word _ziggurat_ means a “lofty peak,” and the royal builders of Babylonia vied with one another in making the temple towers they erected as high as possible.

There was more than one reason for this characteristic feature of religious Babylonian architecture. The first settlers in the plain of Babylonia must soon have discovered that the higher they could be above the surface of the ground the better it was for them. The nearer they ascended to the clouds of heaven, the freer they were from the miasmata and insects of the swamp. The same cause which led them to provide a platform for their temples, would have also led them to raise the temple as high as they could above the level of the plain. This, however, will not explain the origin of the tower itself. It would have been a reason for building the temple as high as possible, not for attaching to it a tower. Nor was the tower suitable for defence against an enemy, like the pylons of an Egyptian temple. At most it was a convenient watch-tower from which the movements of a hostile band could be observed. There must have been some other reason, more directly connected with religious beliefs or practices, which found its outward expression in the sacred tower.

The sanctuary of Nippur, it will be remembered, was the oldest in Northern Babylonia. And from time immemorial it had been known as Ê-kur, “the house of the mountain-land.” It represented that underground world which was the home of En-lil and his ghosts; and this underground world, we must observe, was conceived of as a mountain. In fact, the cuneiform character which signifies “country” also signifies “mountain,” and the hieroglyphic picture out of which it developed is the picture of a mountain-range. The land in which it was first drawn and stereotyped in writing must, it would seem, have been a mountainous one, like the land in which the subterranean realm of En-lil was regarded as a lofty hill. In other words, the Sumerians must have been the inhabitants of a mountainous country before they settled in the plain of Babylonia and laid the foundations of the temple of Nippur.

And this mountainous country lay to the north or east, where the mountains of Elam and Kurdistan border the Babylonian plain. In the story of the Deluge the ark is made to rest on the summit of the mountain of Nizir, which is probably the modern Rowandiz, to the north-east of Assyria; and the gods were believed to have been born in “the mountain of the world,” in the land of Arallu.(343) Here, too, they held their court; “I will ascend into heaven,” the Babylonian monarch is made to say in the 14th chapter of Isaiah, “I will exalt my throne above the stars of El; I will sit also upon the mount of the assembly (of the gods), in the extremities of the north;(344) I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” More than one temple in both Babylonia and Assyria took its name from this “mountain of the world”; the _ziggurat_ at Kis was known as “the house of the mountain of mankind,” while a temple at Ur was entitled “the house of the mountain,” and the shrine of Gula at Babylon was “the house of the holy hill.”(345)

All over Babylonia, accordingly, the mountain is brought into close connection with the religious cult. Not at Nippur only, but in other cities as well, the home of the gods is on the summit of an Olympos, within whose subterranean recesses they were born when as yet the primitive ghost or spirit had not become a god. Sumerian religion must have grown up rather among the mountains than in the plain, and the memory of its birthplace was preserved by religious conservatism. The _ziggurat_ of the temple goes back to the days when the gods were still gods of the mountain, and the builders of the temple sought to force a way into the heavenly Olympos by raising artificially an imitation of the mountain on the alluvial plain. The tower was a mimic representation of the Ê-kur, or mountain of the earth itself, where En-lil, “the god of the great mountain” (_sadu rabu_), had his seat. And the earth could have been figured as a mountain only by the inhabitants of a mountainous land.

But this conception of the world of gods and men stands in glaring contrast to the cosmology of Eridu. There the primeval earth was not a mountain peak, but the flat lands reclaimed from the sea. The gods and spirits had their home in the abysses of the ocean, not in the dark recesses of a mountain of the north; the centre of the world was the palace of Ea beneath the waves, not “the mountain-house” of En-lil, or the dark caverns of “the mountain of Arallu.” Once more we are confronted by a twofold element in Babylonian thought and religion, and a proof of its compound nature. Like the contradictory elements in Egyptian religion, which can best be explained by the composite character of the people, the contradictory elements in Babylonian religion imply that mixture of races which is described in the fragments of Berossos.

In the tower or _ziggurat_, accordingly, we must see a reflection of the belief that this nether earth is a mountain whose highest peak supports the vault of the sky. Around it float the stars and clouds, concealing the heaven of the gods from the eyes of man. But this Olympian heaven was really an afterthought. It was not until the ghosts of the lower world had developed into gods, and been transferred from the heart of the mountain to its summit, that it had any existence at all. It belongs to the age of astro-theology, to the time when the moon and sun and host of heaven became divine, and received the homage of mankind. This is an age to which I shall have to refer again in my next and concluding lecture. It was the time when the _ziggurat_ began to consist of seven storeys, dedicated to the seven planets, when the _ziggurat_ of Erech was called “the house of the seven black stones,” and that of Borsippa, “of the seven zones of heaven and earth.”(346)

The _ziggurat_ occupied but a small part of the temple area. What the temple was like we know to a certain extent, not only from the American excavations at Nippur, but more especially from the accounts given us by Herodotos and by a cuneiform tablet which describes the great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon. The latter was called Ê-Saggila, “the house of the exalted head”; and though the account of Herodotos is probably quoted from an earlier author, while the cuneiform tablet, which was seen and translated by Mr. George Smith at Constantinople, has unfortunately been lost, there is nevertheless no ground in either case for mistrust. The description given by Herodotos fully agrees with that of the tablet.

The visitor to the temple first entered the “Great” or Outer Court. It was 900 feet in breadth, and more than 1150 in length. If we may judge from the analogy of Nippur and Lagas, an arcade ran round its interior, supported on columns, and two larger, but detached, columns of brick or stone stood on either side of the entrance. At Babylon a second court opened out of the first, devoted to the worship of the goddesses Istar and Zamâmâ. Six gates pierced the walls—the Grand Gate, the Gate of the Rising Sun, the Great Gate, the Gate of the Colossi, the Gate of the Canal, and the Gate of the Tower-view.(347) Then came the _kigallu_, or platform, of the original temple, the sides, and not the corners of which faced the four cardinal points, and which possessed four gates, each in the centre of a side. In it was the _ziggurat_, “the house of the foundation of heaven and earth,” as it was termed, with its seven stages, which rose one above the other in gradually diminishing proportions to a height of 300 feet.(348) A winding ramp led upwards on the outside, connecting the stages with each other, and allowing a chariot to be driven along it to the top. Here in the last of the seven stages was the chamber of the god. It contained no image of the deity, only a couch of gold and a golden table for the shewbread.(349) None but a woman into whom the god had breathed the spirit of prophecy was allowed to enter it, and it was to her that Bel revealed himself at night on his golden couch and delivered his oracles. As in Greece, so too in Babylonia and Assyria, women were inspired prophetesses of the gods. It was from the priestesses and serving-women of Istar of Arbela that Esar-haddon received the oracles of the goddess; and we are reminded that in Israel also it was the prophetess Deborah who roused her countrymen to battle, and Huldah, rather than Jeremiah, to whom the high priest betook himself that he might hear “the word of the Lord.”

It is significant that the place of the oracle was the topmost chamber of the tower. The god is conceived as coming down from heaven;(350) it is there that he lives, not in the underground recesses of the mountain of the world or fathomless abysses of the sea. When the _ziggurat_ took its final shape, the deities of Babylonia had already been transported to the sky.

It is also significant that there was no image of the god. The spiritual had been finally separated from the material, and where the god himself came in spiritual form no material image of him was needed. Though none might be able to see him with mortal eye save only his inspired priestess, he was nevertheless as actually present as if he had embodied himself in some statue of metal or stone. The denizen of heaven required no body or form of earthly make; the divine spirits who were worshipped in the sun or stars were seen only by the eye of faith.

But it was in the _ziggurat_ only that the deity thus came down from heaven in spiritual guise. In the chapels and shrines that stood at its foot images were numerous; here the multitude, whether of priests or laymen, served and worshipped, and the older traditions of religion remained intact. On the eastern side of the tower was the sanctuary of Nebo, the “angel” or interpreter of the will of Merodach, with Tasmit, his wife. To the north were the chapels of Ea and Nusku, and to the south those of Anu and En-lil, while westward was the temple of Merodach himself. It consisted of a double building, with a court between the two wings. In the recesses of the inner sanctuary was the _papakhu_, or “Holy of Holies,” with its golden image of the god. Here too was the golden table of shewbread and the _parakku_, or mercy-seat, which at times gave its name to the whole shrine.

The innermost sanctuary was known as the Du-azagga, or “Holy Hill,” after which the month Tisri received one of its names.(351) But the name had really come from Eridu. It was the dwelling-place of Ea on the eastern horizon of the sea, where the sun rises from the deep,(352) and Asari accordingly was entitled its “son.” When Asari became Merodach of Babylon, the Holy Mound or Hill migrated with him, and the seat of the oracular wisdom of Ea was transformed into the shrine of Merodach, where he in his turn delivered his oracles on the festival of the New Year.(353) Lehmann(354) has shown that originally it represented the mercy-seat, the “golden throne” of the description of Herodotos, above which the deity seated himself when he descended to announce the future destinies of man. It was only subsequently that it was extended to the “Holy of Holies” in which the mercy-seat stood.

A golden altar seems to have been raised close to the mercy-seat of the god. If Herodotos may be trusted, lambs only were allowed to be sacrificed upon it. But there was another and larger altar in the outer court. On this whole sheep were offered, as well as frankincense.

The architectural arrangement of a Babylonian temple, however, was not always the same. The orientation of the temple of Merodach, as we have seen, differed from that of the majority of the Babylonian sanctuaries. The number of chapels included within the sacred precincts varied greatly, and even the position of the great tower was not uniform. But the general plan was alike everywhere. There was first the great court, open to the sky, and surrounded by cloisters and colonnades. Here were the houses of the priests and other ministers of the temple, the library and school, shops for the manufacture and sale of votive objects, even the stalls wherein the animals were kept that were intended for sacrifice. In the centre of the court stood an altar of sacrifice, with large vases for the purposes of ablution by the side of it, as well as a “sea,” or basin of water, which derived its name from the fact that it was a symbol of the primeval “deep.” The basin was of bronze or stone, and was at times supported on the backs of twelve oxen, as we learn from an old hymn which describes the construction of one of them.(355) At other times, as at Lagas, the basin was decorated with a frieze of female figures, who pour water from the vases in their outstretched hands.(356) The purifying effects of the water of the “deep” were transferred to that of the mimic “sea,” and the worshipper who entered the temple after washing in it became ceremonially pure.

The great court, with its two isolated columns in front of the entrance, led into a second, from the floor of which rose the _ziggurat_ or tower. The second court formed the approach to the temple proper, which again consisted of an outer sanctuary and an inner shrine. Whether the laity were admitted into its inner recesses is doubtful. No one, indeed, could appear before the god except through the mediation of a priest; and on the seal-cylinders a frequent representation is that of a worshipper whom the priest is leading by the hand and presenting to the image of a deity. But it is not certain that the image represented on them was that which stood in the Holy of Holies, or innermost shrine; it may have been a second image, erected in another part of the temple. On the other hand, the numerous chapels of the secondary gods who formed the court of the chief deity of a city, can hardly have been furnished with more than one statue, and it is even questionable whether they consisted of more than one chamber. Perhaps it was only from the topmost room of the tower that the layman was absolutely excluded.

The Babylonian temple, it will be seen, thus closely resembled the temple of Solomon. That, too, had its two courts, its chambers for the priests, its sanctuary, and its Holy of Holies. Both alike were externally mere rectangular boxes, without architectural beauty or variety of design. It was only in the possession of a tower that the Babylonian temple differed from the Israelite. They agreed even in the details of their furniture. The two altars of the Babylonian sanctuary are found again in the temple of Jerusalem; so too are the mercy-seat and the table of shewbread. Even the bronze “sea” of Solomon, with its twelve oxen, is at last accounted for; it was modelled after a Babylonian original, and goes back to the cosmological ideas which had their source in Eridu. Yet more striking are the twin pillars that flanked the gateway of the court, remains of which have been found both at Nippur and at Tello. They are exactly parallel to the twin pillars which Solomon set up “in the porch of the temple,” and which he named Yakin and Boaz. In these, again, we may find vestiges of a belief which had its roots in the theology of Eridu. When Adapa, the first man, was sent by Ea to the heaven of Anu, he found on either side of the gate two gods clothed in mourning, and weeping for their untimely removal from the earth. Like the two cherubim who guarded the tree of life, they guarded the gate of heaven. One of them was Tammuz, the other Nin-gis-zida, “the lord of the firmly planted stake.” Each had perished, it would seem, in the prime of life, and hence were fitly set to guard the gates of heaven and prevent mortal man from forcing his way into the realm of immortality. Yakin, it should be noticed, is a very passable translation of the Sumerian Nin-gis-zida; perhaps Boaz preserves, under a corrupted form, a reminiscence of Tammuz.

There was yet another parallelism between the temples of Babylonia and Jerusalem. The Hebrew ark was replaced in Babylonia by a ship. The ship was dedicated to the god or goddess whose image it contained, and was often of considerable size. Its sides were frequently inlaid with gems and gold, and it always bore a special name. One at least of the names indicates that the ship goes back to the days when as yet the gods had not assumed human forms; the ship of Bau is still that of “the holy cow.” In early times the ship was provided with captain and crew; later, it was reduced in size so that it could be carried like an ark on the shoulders of men. But its original object is clear. On days of festival the god was rowed in it on the sacred river, where he could enjoy the cool breeze, and return, as it were, to the “pure” waters of the primeval deep. Gradually it became merely his travelling home when he left his usual dwelling-place. In Assyria its place was even taken by a throne or platform borne upon the shoulders in the religious processions. The ship, in fact, passed into an ark, the curtained palanquin or shrine wherein the deity could conceal himself from the eyes of the profane when he left his own sanctuary.

A discovery made by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam in the mounds of Balawât, some fifteen miles from Mossul, shows that in Assyria the development of the ship into the ark was as complete as it was in Israel. Here he found a small chapel dedicated to the god of dreams. At the entrance of the sanctuary was a stone coffer, which contained two small alabaster slabs thickly covered with cuneiform writing. They proved to be records of the conquests of Assur-nazir-pal, the builder of the chapel, and each tablet contained the same text. It was not surprising that the native workmen when they opened the coffer believed that they had discovered the veritable tables of the Mosaic Law! We are told in the Old Testament that the latter were kept in the ark. Not far from the coffer in the north-west corner of the shrine was a stone altar the ascent to which was by a flight of five steps.

The temples were served by an army of priests. At the head came the _patesi_ or “high priest,” who in the early days of Babylonian history performed the functions of a king. But the _patesi_ was essentially the vicegerent of the god. The god delegated his powers to him, and allowed him to exercise them on earth. It was the doctrine of priestly mediation carried to its logical conclusion. Only through the priest could the deity be approached, and in the absence of the deity the high priest took his place. At Babylon, as we have seen, the divine rights were conferred by an act of adoption; the vicegerent of Bel, by “taking the hand” and becoming the son of the god, acquired the right to exercise his sovereignty over men. An early king of Erech calls himself the son of the goddess Nin-ṡun. From the outset the Babylonian monarchy was essentially theocratic; the king was simply the high priest in a new form.

But with the rise of Semitic supremacy the king himself became a god. The vicegerent had taken to himself all the attributes of the deity, the adopted son succeeded to the rights and powers of his divine father. The _patesi_ ceased to be the king himself, and became instead his viceroy and lieutenant. Wherever the supreme monarch had a governor who acted in his name, he had also a representative of his divine authority. There were high priests of the god on earth as well as of the gods in heaven.

A new term was wanted to take the place of _patesi_, which had thus come to have a secular as well as a religious signification. It was found in _sangu_, which, more especially in the Assyrian period, meant a chief priest. Every great sanctuary had its chief priests who corresponded to the Hebrew “sons of Aaron,” with a “high priest” or _sangam-makhu_ at their head.(357) Under them were a large number of subordinate priests and temple ministers—the _kali_ or “gallos-priests,”(358) the _niṡakki_ or “sacrificers,” the _ramki_ or “pourers of libations,” and the _pasisi_ or “anointers with oil.” There was even a special class of bakers who made the sacred cakes that were used in the temple service, as well as “chanters” and “wailers,” “carriers of the axe” and “of the spear.” Above all, there were the prophets and augurs, the soothsayers (_makhkhi_) and necromancers (_musêli_), and those who “inquired” of the dead (_saili_).

The _asipi_ or “prophets” constituted a class apart. In some respects they resembled the prophets of Israel. It was “by order of the college of prophets” that Assur-bani-pal purified the shrines of Babylon after the capture of the city, and the prophet accompanied even an army in the field. At times they predicted the future; more often it was rather an announcement of the will of Heaven which they delivered to mankind.(359) As they prophesied they poured out libations; hence it is that the purification of the shrines of the Babylonian temples was their special care, and that an old ritual text commands the prophet to pour out libations “for three days at dawn and night during the middle watch.”(360) The word was borrowed by the writer of the Book of Daniel (ii. 10) under the form of _ashshâph_, which the Authorised Version renders “astrologers.” But the Babylonian _asip_ or “prophet” was not an astrologer; he left to others the interpretation of the stars, and contented himself with counselling or foretelling the destinies of men. Like his master Bel-Merodach, he was the interpreter of the wisdom of Ea, and the revealer of his counsels. The Holy of Holies in the great temple of Babylon, where Bel uttered his oracles, was known as the “house of prophecy,” like the ship also in which the image of the god was ferried across the stream.(361) The prophet may have been part of the heritage bequeathed by Eridu to the Babylonian people.

By the side of the prophet stood the seer (_sabrû_).(362) The seer and the prophet were distinct from one another; there was no confusion between their offices, as seems to have been at one time the case in Israel. The seer was not the “speaker” who declared the will of the gods or the fate that was decreed for man; it was, on the contrary, through visions and trances that the future was made known to him. Assur-bani-pal tells us how, on the eve of the Elamite war, after he had invoked the aid and protection of Istar, “a seer slept and dreamed a prophetic dream; a vision of the night did Istar reveal unto him; he repeated it to me, saying: ‘Istar, who dwelleth in Arbela, came down, and on the right hand and on the left hung (her) quivers; in her hand she held the bow; she drew the sharp war-sword and held it before her. Like a mother she speaketh with thee, she calleth thee; Istar, the queen of the gods, appointeth for thee a doom: ... “Eat food, drink wine, make music, exalt my divinity, until I march and this work of mine be accomplished. I will give thee thy heart’s desire; thy face shall not grow pale, thy feet shall not totter.” ’ ”

Here the message of the seer passes into a prophecy, and his office is distinguished from that of the prophet only through the difference in the mode of revelation. The seer went back to the earliest ages of Semitic Babylonia. The “seer” of the palace of Sargon of Akkad is already mentioned on a contemporaneous tablet by the side of “the king” and “the queen.”(363) Like the other priests among whom he was reckoned, it was necessary that he should be without bodily blemish. The leper, the blind, and the maimed were excluded from the service of the gods.(364)

How far the Babylonian prophet resembled the Hebrew prophet it is at present impossible to say. But there were certainly two important points in which they differed. The Babylonian prophet was, on the one side, a member of the priestly body; the mere peasant could not become an “utterer” of the will of heaven without previous training and consecration. There was, consequently, no such distinction between the prophet and the priest as prevailed in Israel; Babylonia was a theocratic, not a democratic State. On the other side, the prophet was closely linked with the magician and necromancer. Magic had been taken under the protection of the State religion, not repudiated and persecuted as among the Israelites. Hence, while the prophet was a priest to whom the rites of purification were specially entrusted, he was at the same time classed with the _sailu_ who “inquired” of the dead, the _musêlu_ or necromancer, and the _makhkhu_ or “soothsayer.”

On the other hand, there were prophetesses as well as prophets in both Babylonia and Israel. The employment of women in the temple services peculiarly characterised Babylonia. As we have seen, it was a woman only who was privileged to enter the secret shrine of Bel-Merodach at Babylon; while unmarried women were consecrated, not only to Istar, but also to the sun-god, and, like the priests, formed a corporate community. We are told that in the lower world of Hades there were female as well as male soothsayers; it was the home of the black art, and so reflected the constitution of the professors of sorcery in the upper world.

Along with the seer and the soothsayer, the prophet was thus annexed by the temple. A definite duty was assigned to him there; he was “the pourer out” of libations. The libations were doubtless originally of “pure” water, to which was subsequently added wine, whether made from the palm or the vine. Along with the libations all the first-fruits of the cultivated land were offered to the gods. Milk and butter and oil, dates and vegetables, were given in abundance. So too were the spices and incense that were brought from the southern coast of Arabia, the corn that was grown in the fields, garlic and other herbs from the garden, and honey from the hive. But animal sacrifices were not forgotten. Oxen and calves, sheep and lambs, goats and kids, fish and certain kinds of birds, were slain upon the altar, and so presented to the gods. It is noticeable that it was only the cultivated plant and the domesticated beast that were thus offered to the deity. The dog and swine, or rather wild boar, are never mentioned in the sacrificial lists. What man gave to heaven was what he ate himself, and reared or grew with the sweat of his brow. The gazelle, indeed, is named, but it is a scape-goat which is driven into the desert like the Hebrew Azazel, carrying away with it the sins and sickness of those who let it loose.(365) The gods of Semitic Babylonia were essentially human, and what man lived upon they too required. They had, moreover, given their worshippers all they most needed and prized—fruitful fields, fat cattle, rain in its season, and the blessings of the sunshine. In return they demanded the first-fruits of what was in reality their own; they could, if they so chose, deprive man of the whole, but they were generously satisfied with a part. The Semitic Baal was indeed like a divine king; lord and master though he was of the cultivated soil and of all that it produced, he was content only with a share.

Was the firstborn of man included among the sacrifices that were deemed acceptable to heaven? Years ago I published an early text which seemed to show that such was the case. My interpretation of the text has been disputed, but it still appears to me to be the sole legitimate one. The text is bilingual in both Sumerian and Semitic, and therefore probably goes back to Sumerian times. Literally rendered, it is as follows: “Let the _algal_ proclaim: the offspring who raises his head among men, the offspring for his life he must give; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he must give, the neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he must give, the breast of the offspring for the breast of the man he must give.”(366) It is difficult to attach any other meaning to this than that which makes it refer to the sacrifice of children.

The question, however, is really settled by the evidence of archæology. On the famous stela of the Vultures, now in the Louvre, a sort of wicker-work cage is represented, filled with captives who are waiting to be put to death by the mace of the king.(367) On a certain class of seal-cylinders, moreover, a scene is engraved which Ménant seems to me to have rightly explained as depicting a human sacrifice. In later times, it is true, human sacrifice ceased to be practised; there are few, if any, references to it in the inscriptions, and the human victim is replaced by an ox or sheep. It was to the offended majesty of the Assyrian king rather than of the god Assur that the Assyrian conqueror impaled or burnt the beaten foe; and among the lists of offerings that were made to the deified rulers of Babylonia, we look in vain for any mention of man or child. As in Israel, so too in the kingdoms of the Euphrates and Tigris, human sacrifice seems to have disappeared at an early date.

So, moreover, does another custom which has been revealed to us by the archaic sculptures of Tello. That was the custom of approaching the deity stripped of clothing;(368) and Professor Jastrow aptly compares with it not only the scanty dress of the Mohammedan pilgrims on Mount Arafat, but also Saul’s conduct when the spirit of prophecy fell upon him. A similar custom prevailed in Keltic Ireland, and the Hindu still strips himself when he sits down to eat.

The growth of culture, and it may be also the mixture of races, thus deprived the gods of two of the prerogatives they had once enjoyed. They could no longer claim the firstborn of men, nor require that the worshipper should enter their presence naked and defenceless. But they retained all their other kingly rights. A tithe of all that the land produced was theirs, and it was rigorously exacted, for the support of the temples and priests. Babylonia, in short, was the inventor of tithe.

Why it should have been a tenth we cannot say. The numerical system of the Babylonians was sexagesimal and duodecimal, not decimal, and the year consisted of twelve months, not of ten. Perhaps the institution went back to a period when the year of twelve months had not yet been fixed, and, like the lunar year of the modern Mohammedan, it still possessed but ten months. However this may be, the tithe became a marked characteristic of Babylonian religious life. It was paid by all classes; even the king and his heir were not exempt from it. One of the last acts of the crown prince Belshazzar was to pay the tithe, forty-seven shekels in amount, due from his sister to the temple of the sun-god at Sippara, at the very moment when Cyrus was knocking at the gates of Babylon.(369) It is probable that the daily sacrifices were provided for in great measure out of the tithe; at all events, Assur-bani-pal tells us that after the suppression of the Babylonian revolt, he levied upon the people the provision needed for the sacrifices made to Assur and Beltis and the gods of Assyria. They were, however, often endowed specially; thus Nebuchadrezzar made special provision for the daily sacrifice of eight lambs in the temple of Nergal at Cuthah; and an earlier king of Babylonia describes how he had increased the endowment of the stated offerings at Sippara.

The daily sacrifice was called the _ṡatttûku_, a term which goes back to the age when the Semite was first mingling with the older Sumerian.(370) There were other terms in use to denote the various kinds of offering that were presented to the gods. The animal sacrifice had the name of _zîbu_, the meal-offering being known as manitu.(371) The free-will offering was _nidbu_; the “gift” or “benevolence” demanded by the god upon the produce of the field being _qurbannu_, the Hebrew _qorbân_. Other terms also were employed, the exact sense of which is still uncertain; among them is one which probably means “trespass-offering.”

It is impossible not to be struck by the many points of similarity between the Babylonian ritual and arrangement of the temples and that which existed among the Israelites. The temple of Solomon, in fact, was little more than a reproduction of a Babylonian sanctuary. And just as the palace of the Hebrew king adjoined the temple in which he claimed the right of offering sacrifice, so too at Babylon the palace of Nebuchadrezzar—who, it must be remembered, was a pontiff as well as a king—stood close to the temple of Merodach. Even the bronze serpent which Hezekiah destroyed finds its parallel in the bronze serpents erected in the gates of the Babylonian temples.(372) The internal decoration of the sanctuary, moreover, was similar in both countries. The walls were made gorgeous with enamelled bricks, or with plaques of gold and bronze and inlaid stones. Sometimes they were painted with vermilion, the monsters of the Epic of the Creation being pictured on the walls. But more often the painted or sculptured figures were, as at Jerusalem, those of cherubim and the sacred tree or other vegetable devices. At Erech, bull-headed colossi guarded the doors.

But the resemblance between the Babylonian and Hebrew rituals extends beyond the ceremonial of the temple of Solomon into the Levitical Law. In fact, the very term for law, the _torâh_, as the Israelites called it, was borrowed from the Babylonian _tertu_, as was first pointed out by Professor Haupt. It is even a question whether the word is not a derivative from the verb _ahâru_, “to send” or “direct,” from which the name of Aaron was also formed. However this may be, even the technical words of the Mosaic Law recur in the ritual texts of early Babylonia. The biblical _kipper_, “atonement,” is the Assyrian _kuppuru_; and the _qorbân_, as we have seen, is the Assyrian _qurbannu_. A distinction was made between the offerings of the rich and of the poor (_muskînu_),(373) and the sacrificial animal was required to be “without blemish” (_salmu_). The “right” thigh or shoulder of the victim was given to the priest, along with the loins and hide, the rump and tendons, and part of the stomach.(374) Still more interesting is it to find in the ritual of the prophets instructions for the sacrifice of a lamb at the gate of the house, the blood of which is to be smeared on the lintels and doorposts, as well as on the colossal images that guarded the entrance.(375) To this day in Egypt the same rite is practised, and when my dahabiah was launched I had to conform to it. On this occasion the blood of the lamb was allowed to fall over the sides of the lower deck.

There are other parallels between Babylonia and Mosaic Israel which have been brought forward by Professor Zimmern. In the “Tabernacle of the Congregation,” or “Tent of meeting,” he sees the place where “the proper time” (_moêd_, Assyr. _adannu_) for an undertaking was determined by the _barû_ or seer; at any rate, “to determine the proper time” (_sakânu sa adanni_) was one of the functions of the Babylonian seer.(376) By the side of the rituals for the seers and prophets, moreover, there was another for the _zammâri_ or “singers.” The hierarchy of a Babylonian temple was, in short, the same as that of Israel.

But in addition to the architecture of the temple and the regulations of the ritual, there were yet other resemblances between the religious law of Babylonia and that of the Israelites. They may be traced in the numerous festivals of the calendar, and the time of year at which they were held. Foremost among them was the festival of the New Year. Babylonia was primarily an agricultural community, and the festivals of its gods, like the names of the months, were determined by the necessities of agriculture. Spring and autumn were marked by the sowing of the seed and the garnering of the harvest. But neither the one nor the other took place in all parts of the country at the same time of the year. In the south the harvest might be gathered in when the corn was sown in the north, or the seed sown when in colder regions the harvest was gathered in.

Hence it was that the same festival might commemorate either the beginning or the end of the agricultural year. But in either case it was a period of rejoicing and rest from labour, of thanking the gods for their benefits, and offering them the first-fruits of the field. In the old days of Gudea of Lagas the year commenced with the festival of the goddess Bau in the middle of October; in the later Babylon of Khammurabi the feast was transferred to the spring, and the first month of the year began in March. But the older calendar of Babylonia had been already carried to the West, and there preserved in a country to whose climatic and agricultural conditions it was really inapplicable. The ancient Canaanitish year began in the autumn in what the later calendar reckoned the seventh month. It was not, however, till after the final unification of the country under Khammurabi that a fixed and uniform calendar was imposed upon all the sanctuaries of Babylonia. At an earlier epoch the great sanctuaries had each its own calendar; the months were variously named, and the deities to whom the festivals were dedicated were not always the same.(377) At Lagas it was Bau to whom the festival of the New Year was sacred; at Babylon it was Merodach.

Besides the festivals of the spring and autumn, there was yet a third festival belonging to the agricultural year. This was the feast of the summer solstice, which fell in the month of June. It marked the drying up of the soil and the disappearance of the crops and vegetation of the spring. In some of the early States of Babylonia it was consecrated to a god Bil-’si;(378) in the calendar of Assyria, Tammuz took the place of the older god. Tammuz had perished by an untimely death, and it was fitting that the death of the god should be celebrated when nature also seemed to die. There was a time, however, when the festival of Tammuz had been observed, at all events in some parts of Babylonia, in October rather than in June. The same month that had witnessed the feast of the New Year witnessed also that of Tammuz risen again from the dead.

The three great feasts of the Babylonian agriculturist are found again in Canaan. But it is noticeable that the third of them—the feast of Weeks, as it was called by the Hebrews—was there the correspondent of the spring festival in Babylonia. It was, in fact, a repetition of the festival of spring. And the latter accordingly becomes a prelude and anticipation of it. On the 16th of Nisan the Levitical Law ordered a sheaf of the first-fruits of the harvest to be presented (Lev. xxiii. 10-14), and the unleavened bread eaten at the festival itself symbolised the ingathering of the corn which was thus dedicated to God in the form of consecrated cakes.

The three great agricultural festivals were supplemented by others. Many of these occurred at fixed times of the year, and commemorated the divinities worshipped in one or other of the sanctuaries of Babylonia. Some of them were observed throughout the country; others only in a particular city and district. With the deification of a new king came a new festival in his honour; and if his cult lasted, the festival continued also by the side of the established festivals of the older gods. But new festivals might further be instituted for other reasons. The building or restoration of a sanctuary, or even the dedication of a statue, was a quite sufficient pretext. When Gudea consecrated the temple of Inguriṡa at Lagas, he tells us how he had “remitted penalties and given presents. During seven days no service was exacted. The female slave was made the equal of her mistress; the male slave was made the equal of his master; the chief and his subject have been made equal in my city. All that is evil I removed from this temple.”(379)

The temporary freedom thus granted to the slave seems to have been a characteristic of the Babylonian festival. Berossos stated that in the month of Lôos or July, the feast of Sakæa was celebrated at Babylon for five days, when it was “the custom that the masters should obey their domestics, one of whom is led round the house clothed in a royal garment.”(380) The custom has often been compared with that which prevailed at the Roman Saturnalia, and a baseless theory has recently been put forward connecting with it the Hebrew feast of Purim.(381) But the custom was really the exaggeration in the Greek age of Babylonian history of the old doctrine which underlay the Babylonian conception of a holy day. A holy day was essentially a holiday, a day when the whole people rested from work, and when, accordingly, even the slave recovered for awhile his freedom. The summer feast of Sakæa, at least in its original form, or the festival ordained by Gudea at the consecration of the temple of Ê-Ninnu, was thus a parallel to the Hebrew year of Jubilee. In the year of Jubilee we have the western reflection of beliefs and usages that were familiar to the ancestors of Abraham.

The Sabbath-rest was essentially of Babylonian origin. The word Sabbath itself was borrowed from Babylonia, where it had the form Sabattu, and was derived by the native lexicographers from the Sumerian _sa_, “heart,” and “_bat_, to cease,” and so explained as “a day of rest for the heart.”(382) The derivation is, of course, absurd, but it indicates the antiquity of the term. There was yet another name, _sulum_, or “quiet day,” which was more especially used as a translation of the Sumerian _udu_ _khul-gal_, “dies nefastus,” on which it was unlawful or unlucky to perform certain kinds of work.(383) Thus, in a list of what we should call the Saints’ days in the month of the Second Elul, we read that the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th days of the month were all alike days of quiet and rest. “The 7th day,” we are told, “is a day dedicated to Merodach and Zarpanit. It is a lucky day and a quiet day. The shepherd of mighty nations (_i.e._ the king) must not eat flesh cooked at the fire or in the smoke. His clothes he must not change. White garments he must not put on. He must not offer sacrifice. The king must not drive a chariot. He must not issue royal decrees. In a secret place the seer must not prophesy. Medicine for the sickness of his body he must not apply. For making a spell it is not fitting.”(384) Here the Sabbath recurs, as among the Hebrews, every seven days; and Professor Jensen has pointed out that the 19th of the month, on which there was also a Sabbath, was forty-nine days or seven weeks from the beginning of the previous month. There was therefore not only a week of seven days, but a week of seven-day weeks as well. In fact, the chief difference between the Babylonian and the Hebrew institution lay in the subordination of the Sabbath to the festival of the “new moon” among the Babylonians. There was no Sabbath on the first day of the month; its place was taken by freewill offerings to the moon.

The Sabbath, it will be noticed, was not a fast-day. Fasts, however, were not infrequent in Babylonia and Assyria, and in times of danger and distress might be specially ordained. When Esar-haddon was hard pressed by his northern enemies, he ordered prayers to be made and ceremonies to be performed to the sun-god, lasting for one hundred days and nights. It was a long period of public humiliation, and the god was asked to grant favourable visions to the “seers” who implored his help. In the penitential psalms, fasting is alluded to more than once. “Instead of food,” says the penitent, “I eat bitter tears; instead of palm-wine, I drink the waters of misery.” Or, again: “Food I have not eaten, weeping is my nourishment; water I have not drunk, tears are my drink.”(385)

The fast and the feast alternated as they did in Israel. As we come to know more of the ritual of Babylonia, the resemblance it bears to that of the Hebrews becomes at once more striking and extensive. They both start from the same principles, and agree in many of their details. Between them, indeed, lies that deep gulf of difference which separates the religions of Israel and Babylonia as a whole; the one is monotheistic, the other polytheistic. But, apart from this profound distinction, the cult and ritual have more than a family relationship. Customs and rites which have lost their primitive meaning in the Levitical Law, find their explanation in Babylonia; even the ecclesiastical calendar of the Pentateuch looks back to the Babylonia of the age of Khammurabi. It cannot be an accident that the Khammurabi or Ammurapi of the cuneiform inscriptions is the Amraphel of Genesis, the contemporary of Abram the Hebrew, who was born in “Ur of the Chaldees.” The Mosaic Law must have drawn its first inspiration from the Abrahamic age, modified and developed though it may have been in the later centuries of Israelitish history.

Lecture X. Astro-Theology And The Moral Element In Babylonian Religion.

A hundred years ago, writers on the history or philosophy of religion had much to say about what they called Sabaism. The earliest form of idolatry was supposed to have been a worship of the heavenly bodies. A passage in the Book of Job was invoked in support of the fact, and beautifully executed drawings of Babylonian seal-cylinders were made for the sake of the pictures of the sun and moon and stars that were upon them. Sir William Drummond resolved the sons of Jacob into the signs of the Zodiac;(386) Dupuis derived Christianity itself from a sort of allegorical astronomy.

“Sabaism” has long since fallen into disrepute. Anthropology has long since taught us that primitive religion is not confined to a worship of the stars. The cult of the heavenly bodies was not the source of polytheism; indeed, there are systems of polytheism in which it has never existed at all. Of late the tendency has been to discount it altogether as a factor in the history of religion.

But the tendency has gone too far. There was one religion, at all events, in which it played an important part. This was the religion of ancient Babylonia and of those other countries which were influenced by Babylonian culture. But even here the decipherment of the inscriptions seemed to show that it belonged to a late age, and was an artificial product which never affected the people as a whole. When I delivered my Hibbert Lectures, I believed that I could dismiss it in a few words as merely a kind of subsidiary chapter added to the religion of the State by pedants and scholars.

Certain it is that the elaborate system of astro-theology which characterised Babylonian religion was an artificial creation. It was the result of a combination of religion with astronomy which was elaborated in the schools. Astronomy, like all other sciences, was under the control of the priests, the observatory rose by the side of the school within the precincts of the temple, and the dependence of the calendar on the observations of the astronomer gave them a religious character. Moreover, the astro-theology of Babylonia did not go back to primeval times. The identification of the official gods with the heavenly bodies belongs to an age when the official religion had already been crystallised into shape, and a map of the heavens had been made. We can almost watch its rise and trace its growth.

Nevertheless the rise and growth are of far earlier date than was formerly imagined. Astro-theology was not a mere learned scheme of allegorised science, the plaything of a school of pedants; it exercised a considerable influence upon the religion of Babylonia and upon the history of its development. It had, moreover, a background in the faith of the people. Like the rivers and streams, the stars also were really worshipped,(387) and the symbols drawn on the seal-cylinders show that this worship must go back to the oldest period of Babylonia. Even the ideograph that denotes “a god” represents an eight-rayed star. The fact is significant. At the time when the pictorial hieroglyphics were first being formed out of which the cuneiform characters were to grow, the star was already the symbol and representative of the divine. It was not as yet the more general and abstract “sky,” it was the particular star that was adored as a god. Babylonian religion, as far back as its written history leads us, really begins with Sabaism.

How is this fact to be reconciled with the further fact that the gods of Babylonia were once spirits and ghosts, the _zi_’s of Eridu and the _lil_’s of Nippur? To this question no answer at present is possible; at most we can only suggest that the _zi_, or spirit, was localised in the star. A spirit of the sun was as conceivable as a spirit of Ea, and the son of Ea, it must be remembered, became a sun-god. “The _zi_ of the god” meant originally in the primitive picture-writing “the spirit of the star,” and the literal rendering of the invocation in the early spells would be “the spirit of the star who is lord of Du-azagga,” “the spirit of the star who is mistress of the holy hill.” In the Book of Isaiah the Babylonian king is made to say that he would enthrone himself among the gods on the summit of the Chaldæan Olympos “above the stars of El”; and Nin-ip, the interpreter of En-lil, was at once the sun-god and the moon. Istar, it must not be forgotten, was primarily the evening star; and Istar was not only supreme among the goddesses of Babylonia, she was the type and representative of them all. The signs of the Zodiac had once been the monster allies of the dragon of chaos.

With all this, it may hereafter prove that the conception of the divine as a star was introduced by a different race from that which saw in it a spirit or a ghost. At all events, it was a conception which the inscriptions of Southern Arabia have shown to have prevailed among the Western Semites. Professor Hommel has made it clear(388) that the Semitic tribes to which the Arabs of the south, the Aramæans, and the Hebrews alike belonged, worshipped four supreme deities—Athtar, the evening and morning star; the moon-god and its messenger or “Prophet”; and the goddess of the sun. Athtar is the Babylonian Istar, who has become a male god in her passage to the Semites; and, while the people of Hadhramaut borrowed the name of Sin from Babylonia, those of Qatabân borrowed the name of Nebo (Anbây). Samas, the sun, has become a goddess; the moon-god has taken the foremost place in the pantheon, and the sun has accordingly been transformed into his colourless reflection. As in the case of Istar, so too in that of the sun-god, the genderless grammar of Sumerian facilitated the change. Â, the sun-god of Sippara, had become his wife under Semitic influence,(389) and from Sippara the conception of a solar goddess passed to the Semites on the western side of the Euphrates.

The supreme Baalim of the South Arabian inscriptions must thus have been of Babylonian origin. Name and character alike were derived from Sumerian Babylonia. And from this the further inference is obvious: Arabian and West Semitic “Sabaism,” with its worship of the heavenly bodies, was not indigenous. It must have been the result of contact with Babylonian civilisation, a contact which gave Ur and Harran a mixed population, and caused them to be the seats and centres of the worship of the moon-god. The primitive Semitic Baal—the “lord” of a specific plot of earth or tribal territory—became a moon-good or an evening star, while his wife was embodied in the sun.

This conclusion is confirmed by a study of the religion of Canaan. Here the place occupied by the moon-god among Arabians and Hebrews is taken by the sun. The supreme Baal is the sun-god, and the female Ashtoreth is identified with the moon. As I endeavoured to show in an earlier lecture, there was a period in the history of Babylonian religion when here also the sun-god was supreme. The gods were resolved into solar deities, or rather were identified with the sun. The solar element in Merodach threatened to absorb his human kingship; it was only his likeness to man that saved him from the fate of the Egyptian gods.

It is just this phase in the history of Babylonian theology that we find reflected in the theology of Canaan. Baal has passed into the sun-god, and his characteristics are those of the sun-gods of Babylonia. The historical monuments have told us how long and deep was the influence of Babylonia upon the culture of Canaan, and it was exercised just at the time when the solar faith had triumphed in the Babylonian plain. It is not without significance that Sargon of Akkad, who first brought the civilisation and arts of Babylonia to the shores of the Mediterranean, should have had his capital in a city which adjoined Sippara, the special seat of solar worship. While Arabia drew its inspiration from Ur, the religion of Canaan was modified by contact with a culture and theology that were more purely Babylonian. Phœnician tradition stoutly maintained that the ancestors of the Canaanitish people had come from the Persian Gulf.

“Sabaism,” therefore, to use the old term, must really have been an early form of Babylonian belief. It was communicated to the Semites west of the Euphrates at different times and in different ways. To the Western Semites of Arabia and Mesopotamia it came through Ur, and consequently set the moon-god at the head of the divine hierarchy. To the Canaanite it was carried more directly, but at a later period, when the solar worship had become dominant in Babylonia. The influence of Nippur had waned before that of Eridu, and out of Eridu had risen a culture-god whose son and vicegerent was the sun.

The moon-god was addressed in Southern Arabia by different titles, one of which was that ’Ammi or ’Ammu which forms part of the name of Khammurabi. Professor Hommel hints that even the Hebrew Yahveh may once have been a title of the moon-god among the Western Semites of Babylonia. As I was the first to point out, the name of Yahveh actually occurs in a document of the age of Abraham, where it enters into the composition of the name Yahum-ilu, the Joel of the Old Testament. Professor Hommel has since found other examples of it in tablets of the same period, thus overthrowing the modern theory which derives it from the Kenites.(390) It was already known to “Abram the Hebrew” in Ur of the Chaldees.

The hymn to the moon-god of Ur, to which I have referred in an earlier lecture,(391) is almost monotheistic in tone. To the writer he “alone is supreme in heaven and earth.” He is the creator of the universe; he is also the universal “Father,” “long-suffering and full of forgiveness, whose hand upholds the life of all mankind.” More than that, he is “the omnipotent one, whose heart is immensity, and there is none that may fathom it.” Among the other gods he has no rival; he causes the herb to grow, and the cattle and flock to bring forth; and he established law and justice among mankind. The angels of heaven and the spirits of the earth alike do homage to him; there is no goddess even who appears at his side. The hymn formed part of the ritual of the great temple at Ur before the birth of Abraham, and the Hebrew patriarch may well have listened to its teaching.

From Ur and its mixed population we can trace the worship of the Babylonian moon-god along the coasts of Southern Arabia as far as Egypt. In Hadhramaut, as I have already said, the very name of Sin was retained, and even in North-western Arabia the name of the sacred mountain of Sinai bears witness to the cult of the Babylonian deity. Early seal-cylinders associate with the moon-god both an ape and a dwarf-like figure, called Nu-gidda, “the dwarf,” in Sumerian, who dances in honour of the god, like the Danga dwarf in Egypt, or the cynocephalous apes of Thoth. In Egypt, however, the dwarf assumes the shape of Bes, who is often represented with an ape on either side; and Bes with his crown of feathers, along with the apes (or monkeys) that accompany him, came from the south of Arabia to the valley of the Nile.

The monotheistic tendency of the hymn to the moon-god stands in marked contrast to the polytheism of the solar hymns. The solar ritual, in fact, was essentially polytheistic. But Nannar or Sin, the moon-god, was “the prince of the gods,” the ruler of the starry hosts of heaven. By the side of him the stars were but as the sheep of a flock in the presence of their shepherd, or as the people of a State in the presence of their deified king. Hence he was lord over his brother gods in a way that the sun-god could never be; they became the hosts that he marshalled in fight against the enemies of light and order, the multitude that obeyed his voice as the sheep follow their shepherd. The moon-god was emphatically “the lord of hosts”!

The title was applied to other gods in later days. Nebuchadrezzar calls Nebo “the marshaller of the hosts of heaven and earth,”(392) and Tiglath-pileser I. makes Assur “the director of the hosts of the gods.” The kings transferred the title to themselves, changing only “gods” into “men,” and so becoming “kings of the hosts of mankind.” But the first signification of the term was “the host of heaven,” the stars of El above whom the king of Babylon sought to erect his throne. One of the primeval divinities of the pantheon—a divinity, indeed, who scarcely emerged from his primitive condition of a primordial spirit—was En-me-sarra,(393) “the enchanter of the (heavenly and earthly) hosts,” to whom in some of the old Babylonian cities a feast of mourning was celebrated at the time of the winter solstice in the month Tebet. A hymn entitles him “the lord of the earth, the prince of Arallu, lord of the place and the land whence none return, even the mountain of the spirits of earth ... without whom Inguriṡa cannot produce prosperity in field or canal, cannot create the crop ... he who gives sceptre and reign to Anu and El-lil.”(394) He is invoked, like the moon-god, to establish firmly the foundation-stone that it may last for ever. But it is not only over the spirits of the underground world that he holds sway; he reigns also in heaven, in the close vicinity of the ecliptic, and “the seven great gods” who were his sons were stars in the sky. His attributes, therefore, closely resemble those of the moon-god of Ur: like the moon-god, he is at once lord of the sky and of the underworld, a father of the stars of night who makes the green herb grow in the earth below. In En-me-sarra, “the enchanter of the (spirit)-hosts,” the realm of the moon-god was united with that of En-lil; as lord of the night he ruled in Hades, and was supreme even in that “mountain” of the ghost-world from which En-lil derived one of his names.(395)

But I must leave to others the task of further pursuing the path of exploration which I have thus sketched in outline. That Yahveh was once identified with the moon-god of Babylonia in those distant days, when as yet Abraham had not been born in Ur of Chaldees, explains his title of “Lord of hosts” better than the far-fetched theories which have been invented to account for it. The explanation has at least the merit of being supported by the ancient texts of Babylonia. Adventurous spirits may even be inclined to see in Sinai, the mountain of Sin, a fitting place for the promulgation of the Law of the Lord of hosts; but such speculations lie beyond the reach of the present lecturer, and the lectures he has undertaken to give.

The name of En-me-sarra, “the enchanter of the (spirit)-hosts,” brings us back to that dark background of magic and sorcery which distinguished and disfigured the religion of Babylonia up to the last. The Sumerian element continued to survive in the Babylonian people, and the magic which was its primitive religion survived also. It was never eliminated; behind the priest lurked the sorcerer; the spell and the incantation were but partially hidden beneath the prayer and the penitential psalm. One result of this was the exaggerated importance attached to rites and ceremonies, and the small space occupied by the moral element in the official Babylonian faith. There was doubtless a certain amount of spirituality, more especially of an individualistic sort; the sinner bewails his transgressions, and appeals for help to his deity, but of morality as an integral part of religion there is little evidence. We look in vain for anything analogous to the judgment-hall of Osiris and the negative confession of the Egyptian dead; the Babylonian gods, it is true, preferred that a man should walk uprightly, but his future salvation did not depend on his conduct in this life. He was punished in this world for his sins and shortcomings, but the sins were not confined to sins against morality; they equally included ceremonial transgressions.

At the same time, a sort of catechism which forms part of the ritual of the seers shows that a recognition of the moral element in religion was not altogether wanting. The following is Professor Zimmern’s translation of it: “Has he estranged the father from his son? Has he estranged the son from his father? Has he estranged the mother from her daughter? Has he estranged the daughter from her mother? Has he estranged the mother-in-law from her daughter-in-law? Has he estranged the brother from his brother? Has he estranged the friend from his friend? Has he estranged the companion from his companion? Has he refused to set a captive free, or has he refused to loose one who was bound? Has he excluded the prisoner from the light? Has he said of a captive, ‘Hold him fast,’ or of one who was bound, ‘Strengthen his bonds’? Has he committed sin against a god, or has he committed sin against a goddess? Has he offended a god, or has he held a goddess in light esteem? Is his sin against his own god, or is his sin against his own goddess? Has he done violence to one older than himself, or has he conceived hatred against an elder brother? Has he held his father and mother in contempt, or has he insulted his elder sister? Has he been generous in small things, but avaricious in great matters? Has he said ‘yea’ for ‘nay,’ and ‘nay’ for ‘yea’? Has he spoken of unclean things or [counselled] disobedience? Has he spoken wicked words?... Has he used false scales?... Has he accepted a wrong account, or has he refused a rightful sum? Has he disinherited a legitimate son, or has he recognised an illegitimate son? Has he set up a false landmark, or has he refused to set up a true landmark? Has he removed bound, border, or landmark? Has he broken into his neighbour’s house? Has he drawn near his neighbour’s wife? Has he shed his neighbour’s blood? Has he stolen his neighbour’s garment?”(396)

The list of questions reminds us of the negative confession of the Osirian creed, but the end and purpose of it is different. They are the questions put to the penitent in order that the priest may discover why the wrath of the gods has fallen upon him. They relate to this life only, not to the next; conformity to the moral code they imply brings with it no assurance of eternal happiness, it is a guarantee only against suffering and misfortune in the present world. The point of view of the Babylonian was that of the friends of Job.

Morality, in fact, was left in large measure to the legislator. An old code, which seems to have been ascribed to the god Ea, asserts explicitly the responsibility of the ruler, and his amenability to divine punishment for unrighteous dealing.

“If the king does not give heed to justice,” it begins, “his people will perish and his land be enfeebled.(397)

“If he gives no heed to the law of the land, Ea, the king of destinies, will change his destiny, and visit him with misfortune.

“If he gives no heed to his nobles, his days shall [not] be long.

“If he gives no heed to the wise, his land will revolt against him.

“If he gives heed to the (law-)book, the king will behold the strengthening of his land.

“If he gives heed to the writing (_sipir_) of Ea, the great gods will establish him in counsel and knowledge of justice.

“If he smites a man of Sippara and gives a wrong decision, the sun-god, who judges heaven and earth, will appoint another judge in his land, and a just prince and a just judge instead of unjust ones.

“If the sons of Nippur come to him for judgment, and he accepts bribes and treats them harshly, Bel, the lord of the world, will bring a foreign enemy against him and destroy his army; the prince and his general will be hunted like outcasts through the streets.

“If the sons of Babylon bring silver and offer bribes, and he favours the Babylonians and turns himself to their entreaty, Merodach, the lord of heaven and earth, will set his foes over him, and give his goods and his treasure to his enemy. The sons of Nippur, or Sippar, or Babylon who act thus shall be cast into prison.”(398)

The dissociation of ethics and religion in Babylonia was due to a considerable extent to the practical character of Babylonian theology and the limitation of the doctrine of rewards and punishments to this life. In contrast to the Egyptian, who may be said to have lived for the next world, the Babylonian lived for this. It was here that he was rewarded for his piety or punished for his sins. The world beyond the grave was a place of unspeakable dreariness. I have already described it in a previous lecture. It was a prison-house of darkness and unsubstantiality; a land where all things were forgotten, and those who inhabited it were themselves forgotten of men. It resembled the Hebrew Sheol; indeed, it is probable that the name of Sheol is borrowed from Babylonia,(399) and borrowed names are apt to indicate that the ideas connected with them were borrowed too. In the gloom of that underworld, where the ghosts of the dead fed on dust and refuse, the hideous monsters of chaos still moved and dimly showed themselves, while “the kings of the nations” sat on their shadowy thrones, welcoming the slaughtered king of Babylon with the words: “Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?” The dead man never again saw the light of the sun. There was no Osirian paradise to receive him, with its sunshine and happy meadows; even the brief period of light which the solar creed of Egypt allowed the bark of the sun-god to bring to the denizens of the other world, was denied to the dead Babylonian. Over the gates of the world beyond the grave the words were written: “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” There was no return; none, even with the help of Merodach, could come back to the home he had left on earth; the sevenfold gates of Hades opened only to admit those that entered it. Death meant the extinction of light and hope, even of the capacity for feeling either pleasure or pain.

It was on this life, therefore, that the religious thoughts of the Babylonian were centred. And his view of his relation to the gods was a curious mixture of spirituality and the commercial instinct. On the one hand, it was a question of barter; if the man was generous in his gifts to the gods, if he did what they approved and abstained from what they condemned, above all, if the rites and ceremonies of religion were correctly fulfilled, the gods were bound to grant him all that his heart desired. On the other hand, if misfortune fell upon him, it was a proof that he had sinned against them. And as the centuries passed the consciousness of sin sank more and more deeply into the heart of the Babylonian. At first, indeed, the sins were offences against the ritual rather than against the moral and spiritual code. The ghosts and spirits of the old Sumerian faith were non-moral; if some of them inflicted pain and disease upon man, it was because it was their nature to do so, and the only defence against them was in the charms of the sorcerer. But with the arrival of the Semite, and the consequent transformation of the goblin into a god and of the sorcerer into a priest, a new conception was introduced of the divine nature. The gods became human, and the humanity they put on was that of civilised man. They became moral agents, hating iniquity and loving righteousness, ready to help the creatures they had made, but chastising them for their offences as the father would his son. “Father,” in fact, is one of the commonest titles given to the god in the new age of Babylonian religion. It was only in the conception of Hades that the old ideas still maintained their influence, that the powers who ruled there still continued to be the malignant or non-moral monsters of an earlier belief, and that a common lot was believed to await in it all mankind, whatever might have been their conduct on this side of the grave.

In this world, on the contrary, the conviction that sin brought punishment with it became more and more pronounced. And with the conviction came an increasing belief in the efficacy of prayer and repentance, and the necessity for purity of heart. The words supposed to have been put into the mouth of Merodach after his creation of man, late in date though they may be, testify clearly to the fact. I give them in Mr. King’s translation(400)—

“Towards thy god shalt thou be pure of heart, for that is the glory of the godhead; Prayer and supplication and bowing low to the earth, early in the morning shalt thou offer unto him.... The fear of god begets mercy, offerings increase life, and prayer absolves from sin. He that fears the gods shall not cry aloud [in grief], he that fears the spirits of earth shall have a long [life]. Against friend and neighbour thou shalt not speak [evil]. Speak not of things that are hidden, [practise] mercy, When thou makest a promise (to give), give and [hold] not [back].”

Already, in the age of Khammurabi, the author of the story of the Deluge makes it the punishment inflicted on mankind for their misdeeds, and the Chaldæan Noah is rescued from it by Ea on account of his piety. The penitential psalms and ritual texts are full of illustrations of the same fact. It is true that the misdeeds are often merely involuntary violations of the ceremonial law or offences against the ritual, but the sense of guilt attaching to them is already profound. It required centuries before the Babylonian was able to distinguish between moral and ceremonial sin,—if, indeed, he ever succeeded in doing so,—but at an early period a consciousness of the heinousness of sin already lay heavily upon him, as well as of the need of repentance. A profound sense of his transgressions, and of the punishment they deserved, had grown up within him long before he had learnt to confine it to moral guilt. In this respect, again, he differed from the Egyptian: penitence and the consciousness of sin belonged to Babylonia; we look in vain for them in the valley of the Nile. The light-hearted Egyptian was too contented to feel them; the gods he worshipped were, like himself, kindly and easy-going, and the pantheism of the upper classes offered no place to a reproachful conscience.

But the gods of Babylonia, in the days when the Sumerian and the Semite had become one people, were stern judges. The theology of Eridu was coloured and darkened by that of Nippur; Ea might save Xisuthros from the waters of the Flood, but En-lil had doomed all men to destruction. And whether it was the sun-god who was worshipped, or the moon-god of Ur, it was still a judge who beheld and visited all the deeds of living men. In the sun-god the judge predominated, in the moon-god the father, but that was all. The father was also a judge, the judge was also a father, and the same word might be used to denote both.

But it must be remembered that the judgeship of the son-god and the fatherhood of the moon-god were confined to the present world. They were not dead gods like Osiris, whose tribunal was in another world. There was no postponing the evil day, therefore; a man’s sins were visited upon him in this life, just as it was also in this life that his righteousness was rewarded. A death-bed repentance was useless; penitence, to be effective, must be manifested on this side of the grave.

Hence came the penitential ritual which forms so striking a feature in the service-books of Babylonia. It was reduced to a system, like the confessional in later days. The penitent was instructed by the priest what to say, and the priest pronounced his absolution. For the exercise of priestly absolution was another essential feature of Babylonian religion.

Besides the consciousness of sin and the conception of repentance, the idea of mediation must also be traced to Babylonia. On the earliest seals the priest is represented as acting as a mediator between the worshipper and his god. It is only through the priest that the layman can approach the deity and be led into the presence of the god. This idea of mediation has a twofold origin. On the one side, it goes back to the beliefs which saw in the magician—the predecessor of the priest—the possessor of knowledge and powers that were hidden from the rest of mankind; on the other side, it has grown out of the doctrine that the priest was the vicegerent of the god. It was thus the result of the union of two conceptions which I believe to have been respectively Sumerian and Semitic. The deified king or pontiff necessarily took the place of the god on earth; Gudea, for instance, at Lagas was the representative of the god Inguriṡa, and therefore himself divine. The fact that the gods were represented in human forms facilitated this conversion of the minister of the deity into his adopted son and representative; the powers and functions of the god were transferred to him, and, like the vassal-prince in the absence of the supreme king, he acted in the god’s place.

The Semitic Baal was a lord or king of human shape and passions. He thus stood in marked contrast to the Sumerian ghost or spirit; and, as we have seen, the gulf between them is too deep and broad to be spanned by the doctrine of evolution. For the Sumerian the world outside man was peopled with spirits and demons; for the Semite it was a human world, since man was made in the image of the gods. The triumph of the gods of light and order over the monsters of chaos symbolised not only the birth of the present creation, but also the theological victory of the Semite over the Sumerian. And with the victory came a conception of the divine which was modelled on that of the organised State. As the human head of the State was himself a god, delegating his authority from time to time to his human ministers, so too in the world of gods there was a supreme Baal or lord who was surrounded by his court and ministers. Foremost among these were the _sukkalli_ or “angels,” the messengers who conveyed the will of their lord to the dwellers upon earth. Some of them were more than messengers; they were the interpreters and vicegerents of the supreme deity, like Nebo “the prophet” of Borsippa. And as vicegerents they naturally became the sons by adoption of Bel; Asari of Eridu first takes the place of Ea, whose double he originally was, and then in the person of Merodach becomes his son; Nin-ip of Nippur, the messenger of En-lil, is finally transformed into his son, and addressed, like Horus in Egypt, as “the avenger of his father.”(401) The hierarchy of the gods is modelled upon that of Babylonia, and the ideas of mediation and vicegerency are transferred to heaven.

Repentance, the consciousness of sin, and mediation are thus conceptions all of which may be traced back to Babylonia. And each of them leads naturally, if not inevitably, to other and cognate conceptions. Mediation, as I have pointed out, is partly dependent on a belief in a doctrine of vicegerency, which, in combination with a profound sense of sin, leads in turn to the doctrine of absolution. And mediation itself is given a wide meaning. The priest mediates between the layman and his deity; the lesser gods between mankind and the supreme Baalim. M. Martin aptly compares the intercession of Abraham for the doomed cities of the plain, and the doctrine of the intercession of the Saints in the Christian Church.(402)

The consciousness of sin, again, is similarly far-reaching. It extends to sins of ignorance and omission as well as to sins of commission. Time after time the penitential psalms ask forgiveness for sins the very nature of which was unknown to the penitent. “The sin that I have done I know not,” he is made to say, “The transgression that I have committed I know not.”

“An offence I have committed unwillingly against my god. A sin against my goddess unwillingly have I wrought: O lord, my transgressions are many, manifold are my sins!”

The disease or misfortune that had overtaken him was a proof of the sin, even though it had been committed involuntarily or in ignorance that it was wrong. “When I was little I sinned,” says another psalm, “yea, I transgressed the commandments of my god.”(403)

Repentance has its corollary confession, whether public or private. And the ritual texts show that both public and private confession was practised in Babylonia. Indeed, private confession seems to have been the older and more usual method. The penitential psalms are in the first person singular, like the Hebrew psalms; in public confession the Babylonian probably believed that a man was more likely to think about the sins of others than about his own.

Penitence implies a need of absolution. It also implies a belief in the sinfulness of human nature and the purity of the divine. The purity, it is true, may be ceremonial rather than moral, and in the early days of Babylonian religion the ceremonial element almost obscured the moral. But as time went on the moral element grew ever stronger, and the ritual texts began to be superseded by prayers of a more spiritual character. The prayers addressed by Nebuchadrezzar to Merodach rise almost to the height of a passionate faith in the absolute goodness and mercy of the god.

Speaking generally, then, we may say that the religion of Babylonia was essentially anthropomorphic, with all the faults and virtues of an anthropomorphic conception of the divine. But it was grafted on a primeval stock of Sumerian shamanism from the influences of which it never wholly shook itself free. It thus differed from Hebrew anthropomorphism, with which in other respects it had so much in common. Behind the lineaments of Hebrew anthropomorphism ghost or goblin are not to be found.

And yet between the religion of Babylonia and that of Israel there was much that was alike. It was natural, indeed, that it should be so. The Babylonians of history were Semitic, and Abraham the Hebrew had sprung from a Babylonian city. In the last lecture I drew attention to the similarity that existed between the temples of Babylonia and that of Jerusalem, a similarity that extended even to details. There was the same similarity between the Babylonian rituals and the Mosaic Law; the priesthood, moreover, was established on the same lines, and the prophets and seers of Israel have their analogues in those of Chaldæa. The religious law and ritual of the Hebrews looks back like their calendar to the banks of the Euphrates.

The same lesson is taught by the literary traditions of the Hebrew people. The cosmology of Genesis has its roots in the cosmology of Eridu, and the first home of mankind is placed by the Old Testament in Eden, “the plain” of Babylonia, which was watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. The Babylonian story of the Deluge is the parent of that which is recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures, while it was at Babylon that the dispersal of mankind took place. The background of Hebrew history is as purely Babylonian as the background of Hebrew ritual.

And, as Gunkel has shown,(404) the old Babylonian traditions embodied in the Book of Genesis must have made their way to the West at the very beginning of Hebrew history. They enter into the web of the earliest Hebrew thought, and are presupposed by Hebrew literature. The cosmology which saw the primordial element in the watery deep, and told of the victory that had been won over Tiamât, the dragon of chaos, must have been already known in Canaan when the language and script of Babylonia were taught in its schools, and Babylonian literature studied in its libraries. Long before the Mosaic age, the literary culture of Babylonia had profoundly affected the peoples of Syria, and had penetrated even to the banks of the Nile. Need we be surprised, then, if we find a “sea” in the temple of Solomon, the symbol of beliefs which had their origin on the shores of the Persian Gulf, or priestly ordinances which recall those of ancient Chaldæa?

The ordinances and temples were but the outward symbols of the ideas that had created them. The anthropomorphism of Semitic Babylonia is reflected in the anthropomorphism of the Israelites. The sense of sin and of the overwhelming power of the deity, the efficacy of penitence and the necessity of a mediator, are common to both Babylonia and Israel. Hence it is that the penitential psalms of the Babylonian ritual bear so striking a resemblance to the psalms of the Old Testament; hence, too, the individual element and deep spirituality that characterise them. Israel was indebted to Babylonia for something more than the seeds of a merely material civilisation.

It is true that there is a gulf, wide and impassable, between the Babylonian religion as we decipher it in the cuneiform tablets, and the religion of Israel as it is presented to us in the Old Testament. On the one side, we have a gross and grotesque polytheism; on the other, an uncompromising monotheism. Babylonian religion made terms with magic and sorcery, and admitted them in a certain degree to its privileges; they were not incompatible with polytheism; but between them and the worship of the one God there could be no reconciliation. It was the same with the sensualities that masqueraded at Erech in the garb of a religious cult; they belonged to a system in which the sun-god was Baal, and a goddess claimed the divided adoration of man. To Israel they were forbidden, like the necromancy and witchcraft with which they were allied.

But deep and impassable as may be the gulf which separated the Mosaic Law from the official religion of Babylonia, different as may have been the development of prophecy in Babylonia and Israel, the primordial ideas from which they started were strangely alike. The same relation that is borne by the religion of ancient Egypt to Christianity is borne by the religion of Babylonia to Judaism. The Babylonian conception of the divine, imperfect though it was, underlay the faith of the Hebrew, and tinctured it up to the end. The Jew never wholly freed himself from the dominion of beliefs which had their first starting-point in the “plain” of Babylonia; his religious horizon remained bounded by death, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued to be the God of the living and not of the dead. It was in this world that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished; the world to come was the dreary shadow-land of Babylonian teaching, a land of darkness where all things are forgotten, but also a land where “the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.”

INDEX.

Â, 318, 338, 482.

Abraham, 497, 498.

absolution, Babylonian doctrine of, 497.

Abusir. _See_ Busiris.

Abydos, 104, 119, 159, 166.

Adam, 384, 417.

Adapa the first man, 383, 423, 424, 439, 445.

Adonis, 447.

Æons, Gnostic, 397.

Akhem, 161. _See_ Horus of Nekhen.

Akkad, 264, 270.

Alexander, 45, 447.

Allat, 288.

Alu, fields of, 37, 156, 161, 168, 184, 191, 200.

Am Duat. _See_ Book of.

Amherst, Lord, of Hackney, 255.

’Ammi, 484.

Amon, 89, 90, 94, 148 sq., 249.

Amon-hotep III., born of a virgin, 45, 249.

Amon-hotep IV. (Khu-n-Aten), 11, 35, 92, 195.

Amon-t, 231.

Amorites, 265, 271, 320.

Amraphel. _See_ Khammurabi.

amulets, 226, 227.

Anak, 136.

Anat, 310.

ancestor-worship, 122.

angel, 315, 361, 456, 496.

Anhur, 44, 87, 89, 160, 163.

animal gods of Babylonia, 406.

animal worship, 100 sq., 242.

Ansar, 367, 390, 404.

anthropomorphism, 107, 349, 498.

Anu, 308 sq., 342, 384, 435, 456. " identified with other gods, 336.

Anubis, 90, 103, 104, 158.

Anunit, 344.

Anunna, 344, 356.

Anunna-ki, 309, 335, 376.

Anuqet, 135.

_ânz_, 156.

apes of Thoth, 132.

Apis, 110, 115, 206.

Apophis, 162, 187, 199, 212, 225.

Arabia, 261, 315, 317, 321, 481, 483, 485.

Arad-Ea, 437.

Arallu, 451, 452, 486.

Ararat, 441.

ark, 369, 460.

Arum, 305, 383, 432, 433, 440.

Aṡari, 131, 147, 164 sq., 272, 288, 300, 313, 325, 401, 406, 457, 496.

Ashel, 144.

Asherah, 321, 338, 367.

Ashtoreth, 338, 339, 342, 483.

Assur, 85, 346, 366 sq., 486.

Assur-bani-pal, 289, 292, 416, 464, 470.

Assurit, 371.

astronomy, Babylonian, 236, 411, 480.

astro-theology, 234, 438.

Atarpi, 438, 446.

Aten-Ra, 94. " hymn to, 96. " universal father, 98.

Athtar (Istar), 147, 321, 482.

Atmu. _See_ Tum.

At-Nebes, 225.

axe, double-headed, 128.

Azaga-suga, 353.

_ba._ _See_ Soul.

Baal, 98, 287, 310, 314, 315, 317, 328, 330, 349, 364, 370, 395, 467, 482.

Babylon, colony of Eridu, 261, 327, 335, 367, 394.

Babylonia and Egypt, 234. " divided into States, 264.

Babylonian theology artificial, 273.

Babylonians, mixed race, 270.

Bâkhu, 146.

Bakis, 111.

Balawât, 461.

Ball, Mr., 164.

“banner-name,” 53.

Bast, 144, 231.

Bau, 304 sq., 407, 460, 473.

beast-worship, 37.

Bel, 118, 267, 301, 312, 348.

Bel-Merodach, 256. _See_ Merodach.

Belshazzar, 469.

Beltis (Bilat), 310.

_bennu._ _See_ phœnix.

Berenikê, city of, 223.

Berossos, 264, 269, 299, 307, 377, 411, 436, 453, 475.

Bes, 139, 485.

Bilu. _See_ Bel.

Book Am Duat, 195 sq.

Book of Respirations, 194.

Book of the Dead, 173, 182 sq.

Borsippa, 255, 453.

Brahmanism, 103.

Breasted, Professor, 96.

Bubastis, 112, 144, 145.

bulls, winged, 118, 224, 354.

Busiris, 156, 160.

Buto, 154, 162.

Cain, 307, 308.

calendar, Babylonian and Hebrew, 472.

Canaan, 259, 261, 287, 310, 483.

cannibalism, 16, 234.

cats, 144, 208.

Chabas, 232.

Champollion, 187, 249.

chaos, 375, 376, 388, 389.

Chemosh, 85, 345, 346.

cherubim, 118, 354, 471.

Christian theology, 230.

Christianity and Osirian creed, 248.

Clement, St., 100, 120, 181.

confession in Babylonia, 418, 488 sq., 497.

confession, the negative, 174, 489.

cow of Istar, 148.

creation, epic of, 238, 387 sq. " of heavenly bodies, 393. " of man, 304. " Sumerian story of, 380.

creator-potter, 375.

_dad_, 227.

Daddu, 156, 157.

Damascius, 367, 387.

Dam-kina, 300 sq.

dances, sacred, 134.

Danga dwarf, 133, 139, 485.

death, origin of, 384, 425.

decans, 237.

deep, the, 239, 375, 389.

deification of Babylonian kings, 290, 351.

deluge, Babylonian story of, 437 sq., 443 sq., 493.

deluge in Genesis, 443, 444.

de Morgan, M., 59, 105.

Dendera, 87, 145.

Dep. _See_ Buto.

de Sarzec, M., 254.

Deukalion, 445.

development, 248.

_dimmer_, 405.

Diodorus, 237.

disc, solar, 76, 89, 94 sq., 224, 369. " legend of, 226.

dismemberment of corpse, 25.

double. _See_ Ka and Zi.

Du-azagga, 327, 374, 456.

Dungi, 41.

Ea, 86, 131, 137, 164, 239, 262, 269, 279, 287, 299, 304, 307, 326, 353, 354, 374, 386, 401, 439.

Ea, code of, 489.

Ea-bani, 283, 433 sq.

Eden or Edin, 260, 263, 281, 385.

Edfu, 221.

Egypt, earliest races of, 23. " early kingdoms of, 37 sq., 43. " origin of name, 55, 58. " Pharaonic conquest of, 224.

Egyptian conception of God, 34.

Egyptians, conservative, 30, 36. " disinclined for the abstract, 30, 36.

Egyptians, origin of, 22.

_ekimmu_, 284, 285, 287.

E-kur(a), 306, 356, 374, 376, 449, 451, 457.

Elamites, 266, 270, 434.

El-Kab (Nekheb), 39, 135, 168.

El-lil. _See_ En-lil.

Elohim, 286.

emanation, doctrine of, 91, 250.

embalming, 23, 68.

_ên_, 413.

Endor, witch of, 286.

En-lil, 261, 262, 269, 282, 285, 297, 309, 315, 348, 352, 353, 376, 379, 405, 406, 439, 452.

En-me-sarra, 408, 486.

Ennead, the, 33, 82, 314.

Enos, 308.

_ênu_, 404, 410, 415.

Erech, 308, 311, 312, 340, 341, 432, 433, 453, 461.

Ereskigal, 428.

Eridu, 138, 164, 260, 262, 268, 301, 304, 327, 367, 373, 381, 386, 407.

Erman, Professor, 125.

Erment, 86, 111.

Ê-Saggil, 324, 328, 374, 382, 413, 454.

Ê-Sarra, 356.

Esau, 272.

Etana, story of, 425.

euhemerism, 123.

Evans, Dr. A. J., 128.

fasting, 418, 477.

Feast of Weeks, 474.

feather cap, 136.

festivals, 472 sq.

fetishism in primitive Egypt, 103, 205, 227.

folk-lore, limitations of, 18.

frog, the, 136.

Genesis, Book of, 340. " cosmology of, 388, 395. " deluge in, 443, 444.

genii of the dead, 65.

ghost of unburied dead, 284.

Gilgames, 79, 191, 283, 284, 383, 423, 426, 430 sq.

Gnostics, 91, 202, 250, 397.

God, Egyptian conception of, 34, 244 sq., 396.

God, Sumerian conception of, 405.

goddess, Babylonian, 332.

gods, Babylonian, identified with each other, 330.

gods, Babylonian, human, 349.

Goshen, 225, 236.

Great Bear, the, 236.

Grébaut, M., 164.

green paint, 155.

Gudea, 41, 43, 124, 254, 274, 290, 352, 473, 475.

Gunkel, 445, 499.

Hadad, 319 sq., 329, 440.

Hades, Babylonian, 286, 288, 294, 349, 426, 427, 443, 491.

Hâpi. _See_ Nile.

Harmakhis, 76, 78, 89, 220.

Harper, song of the, 13, 125.

Harran, 314, 315, 335, 482.

Hathor, 36, 143, 145 sq., 228.

Hathor-headed column, 119.

Haupt, Prof., 433, 455, 464, 465, 471.

hawk of Horus, 71, 103, 104.

heart, 66.

Heliopolis. _See_ On. " school of, 33, 131.

hell, Egyptian, 179, 197.

Hêraklês, 432, 436, 443, 446.

Herkhuf, 133.

Hermetic books, 68, 101, 181.

Hermopolis, school of, 33, 114, 130, 132.

Herodotos, 110, 112, 139, 144, 454, 457.

Hesperides, 446.

Heuzey, M., 119.

Hezekiah, 334, 471.

Hierakonpolis. _See_ Nekhen.

hieroglyphics, 32.

high priest, 267, 367, 461, 462. _See_ patesi.

Holy of Holies, 456, 457, 459, 464.

Hommel, Professor, 59, 130, 238, 256, 267, 287, 315, 317, 321, 437, 482, 484, 491.

Hor-Behudet, 220.

Hor-pes, 207.

Horus, the elder, 71.

Horus, the younger, son of Isis, 89, 154, 161, 163, 232, 496.

Horus, 39, 42, 54, 61, 162, 165, 238. " followers of, 23, 43, 73, 81, 128.

Horus, the golden, 74. " the mummified, of Nekhen (_see_ Akhem), 68, 75, 78, 163, 236.

Horus, two eyes of, 78.

hosts, divine, 355. " lord of, 487.

hymns, Babylonian, 411 sq.

Igigi (angels), 309, 355.

Imhotep, 140, 231.

Incantations, book of, 402.

incarnation, doctrine of, 242.

inspiration, verbal, 414.

Isaiah, 452, 457, 477, 481.

Isis, 84, 135, 146. " as witch, 219.

Iskhara, 374.

Israelitish religion, 498.

Istar, 144, 146, 292, 311, 332, 337 sq., 349, 431, 434, 440, 464.

Istar, descent of, to Hades, 426 sq.

Isum, 429.

Jachin (Yakin), 350, 459.

Jacob’s ladder, 393.

Jastrow, Professor, 440, 464, 469.

Jensen, Professor, 457, 477.

Jokha, 254.

Jubilee, year of, 476.

judgment, future, 173 sq., 191, 295.

Juvenal, 101.

Ka, 48 sq., 185, 192, 198, 227, 228, 276, 280, 286, 293.

Ka-name. _See_ banner-name.

Khammurabi (Amraphel), 79, 256, 266, 352, 362, 365, 410, 423, 438, 473.

Khar, 79.

Khent-Amentit, 161.

Khepera, 218, 231.

kher-heb, 140, 405.

Khonsu, 130, 151.

_khu_, 59, 60 sq., 120, 199.

Khumbaba, 433.

Khu-n-Aten. _See_ Amon-hotep IV.

_kigal_, 449, 455.

Kingu, 282, 428.

Kisar, 390.

Kutha (Cuthah), 378.

Lagas. _See_ Tello.

Larsa, 266, 318.

law, Egyptian conception of, 247.

Law, Mosaic, 52, 57, 99, 471, 474, 498.

Lehmann, Dr., 457.

Lenormant, Fr., 300, 399, 400.

lil, 261, 278, 280 sq., 285, 287, 301, 306, 379, 481.

Lilith, 261, 281, 306.

Lindl, Dr., 256.

Logos, 132.

Lucas, Paul, 213.

Lugal-zaggisi, 308, 311.

Magan (Sinaitic Peninsula), 265.

magic in Israel, 292, 401. " in Babylonia, 466, 500.

magical texts, 291. " " Babylonian, 399 sq.

Malik, 321.

Mami, 446.

man, deification of, in Egypt, 37, 41, 42.

man, deification of, in Babylonia, 41.

Manes, 61.

Manetho, 61.

maqlû, collection, 410.

Mas, 79, 436.

Maspero, Professor, 33, 51, 59, 60, 63, 72, 77, 83, 87, 107, 132, 156, 161, 179, 183, 186, 189, 198, 207, 210, 244.

Mât, 174, 247.

materialism, 242.

mediation, Babylonian idea of, 495 sq.

Memphis, 51, 55, 58, 90, 139. " origin of name of, 138.

Ménant, M., 468.

Mendes, 113, 115, 157, 206.

Meneptah, 141.

Menes, 44, 60, 103, 121, 160, 162.

Mentiu, the, 149.

Mentu, 89, 111, 149, 151.

mercy-seat, 456.

Mermer, 321.

Merodach (Asari), 256, 267, 269, 288, 302, 307, 323 sq., 351, 353, 354, 365, 382, 391, 428, 483.

Merodach identified with other gods, 336.

Merodach, etymology of name of, 272, 273.

Mert-seger, 210.

_mesen_, 222.

Messiah, the Egyptian, 248.

metaphors, 15.

metempsychosis, 102, 108.

Min, 104.

_mitra_, 357.

Mnevis, 111, 115, 206.

monotheism in Babylonia, 336, 484.

moon, 130. " eclipse of, 430.

Moon-god, 261. " Babylonian, 314, 322, 340, 353, 482, 484.

moral test of righteousness, 173, 178, 247.

morality not religion, 6.

mountain of the world, 376, 452.

Mummu (chaos), 85, 130.

mummy, 26, 63, 67, 154, 198.

Mut, 80, 81, 89, 135, 144, 151.

Nabonidos, 334, 365, 411, 448.

name, identical with thing, 331. " virtue of, 219.

Namtar, 282.

Nannar. _See_ Moon-god.

Naram-Sin, 41, 45, 125, 265, 318, 351.

Naville, Dr., 72, 145, 192, 250.

Nebhât, 84, 90, 157, 162.

Nebo, 166, 255, 322, 355, 362 sq., 374, 390, 456, 482, 485, 496.

Nebuchadrezzar, 323, 457, 485, 498. " palace of, 256.

Nefer-Tum, 90, 140.

Nekheb. _See_ El-Kab. " goddess, 39, 40, 42, 68, 80, 135.

Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), 39, 72, 75, 119, 135, 166, 168.

Nergal, 288, 378, 428, 470.

_neter_, 127.

New year, 473.

Nile, 140 sq. " sources of, 137.

Nimrod, 446.

Ninâ, 366.

Nin-gis-zida, 350, 384, 460.

Nin-ip, 80, 356 sq., 439, 474, 496.

Nin-lil, 405.

Nippur, 254, 260, 268, 269, 297, 328, 356, 373, 407.

Nit, 89, 143, 321.

Nizir, 441, 451.

nomes, origin of, 38. " standards of, 105.

Norden, 214.

Nu, 83, 129.

Nu-gidda, 139, 353, 485.

Nusku, 363, 439, 456.

Nut, 83, 84, 129.

Nu-Urru, 191.

Oannes, 264, 299.

offerings, Babylonian, 466, 470.

On (Heliopolis), 40, 51, 61, 82, 86, 91, 114, 120, 161, 190, 231.

Opis, 366.

Oppert, Professor, 464.

Orion, 234, 238.

Osiris, 84, 87, 90, 123, 131, 139, 147, 153 sq., 199, 200, 232, 247, 325, 353, 494.

Osiris, judgment-hall of, 66. " the, 169.

Palestine, 42.

_paradise_, etymology of, 272.

Patæki, 139.

_patesi_. _See_ high priest.

Pe, 162.

penitence, Babylonian idea of, 493 sq.

Pepi, 73, 145, 146, 238.

Pestilence-god, 429.

Peters, Dr., 261.

Petrie, Professor, 53, 64, 144, 184.

Pharaoh as god, 42, 44, 107. " son of the Sun, 88.

Pharaonic Egyptians, 22, 40, 43, 73, 74, 76.

Philæ, 135.

Philo, 230.

phœnix, 117, 121, 207, 238.

Phrygia, 111.

Piehl, Professor, 184.

Pierret, M., 193.

Pinches, Dr., 263, 336, 365, 385.

planets, 235.

Plato, 233.

Platonic ideas, 49, 242.

Plutarch, 101.

polytheism, 289.

Porphyry, 64, 71, 102.

postal service in Babylonia, 266.

priestly colleges, 32.

priests, 461 sq.

prophetess, 455, 466.

prophets, Babylonian college of, 416, 463 sq.

psalms, penitential, 416 sq., 500. " Assyrian, 419.

Ptah, 44, 55, 87, 90, 110, 138, 151, 167, 190.

Ptiris, 111.

Punt, 146.

Purim, feast of, 476.

Pyramid texts, 15, 37, 59, 61, 64, 77, 86, 92, 144, 157, 161, 178, 183, 184, 191, 234, 244, 258.

Quibell, Mr., 39, 175.

Ra, 51, 182, 231. " followers of, 196. " legend of, 216.

Rahab, 309.

ram, 149, 157, 353, 406.

Rassam, Hormuzd, 461.

Rawlinson, Sir H. C., 336, 431.

Rawnsley, Canon, 125.

Reisner, Dr., 188.

relics, 226.

religion, ancient, difficult to realise, 46.

religion, earliest forms of, 7. " individual in origin, 8.

Renouf, Sir P. L., 51, 60, 127.

resurrection, 24, 167, 170.

ritual, Babylonian, 400, 412.

_rpâ_, 129.

Saba, 437.

Sabaism, 479, 481, 482, 483.

Sabbath, Babylonian, 476. " etymology of, 272.

sacrifice, Babylonian, 466, 470, 472. " daily, 470. " of firstborn, 467. " of lamb, 472.

Sahu. _See_ Orion.

_sahu._ _See_ mummy.

Sahu-Ra, 104, 223.

Sakæa, 475.

Samas. _See_ Sun-god.

Samuel, 366.

Sargon of Akkad, 41, 265, 290, 351, 465, 483.

Sati, 80.

Sati or Sutu, 135, 163, 166.

savage man, 17.

scape-goat, 467.

scarabs, 65, 66, 188, 227.

scepticism, Egyptian, 13, 202.

Scheil, Dr., 139, 148, 378, 438.

Schweinfurth, Dr., 215.

scorpion-man, 436.

“sea,” artificial, 458, 459.

Seb, 84, 129. " legend of, 225.

Sebek, 114, 226.

Sebennytos, 160.

seer, Babylonian, 464 sq.

Sehêl, 135.

Sekhet, 90, 106, 140, 144, 145, 231.

Selk, 104, 106.

Semitic supremacy, 270.

Serapis, 113.

serpent, bronze, 471. " guardian, 212. " with seven heads, 240. " worship, 208 sq.

Set, 74, 90, 104, 112, 114, 117, 135, 153, 162, 165, 223, 224, 238.

Seth, 307.

Shamanism, 298.

Sharu, 73.

Shêkh Herîdî, 213.

Shem, 328.

Sheol, 295, 491.

shewbread, 455.

ships of the gods, 239.

Shu, 83, 89, 160, 225.

Sin. _See_ Moon-god.

sin, Babylonian conception of, 417, 492 sq.

Sinai, 485.

Sinaitic Peninsula, 146.

Sin-liqi-unnini, 423, 438.

Sippara, 318, 344, 414, 482.

Sirius (Sopd), 148, 235, 238.

Smith, George, 387, 436, 437, 454.

smiths, 73, 128.

Sokaris, 138, 198, 199.

solar cult, 185.

Sopd. _See_ Sirius.

sorcerer, 298.

soul, Egyptian doctrine of, 26, 62 sq., 108.

sphinx, 76, 117.

spirits, seven evil, 408, 430.

stars, 367, 480.

statues, wonder-working, 228. " Memphite, 51. " why made, 50.

Sumer, 264.

Sumerian, 254.

Sumerians, 269.

Sun-god, 88, 293. " Babylonian, 317 sq., 321, 338, 340, 370, 414.

Surippak, 264, 440.

_surpu_, the collection, 410.

Susa, 265, 270.

Sutu, 166.

Sutu-sar, 166.

swine, 358, 467.

sycamore worshipped, 206. " of Matarîya, 207.

symbolism in Egypt, 35, 49, 242.

Tabernacle of Congregation, 472.

Tables of the Law, 461.

tablets of destiny, 282, 333, 392, 428.

Tammuz, 340, 350, 384, 386, 426, 434, 460, 474.

Tanen, 140.

Tasmit, 363, 456.

Tefnut, 83.

Tel el-Amarna, 95, 428, 445.

Tello (Lagas), 254, 265, 274.

temple of Solomon, 459, 470.

temples, open in Egypt, 110. " Babylonian, 449, 454 sq.

This, 160.

Thoth, 36, 37, 104, 114, 130, 154, 191.

Tiamât, 118, 349, 355, 377, 392.

tithes, 469.

totemism, 116.

transformation, 243.

tree of life, 240, 384. " knowledge, 354, 386.

trees, sacred, 215.

triad, 231. " Babylonian, 313, 314, 321, 322, 341, 382, 390.

trinity, Egyptian, 90, 143, 230 sq. " Theban, 151, 231.

Tum (Atmu), 81, 83, 85, 87, 225, 231.

Typhon, 153, 179.

Uazit, 40, 42, 81, 144.

Un-nefer, 168, 247, 325.

Ur, 261, 266, 267, 274, 295, 314, 482, 484.

Urim and Thummim, 282, 351, 392, 428.

Ur-nes, 196.

ushebti, 52, 58, 112, 171.

utukku, 283, 285, 287.

vampire, 282, 283.

Venus, 238.

virgin-birth, the, 249.

Wiedemann, Professor, 149, 173, 208.

Wilkinson, Sir G., 207.

witchcraft, 359.

word, the creative, 131, 391.

Xisuthros, 436 sq.

Yahum-ilu, 484.

Yahveh, 99, 131, 346, 371, 385, 484, 487.

_zaqiqu_, 262, 283.

Zenjirli, 346.

Zi, the, 58, 276 sq., 283, 287, 301, 306, 329, 379, 400, 403, 404, 481.

ziggurat, 450, 453, 456, 458.

Zi-kum, 278, 305, 386, 407.

Zimbabwe, 72.

Zimmern, Professor, 392, 394, 438, 472, 488.

Zodiac, 481.

Zu, 351, 353, 429.

FOOTNOTES

_ 1 Notes for the Nile_, pp. 188, 189.

2 Révillout in the _Revue égyptologique_, i. 4, ii. 3.

3 For the extraordinary variety of senses in which the verb _ye_, “to eat,” has come to be used in the African language of Akra, see Pott, _Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues von Wilhelm von Humboldt_, ii. pp. 495-498 (1876). Thus _ye no_, “to be master,” is literally “to eat the upper side”; _ye gbî_, “to live” or “exist,” is literally “to eat a day”; _feî ye_, “to be cold,” is “to eat cold.”

4 See Schweinfurth, “Ueber den Ursprung der Aegypter,” in the _Verhandlungen der Berliner anthropologischen Gesellschaft_, June 1897.

5 See W. M. Flinders Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_, 1898.

6 “The custom of dismembering the body or stripping it of its flesh is widely spread: the neolithic tombs of Italy contain skulls and bones which have been painted red; Baron de Baye has found in the tombs of Champagne skeletons stripped of their flesh, and the Patagonians and Andamanners as well as the New Zealanders still practise the custom” (De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Egypte_, ii. p. 142). Secondary burial is met with in India among the Kullens, the Kâthkaris, and the Agariya, as well as in Motu, Melanesia, Sarawak, the Luchu Islands, Torres Straits, and Ashanti, while “in some of the English long barrows the bones appear to have been flung in pell-mell” (Crooke in _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxix. pp. 284-286 (1899)).

7 See Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. p. 372 sqq.

8 See Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et l’Archéologie égyptiennes_, i. p. 85 sqq.

9 Mariette, _Dendérah, Texte_, p. 156.

10 In the Pyramid texts the dead are described as being carried across the lake which separates this world from the fields of Alu, on the wings of Thoth.

11 See Sethe in the _Zeitschrift für Aegyptischer Sprache_, 1897, 1.

12 Similarly the “chief _Kher-heb_” of the Pharaoh, in the age of the Old Empire, bore the title of “Chief of the city of Nekheb” (Ebers, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. tr., p. 90). The Pyramid texts speak of the White Crown of Southern Egypt as well as of the royal uræus “in the city of Nekheb” (_Pepi_ 167); and the goddess of the city is described as “the cow Samet-urt” who was crowned with the two feathers (_Teta_ 359). Elsewhere mention is made of “the souls of On, Nekhen, and Pe” (_Pepi_ 168, 182; see also _Teta_ 272). By the “souls of On” Ra or rather Tum was meant; Pe and Dep constituted the twin-city of the Delta called Buto by the Greeks, over a part of which (Dep) Uazit the serpent-goddess of the north presided, while the other half (Pe) acknowledged Horus as its chief deity. In _Teta_ 88 “the doubles in Pe” are said to be “the double of Horus.”

13 Wiedemann, in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, iv. p. 332.

14 The title of “good god” went back to a very early date, and stands in contrast to that of _nefer mât-kher_, “good and true of voice,” applied to the ordinary individual on early seal-cylinders.

15 See the illustration from the temple of Amon-hotep III. at Luxor, in Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 111.

16 The Westcar Papyrus, which was written in the time of the Middle Empire, already describes the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty as born of Ruddadt (the wife of a priest of the sun-god) and the god Ra of Sakhab (Erman, “Die Märchen des Papyrus Westcar,” i. p. 55, in the _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen zu Berlin_, 1890).

17 Callaway, _Unkulunkulu; or, the Tradition of the Creation as existing among the Amazulu and other Tribes of South Africa_, pt. i. pp. 2, 7, 8.

18 Professor Maspero, to whom, along with Sir P. Le Page Renouf, we owe the explanation of what the Egyptians meant by the Ka, first pointed out the meaning of the portrait statues which were buried in the tomb (_Recueil de Travaux_, i. pp. 152-160).

19 Renouf, _TSBA._ vi. p. 504 sqq.; Lepsius, _Denkmäler_, iii. 194. 13; Dümichen, _Tempelinschriften_, i. pl. 29.

_ 20 A Season in Egypt_, 1887, pp. 21, 22.

21 Cf. the illustrations in Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 259; and Lepsius, _Denkmäler_, iii. 87. In Bonomi and Arundale, _Gallery of Antiquities_, pt. i. pi. 31, is a picture of Thothmes II. with his Ka standing behind him.

22 Baring Could, _Curiosities of Olden Times_, 2nd ed., p. 57 sqq.

23 It is noticeable that while the Tel el-Amarna letters show that the actual pronunciation of the word Ka was Ku, _Ha-ka-Ptah_, the sacred name of Memphis, being written _Khi-ku-Ptakh_ (_Aiguptos_), _ku_ was “food” in the Sumerian of primitive Babylonia.

24 In his _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, i. p. 61, Professor Maspero gives “cake” as the original sense of _Ka_, which, however, he explains as “a cake of earth,” and hence “substance.”

25 Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 114. The Ka, however, is here identified with the Khu, and it is questionable whether the passages referred to in the Pyramid texts really embody old ideas which are to be interpreted literally, or whether they are not rather to be taken metaphorically.

26 Maspero, _Comptes rendus du Congrés provincial des Orientalistes à Lyon_, 1878, pp. 235-263; Renouf, _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_ (1879), vi. pp. 494-508.

27 This particular bird was chosen because its name was similar in sound to that of the Khu. For the same reason the plover (_ba_) denoted the Ba or soul. On objects found by de Morgan in the tomb of Menes at Negada, the “soul” is represented by an ostrich.

28 See Chassinat, _Recueil_, xix. p. 23 sqq.

29 From the fifteenth to the eleventh century B.C., it was fashionable to substitute for the bird a beetle with a ram’s head, the phonetic value of the hieroglyph of ram being _ba_, and that of the beetle _kheper_, “to become.”

30 Hermes Trismeg., _Pœmandres_, ed. Parthey, chs. i. and x.

_ 31 Études de Mythologie_, i. p. 166.

_ 32 De Abst._ iv. 10.

33 Cf. also Plutarch, _De Esu carnium Or._ ii. p. 996, and _Sept. Sapient. Conviv._ p. 159 B.

34 The four vases were dedicated to the man-headed Amset (or Smet), the jackal-headed Dua-mut-ef, the ape-headed Hâpi, and the hawk-headed Qebḥ-sonu-f, who are identified with the planets in the Pyramid texts (Maspero, “Pyramide du roi Ounas” in the _Recueil de Travaux_, iii. p. 205).

35 See the Book of the Dead, chs. xxvi. and sqq.

36 It is still a moot question whether any scarabs go back to the age of the Old Empire. Personally, I am inclined to agree with Prof. Flinders Petrie in thinking that they do so.

37 Or, according to Renouf’s translation: “Pleasant unto us, pleasant unto the listener, is the joy of the weighing of the words.”

38 Three grains of the natron of the city of Nekheb had to be used, while only two grains of that of the north were required (Maspero, “Pyramide du roi Ounas” in the _Recueil de Travaux_, iii. p. 182). The Horus of Nekhen, opposite El-Kab, was represented by a mummified hawk (_akhem_).

39 De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, ii. pl. iii. line 2.

_ 40 Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, xxxvi. pls. xii. and xiii.; Quibell, _Hierakonpolis_, pt. i. pl. xxix.

41 Professor Maspero, however, proposes to see in them a symbol of the king of Upper Egypt destroying a hostile city.

_ 42 Recueil de Travaux_, xxi. pp. 116, 117. Dr. Naville points out that on the Palermo Stela the festival of the Shesh-Hor, with the determinative of a sacred bark, occurs repeatedly in that part of the inscription which relates to the festivals of the kings of the first two dynasties. Professor Petrie has found the same festival mentioned on two ivory tablets from the tomb of a king of the First Dynasty at Abydos (Petrie, _The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty_, pt, i. pl. xvii.); and it may be added that in the Pyramid texts (_Pepi_ 670; _Recueil de Travaux_, viii. p. 105) the Mât or Mâdit bark of the sun-god is identified with the bark of the Shesh-Hor, while the Semkett or bark in which the sun-god voyages at night becomes a bark in which the place of the hawk is taken by a picture of the ben or tomb of Osiris—here identified with that of Akhem the mummified hawk, which forms part of the symbol for the Thinite nome. Elsewhere it is the Semkett or day-bark of the sun which is identified with the festival of the Shesh-Hor (_Recueil de Travaux_, iii. p. 205).

43 On the _mesnitiu_ or “blacksmiths” of Horus, see Maspero, _Études de Mythologie_, ii. p. 313 and sqq. The _Mesnit_ or “Forge” was the name given to the passage opening into the shrine of the temple of Edfu.

44 Quibell, _Hierakonpolis_, pt. i. pl. ii.

45 See de Rougé, _Recherches sur les Monuments qu’on peut attribuer aux six premières dynasties_, pp. 44, 45.

46 Mr. Quibell found a large bronze hawk with a head of solid gold and eyes of obsidian along with two bronze figures of Pepi, in the foundation of the temple of Nekhen (Kom el-Aḥmar); see Quibell, _Hierakonpolis_, pt. i. pl. xlii. Hor-nubi, “the golden Horus,” was the god of the Antæopolite nome.

47 The 1st (Ombite) and 2nd (Apollinopolite) nomes, the 3rd nome (originally) with its capital Nekhen, the nomes of the “Eastern and Western Horus” (Tuphium and Asphynis), Qus “the city of Horus the elder,” the 5th (Coptite) nome, the 6th nome of Dendera in so far as Hathor was daughter and husband of Horus, the 10th (Antæopolite) and 12th (Hierakopolite) nomes, and finally the 15th, 18th, and 20th (Herakleopolite) nomes. In the Delta also Horus was god of the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 11th, 19th, 25th, 27th, and 30th nomes, of which the 7th and 8th were close to the Asiatic frontier.

48 When this emblem was first invented we do not know; it probably goes back to the præ-Menic period, like the composite animals on the early monuments of Nekhen and Abydos. Its first dateable occurrence is on a boulder of granite in the island of Elephantinê above the name and figure of Unas of the Fifth Dynasty. It is also engraved above the double figure of an Old Empire king on a great isolated rock near El-Kab, which is probably of the same date. The tablet on which it is engraved faces south-east.

49 Hor-merti, “Horus of the two eyes,” was worshipped at Shedennu in the Pharbæthite nome of the Delta. Grébaut’s view, that the two eyes originally represented the light, seems to me too abstract a conception for an early period (_Recueil de Travaux_, pp. 72-87, 112-131). In the Pyramid texts (_Rec._ iv. p. 42), mention is made of Horus with “the blue eyes.”

50 Cf. Sayce, _TSBA._, Nov. 1898. In one case the name of the god is written _Kha-ar_. In _WAI._ ii. 55. 36, Khur-galzu, “Horus, thou art great!” is given as the name of a Sumerian goddess.

51 Nin-ip was identified with the planet Saturn, like “Horus the bull.”

52 It was then that the two obelisks were erected in front of the temple by Usertesen I., which caused it to be known as Hât-Benbeni, “the house of the two obelisks.”

53 The members of the Ennead of Heliopolis or On are named in the Pyramid texts (_Pepi_ ii. 666) Tum, Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nebhât.

54 See his _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. p. 337 sqq.

55 Similarly, on early Babylonian seal-cylinders the leaves of the folding doors through which the sun-god comes forth at daybreak are surmounted by lions. See the illustration in King, _Babylonian Religion and Mythologie_, p. 32. (The genuineness of this cylinder has been questioned without good reason.)

56 The wife occasionally provided for Asshur by the scribes was a mere grammatical abstraction, like Tumt, the feminine of Tum, whose name is now and then met with in late Egyptian texts.

57 One of the old formulæ embedded in the Pyramid texts (_Teta_ 86) reads like a passage from a Sumerian hymn: “Hail to thee, great deep (_ageb_), moulder of the gods, creator of men.” It belongs to Babylonia rather than to Egypt, where the “great deep” could have been a matter only of tradition.

58 See Petrie, _Medum_, p. 30.

59 The existence of other cities of the name in Upper Egypt, “On of the south,” now Erment, and On, now Dendera, shows that it must go back to the earliest epoch of Pharaonic Egypt. I believe that it is the Sumerian _unu_, “city,” and that the column which represented it hieroglyphically denoted “a foundation” or “settlement.”

60 It will be shown in a future lecture that Osiris was the mummified Anher. One is tempted to ask whether Ptaḥ is not similarly the mummified Tum?

_ 61 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. p. 270 sqq.

62 This has been proved by a stela of Antef IV. of the Eleventh Dynasty, discovered by M. Legrain in 1900, in the temple of Ptaḥ. Khonsu was a mere epithet of the moon-god, meaning “wanderer.” In a later age Khonsu was himself superseded by Mentu.

63 For the architectural plan of the temple, see Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. tr., p. 287.

64 Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. tr., p. 262.

65 Another strophe of the Hymn to Aten, as translated by Professor Breasted (_De Hymnis in Solem sub rege Amenophide __IV.__ conceptis_, p. 47), is equally explicit: “Thou hast created the earth according to thy pleasure, when thou wast alone, both all men and the cattle great and small; all who walk upon the earth, those on high who fly with wings; the foreign lands of Syria (_Khar_) and Cush as well as the land of Egypt; each in its place thou appointest, thou providest them with all that they need; each has his granary, his stores of grain are counted. Diverse are the languages of men, more different than their shape is the colour of their skin, (for) thou hast distinguished the nations of the world (one from the other).” In the succeeding strophe the monotheism of the worshipper of Aten, in whose eyes even the sacred Nile was the creature of the one true God, appears in striking contrast to the ordinary polytheism of Egypt (Breasted, _l.c._ p. 53): “Thou createst the Nile in the other world, thou bringest it at thy pleasure to give life to mankind; for thou hast made them for thyself, O lord of them all who art ever with them, O lord of all the earth who risest for them, O sun of day (the mighty one in?) the remotest lands, thou givest them their life, thou sendest forth the Nile in heaven, that it may descend for them; it raises its waves mountain high like the sea, it waters the fields of their cities. How glorious are thy counsels! O lord of eternity, thou art a Nile in heaven for foreign men and cattle throughout all the earth! They walk on their feet, (and) the Nile cometh to Egypt from the other world.”

66 Diod. Sic. i. 83.

67 Except in the case of Osiris at Abydos; Petrie, _The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty_, pt. i. pl. xv. 16; comp. also at Kom el-Aḥmar, _Hierakonpolis_, pt. i. pl. xxvi. B, though here it seems to be the Pharaoh who is represented.

68 Quibell in the _Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, xxxvi. pls. xii., xiii.; _Hierakonpolis_, pt. i. pl. xxix.

69 On a stela in the Wadi Maghara, in the Sinaitic Peninsula, Sahu-Ra of the Fifth Dynasty, divided into two figures, one with the crown of Lower Egypt the other with that of Upper Egypt, is standing before a standard on which are the two emblems of Southern and Northern Egypt, Set and Horus. Set is represented by his usual animal, but Horus by an uræus serpent and the same symbol as that on the plaque (de Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, i. p. 233). As we learn from the legend of Seb recounted at At-Nebes (Saft el-Henna), the two relics preserved there were the uræus and lock of hair of Ra. The lock of hair has practically the same form as the symbol we are considering here, and long before the legend had been concocted, Ra and Horus had been identified together (see Griffith, _Antiquities of Tell el-Yahudiyeh, Seventh Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund_, pl. xxiii.).

70 De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, ii. pls. ii. and iii.; Sayce in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, Feb. 1898. It will be noticed that Thoth is represented by the ibis and not by the ape.

71 De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, p. 93.

72 For late examples of the worship of animals like the cat, ram, swallow, or goose, as animals and not as incarnations of an official god, see Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. p. 395 sqq. The rarity of them is due to their representing private and domestic cults not recognised by the religion of the State. “The worship of the swallow, cat, and goose, which had commenced as the pure and simple adoration of these creatures in themselves, always remained so for the multitude. We must not forget that Orientals regard beasts somewhat differently from ourselves. They ascribe to them a language, a knowledge of the future, an extreme acuteness of the senses which allows them to perceive objects and beings invisible to man. It was not, indeed, all Egypt that worshipped in the beast the beast itself; but a considerable part of it which belonged almost entirely to the same social condition, and represented pretty much the same moral and intellectual ideas.”

73 See Wiedemann, _Die Religion der alten Aegypten_, pp. 108, 109.

74 Late inscriptions call Bakh or Bakis “the living soul of Ra,” but this was when Mentu and Ra had been identified together. Stelæ of the Roman period, however, from Erment represent the sacred bull without any solar emblem, while by the side of it stands a hawk-headed crocodile crowned with the orb of the sun. It is possible that the latter may be connected with the hawk-headed crocodile, with the orb of the sun on its head and an uræus serpent at the end of its tail, which in Greek _graffiti_ at Philæ is called Ptiris.

75 Nicolaus Damascen., _Fr._ 128, ed. Müller.

76 De Rougé, _Monnaies de nomes_, p. 46.

77 Griffith (_Proc. of Society of Biblical Archæology_, xxi. p. 278) has recently proposed to see in Deḥuti a derivative from the name of the nome Deḥut, like Anzti, the title of Osiris at Busiris, from the name of the nome Anzet. But this is “putting the cart before the horse.” It was not the nomes that were birds or men, but the deities worshipped in them. Anz (perhaps from the Semitic _’az_, “the strong one”) meant “king,” and represented the human Osiris.

78 Plutarch, _De Iside et Osiride_, ed. Leemans, lxxii. p. 126.

_ 79 Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_ (1880) p. 50.

_ 80 Rev. Archéologique_, xxxiv. p. 291. On the seal-cylinder they are accompanied by the lion-headed eagle of primitive Babylonian art. The Egyptian figures are given in the _Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, xxxvi. pl. xii.

_ 81 Ep. ad Cor._ 25.

82 See also Herodotos, ii. 73; Pliny, _N. H._ x. 2; Tertullian, _De Resurr._ 13.

83 De Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, ii. p. 165.

84 Sayce, _Proc. SBA._, Feb. 1898, No. 8. On a monument discovered at Sân (Petrie, _Tanis_, pt. ii. pl. x. 170), we read of “Horus in the _bennu_ as a black bull,” “Horus in the _bennu_ as a horned bull.” The cemetery of Tanis was called “the city of the phœnix” (_bennu_). At Edfu it is said that the phœnix (_bennu_) “comes forth from the holy heart” of Osiris.

85 On a stela in the Louvre a certain Psamtik, son of Uza-Hor, calls himself prophet of Khufu, Khaf-Ra, and Dadef-Ra, as well as of Tanen, Isis, and Harmakhis.

86 The versification is Canon Rawnsley’s, _Notes for the Nile_, pp. 188, 189. Professor Erman’s literal translation is as follows (_Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. tr., pp. 386, 387)—

“I heard the words of Imhotep and Har-dad-ef, Who both speak thus in their sayings: ‘Behold the dwellings of those men, their walls fall down, Their place is no more, They are as though they had never existed.’ No one comes from thence to tell us what is become of them, Who tells us how it goes with them, who nerves our hearts, Until you yourselves approach the place whither they are gone. With joyful heart forget not to glorify thyself And follow thy heart’s desire, so long as thou livest. Put myrrh on thy head, clothe thyself in fine linen, Anointing thyself with the marvellous things of God. Adorn thyself as beautifully as thou canst, And let not thy heart be discouraged. Follow thy heart’s desire and thy pleasures As long as thou livest on earth. Follow thy heart’s desire and thy pleasures Till there comes to thee the day of mourning. Yet he, whose heart is at rest, hears not their complaint, And he who lies in the tomb understands not their mourning. With beaming face keep holiday to-day, And rest not therein. For none carries his goods away with him, Yea, none returns again, who has journeyed thither.”

87 Brugsch’s translation (_Die Aegyptologie_, i. p. 163).

88 Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of Ancient Egypt_ (1879), pp. 93-100.

89 Brugsch, _Die Aegyptologie_, p. 167.

90 See _Beni-Hasan_, pt. iii. (_Archæological Survey of Egypt_), pl. v. fig. 75.

91 The double-headed axe is carved repeatedly on the walls of the “palace of Minos,” discovered by Dr. A. J. Evans at Knossos, and seems to have been the divine symbol which was believed to protect the building from injury. On the coins of Tarsus the sun-god Sandan carries an axe.

92 See above, p. 83.

_ 93 De Isid._ 12.

94 As Thoth writes the name of the king upon the sacred sycamore in order to ensure him everlasting life, so the name of Ea is written upon the core of the sacred cedar-tree (_WAI._ iv. 15, _Rev._ 10-13); Sayce, Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, p. 240.

_ 95 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. pp. 381-385.

96 This is Brugsch’s translation (_Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter_, p. 123 sqq.); but the meaning of the last name is doubtful, and the first is rather “time” than “eternity.”

97 See Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, ii. pp. 257 sqq. and 375 sqq. In an inscription discovered by Professor Petrie in the tombs of the first two dynasties at Abydos, Thoth is represented as a seated ape (_The Royal Tombs of Abydos_, pt. i. pl. xvii. 26). On the other hand, on the broken Abydos slate figured in de Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, pl. ii., which is probably prehistoric, Thoth appears as an ibis.

_ 98 Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, p. 65.

99 Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, p. 429 sqq.

100 The same cap is worn by the god who sits behind a scorpion-man on a stone containing a grant of land by the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar I. (B.C. 1100). The stone was found at Abu-Habba, and is now in the British Museum (_WAI._ v. 57).

101 Maspero (_Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 157) reproduces a picture in the temple of Luxor representing Khnum moulding Amon-hotep III. and his _Ka_ on a potter’s table.

102 See Scheil, _Recueil de Travaux_, xx. p. 124 sqq.

103 The _khnum_ or “pot” is often used to express the name of Khnum in the hieroglyphics. It reminds us of the vase on early Babylonian seal-cylinders from the two sides of which flow the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and which is often held in the hands of the water-god Ea. The design is reproduced with modifications on early Syrian cylinders, and the name of the zodiacal sign Aquarius shows to what an antiquity it must reach back. The primitive Egyptians believed that the Nile issued from a grotto to which the _qerti_ or “two gulfs” of the Cataract gave access (Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 19, 38, 39), and Khnum was the god of the Cataract. Perhaps the classical representation of the Tiber and other rivers holding urns from which a stream of water flows is derived from Egypt.

104 Men-nofer (Memphis), “the good place,” is the equivalent of the name of the ancient seaport of Babylonia, Eridu, the Sumerian Eri-duga or “good city.” Ea, the culture-god and creator, was the god of Eridu. In the Deluge tablet (l. 9) Ea says that he had not “opened (_patû_) the oracle of the great gods.” It is hardly worth while to mention that the antiquity of Memphis has been disputed by some philologists.

105 Ptaḥ is stated in the Book of the Dead to have been the original author of the ceremony which he first performed on the dead gods.

106 This is Maspero’s view (_Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, ii. pp. 21, 22). Wiedemann (_Religion der alten Aegypter_, p. 75) makes Sokaris a sun-god; but his solar attributes belong to the time when he was identified with Ra of Heliopolis.

107 It was only when the sun-god had absorbed the other deities that they became the children of Ra.

_ 108 Recueil de Travaux_, xix. pp. 50, 54.

109 To “come in peace” is still a common expression in Egyptian Arabic, and means “to return safely.” The name seems to be taken from the office of Im-hotep, which was to conduct the dead safely back to a second life.

110 Nofer-Tum and Im-hotep had human forms like their father. The first is a man with a lotus flower on the head, the second a youth with a papyrus roll on the knee.

111 There was a difference only in the vowel of the first syllable.

112 The Nile-gods, representing the Nile and the canals, are depicted as stout men with large breasts, crowned with flowers, and wearing only the narrow girdle of prehistoric Egypt. The human form agrees well with the fact that the Nile was first engineered, and so made a source of life for Egypt, by the Pharaonic Egyptians. Babylonia was the country, it must be remembered, where river engineering and irrigation were originally developed.

113 “Hymn to the Nile,” translated by P. Guieysse, _Records of the Past_, new series, iii. p. 46 sqq. The hymn was composed by Anna or Annana in the time of Meneptah II.

114 Brugsch, _Religion und Mythologie_, pp. 3, 248, 348.

115 Her name is already mentioned in the Pyramid texts, and in _Pepi_ ii. 131 she is described as the eye of Horus and “the opener of the paths,” the ordinary title of Anubis as god of the dead.

116 In the Speos Artermidos near Beni-Hassan, where a large cemetery of mummified cats has been found, she is called Pakht, an older form of Bast.

117 On a slab discovered by Professor Petrie at Koptos, Usertesen I. of the Twelfth Dynasty already appears standing before a cat-headed goddess who is called “Bast, the lady of Shel.” Shel is perhaps Ashel at Karnak, where the temple of Mut stood, in which so many figures of Bast or Sekhet have been found (Petrie, _Koptos_, pl. x. 2). The name of Bast also occurs in the Pyramid texts (_Pepi_ 290); but here it is an epithet of Uazit, the goddess of Dep or Buto, once the capital of the kingdom of Northern Egypt, who is contrasted with the goddess of Nekheb.

118 Naville, _Bubastis_ (_Egypt Exploration Fund_), i. pp. 44, 47, 48.

119 Horus Ahi. The meaning of Ahi, the local title assigned to Horus the younger, is doubtful.

120 Thus at Dendera we read: “Ancestral mother of the gods, thou unitest thyself with thy father Ra in thy festal chamber.”

121 The so-called Hathor head with the horns of a cow is already found on the slate plaque of Kom el-Aḥmar, which is either of the time of the First Dynasty or pre-Menic (_Zeits. f. Aegypt. Spr._ xxxvi. pl. xii.). A head of similar type is engraved under the name of Pepi II., discovered at Koptos (Petrie, _Koptos_, pl. v. 7).

122 Horus and Hathor, that is to say, Baal and Ashtoreth, were, according to the Egyptians, the deities of Mafket, the Sinaitic Peninsula.

123 It must be remembered that in Egypt the place occupied by the morning star in the astronomy and myths of other peoples was taken by Sirius on account of its importance for the rising of the Nile. And Sirius was identified with Isis.

_ 124 Recueil de Travaux_, xx. p. 62. Dr. Scheil further points out that the sacred bark of Bau, with whom Istar is identified, was called “the ship of the holy cow.” At Dendera also, Isis, in her bark as goddess of the star Sirius, becomes Hathor under the form of a cow.

125 Professor Wiedemann has suggested that the name of Men-tu or Mon-tu is connected with that of A-mon. It is, however, more reasonable to associate it with that of the Mentiu or Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula.

126 Hence the ram-headed sphinxes that lined the roads leading to the temple of Karnak. The flesh of the ram was tabooed at Thebes, an indication that the animal was originally a totem (cf. Herod. ii. 42).

127 A stela of Antef IV., found by M. Legrain in 1900, shows that Khonsu was preceded by Ptaḥ as the third member of the trinity. See above, p. 90.

128 So Lauth, _Aus Aegypten’s Vorzeit_, p. 61; Brugsch, _Dictionnaire géographique_, pp. 61, 62; Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 180. The evidence, however, is not quite clear.

129 The bronze figures of the ibis found at Tel el-Baqlîya, on the east bank of the Damietta branch of the Nile, opposite Abusir or Busiris, have shown that it is the site of the capital of the Hermopolite nome.

130 At Beḥbêt near Mansûra.

131 This, at least, is how the name is usually written. But on an early seal-cylinder which I have published in the _Proc. SBA._, Feb. 1898, No. 2, where we read, “The city of the ram, the city which is called Dad,” the name is written _D-d_, and on a libation-table of the Sixth Dynasty from El-Kab we find _Dad-d-u_ (Quibell, _El-Kab_, pl. iv. 1). The earlier pronunciation of the name as found in the Pyramid texts is Zaddu or Zadu.

132 As early as the age of the Pyramid texts the column Dad had come to be explained as a picture of the spine, or rather spinal column (_zad_), of Osiris, which was supposed to be preserved at Daddu or Pi-Asar-neb-Daddu or Abusir. See _Unas_ 7.

133 Not unfrequently a rich Egyptian who was buried at Saqqâra had a cenotaph at Abydos. I believe that the fashion had been set by the founder of the united monarchy himself, and that besides the tomb of Menes at Negada there was also a cenotaph of the king at Abydos. At all events clay impressions of his Ka-name Aḥa have been found there in the Omm el-Ga’ab.

134 The title borne by Osiris at Abydos was Khent-amentit, “the ruler of the west.” There is no need of turning the title into a separate god who was afterwards identified with Osiris: he was as much Osiris as was Neb-Daddu, “the lord of Daddu.” Professor Maspero says with truth that “Khent-amentit was the dead Anher, a sun which had set in the west” (_Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. p. 24)—or rather, perhaps, a sun that was setting in the west, as his domain was the necropolis of Omm el-Ga’ab, immediately eastward of the western boundary of hills. When “Osiris of Daddu” is distinguished from “Khent-Amentit of Abydos,” as on a stela of the Eleventh Dynasty (Daressy in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xiv. p. 23), this is only in accordance with the Egyptian habit of transforming a divine epithet into a separate deity.

135 Already in the Pyramid texts Horus is said to have assisted in the burial of Osiris, who goes to the plains of Alu with “the great gods that proceed from On” (_Pepi_ ii. 864-872); and we have perhaps a reminiscence of the spread of the Osirian cult to the south and the identification of Osiris with Akhem, the mummified Horus of Nekhen, in _Pepi_ ii. 849, where we read: “Seb installs by his rites Osiris as god, to whom the watchers in Pe make offering, and the watchers in Nekhen venerate him” (Maspero in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xii. p. 168). Pe and Nekhen were the capitals of the two pre-Menic kingdoms of Northern and Southern Egypt, and on a stela from Nekhen (Kom el-Aḥmar) in the Cairo Museum, “Horus of Nekhen” is identified with Osiris (_Recueil de Travaux_, xiv. p. 22, No. xx.). In the inscriptions of the Pyramid of Pepi II., lines 864-5, it is said that Isis and Nebhât wept for Osiris at Pe along with “the souls of Pe.” Pe with its temple of the younger Horus, and Dep with its temple of Uazit the goddess of the north, together formed the city called Buto by the Greeks.

136 So in the Pyramid texts (_e.g._ _Teta_ 171, 172).

137 The origin of the name of Set had already been forgotten in the age of the Pyramid texts, where it is explained by the determinative _set_, “a stone.”

138 When the hieroglyphic name of the Busirite nome was first invented, Osiris was still the living “lord of Daddu” rather than the mummified patron of its necropolis, since it represents him as a living Pharaoh with the title of _ânz_ or “chieftain.”

_ 139 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, xii. 8, pp. 401-402.

140 The origin of the name of Osiris had been forgotten by the Egyptians long before the age of the Pyramid texts, where we find (_Unas_ 229) the grammatical goddess User-t invented to explain Osiris, as if the latter were the adjective _user_, “strong”! M. Grébaut long ago expressed his belief that Osiris was of foreign origin (_Recueil de Travaux_, i. p. 120).

141 Nebo or Nabium (Nabu), “the prophet,” was the interpreter of the will of Merodach, just as Merodach was the interpreter of the will of Ea.

142 The constellation of Osiris was called “the soul of Osiris,” and Professor Maspero notes that the Pyramid texts place his kingdom near the Great Bear (_Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, ii. p. 20). Isis became Sirius, and Horus the morning star.

_ 143 The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Immortality_, p. 48.

144 Renouf’s translation of the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead (_Papyrus of Ani_) is as follows:—“I am not a doer of what is wrong. I am not a plunderer. I am not a robber. I am not a slayer of men. I do not stint the measure of corn. I am not a niggard. I do not desire the property of the gods. I am not a teller of lies. I am not a monopoliser of food. I am no extortioner. I am not unchaste. I am not the cause of others’ tears. I am not a dissembler. I am not a doer of violence. I am not a domineering character. I do not pillage cultivated land. I am not an eavesdropper. I am not a chatterer. I do not dismiss a case through self-interest. I am not unchaste with women or men. I am not obscene. I am not an exciter of alarms. I am not hot in speech. I do not turn a deaf ear to the words of righteousness. I am not foul-mouthed. I am not a striker. I am not a quarreller. I do not revoke my words. I do not multiply clamour in reply to words. I am not evil-minded or a doer of evil. I am not a reviler of the king. I put no obstruction on (the use of the Nile) water. I am not a bawler. I am not a reviler of the god. I am not fraudulent. I am not sparing in offerings to the gods. I do not deprive the dead of the funeral cakes. I take not away the cakes of the child, or profane the god of my locality. I do not kill sacred animals.”

145 Wiedemann, _Die Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133; and Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 188-190.

146 Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 190.

147 Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 191.

148 So on a stela translated by Professor Maspero (_Recueil de Travaux_, iv. p. 128) the deceased says: “Never has one said of me, What is that he hath done? I have not injured, I have not committed evil; none has suffered through my fault, the lie has never entered into me since I was born, but I have always done that which was true in the sight of the lord of the two worlds. I have been united in heart to the god; I have walked in the good paths of justice, love, and all the virtues. Ah, let my soul live ... for behold I am come to this land, O souls, to be with you in the tomb, I am become one of you who detest sin.”

149 Clem. Alex. _Strom._ vi. p. 260, ed. Sylb. See Lepsius, _Einleitung zur Chronologie der Aegypter_, pp. 45, 46. The remains ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos, including the Dialogue called _Pœmandres_, have been translated into English by J. D. Chambers (1882). The Dialogue is already quoted by Justin Martyr (_Exhort. ad Græcos_, xxxviii.).

150 The extraordinary care with which the sacred texts were handed down through long periods of time is illustrated by certain of the Pyramid texts, which are reproduced word for word down to the close of the Egyptian monarchy. Thus passages at the beginning of the inscriptions in the Pyramid of Unas are repeated in the Ritual of Abydos, and another portion of the same text is found on a stela of the Thirteenth Dynasty, as well as in one of the courts of the temple of queen Hatshepsu at Dêr el-Bâhari, where, as Professor Maspero remarks, “we have three identical versions of different epochs and localities.” The invocations against serpents (_Unas_ 300-339) recur in the tomb of Bak-n-ren-ef of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See Maspero, _Recueil de Travaux_, iii. pp. 182, 195, 220. The fact gives us confidence in the statements of the Egyptian scribes, that such and such chapters of the Book of the Dead had been “found” or written in the reigns of certain early kings.

151 There is much to be said for the view of Professor Piehl, that we have in it an amalgamation of the rituals and formulæ of the various chief sanctuaries of Egypt, which have been thrown side by side without any attempt at arrangement or harmony. One of such rituals would be that mentioned on the sarcophagus of Nes-Shu-Tefnut, where we read of “the sacred writings of Horus in the city of Huren” in the Busirite nome (_Recueil de Travaux_, vi. p. 134). On the sarcophagus of Beb, discovered by Professor Petrie at Dendera, and belonging to the period between the Sixth and the Eleventh Dynasties, we have not only “early versions” of parts of the Book of the Dead, but also chapters which do not occur in the standard text (Petrie, _Dendereh_, 1898, pp. 56-58).

152 We even read in them of Ra being “purified in the fields of Alu” (_Unas_ 411).

153 Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, pp. 367-370.

154 Various interpretations have been given of the phrase _per m hru_. I have adopted that which seems to me most consonant with both grammar and logical probability.

155 The inscribed scarab does not seem to be older than the age of the Eleventh Dynasty, when it began to take the place of the cylinder as a seal. At all events there is no authentic record of the discovery of one in any tomb of an earlier date, and the scarabs with the names of Neb-ka-ra, Khufu, and other early kings, were for the most part made in the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. It is possible, however, that some at least of the scarabs which bear the name of Ra-n-ka of the Eighth Dynasty are contemporaneous with the Pharaoh whose name is written upon them. If so, they are the oldest inscribed scarabs with which we are acquainted. Uninscribed scarabs, however, go back to the prehistoric age. The use of the scarab as an amulet is already referred to in the Pyramid texts. And Dr. Reisner has discovered green porcelain beetles in the prehistoric graves of Negadiyâ, along with other green porcelain amulets, such as turtles, etc.

156 As is also the case in the Pyramid texts.

157 Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, p. 369.

158 Maspero, “La Pyramide de Pepi 1er” in _Recueil de Travaux_, vii. pp. 161, 162. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgames the place of Nu-Urru is taken by Ur-Ninnu.

159 The Book of the Dead has been analysed by Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, i. pp. 325-387.

160 Translated by P. J. de Horrack.

161 For a translation and analysis of the Book of Am Duat, see Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_ ii. pp. 1-163.

_ 162 Revue égyptologique_, i. 4, ii. 3 (1880, 1881), where an account of the demotic story is given by E. Révillout.

163 Scheil, “Tombeaux thébains” in _Mémoires de la Mission archéologique française du Caire_, v. 4, pl. 4.

164 So in the Pyramid texts (_Unas_ 170) reference is made to “the _baqt_,” or “ben-nut tree which is in On.” The tree is the _Moringa aptera Gærtner_, from the fruit of which the myrobalanum oil was extracted (Joret, _Les Plantes dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age_, i. pp. 133, 134).

_ 165 Ancient Egyptians_, iii. p. 349. The _bennu_ is described as “the soul of Osiris.”

_ 166 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, ii. p. 395 sqq.

167 The influence of the State religion is visible in the picture, as the cow has the solar disc between its horns, and the cobra is crowned not only with horns, but also with the solar disc. Behind the cobra is the leafy branch of a tree. There is no reason for supposing with Wiedemann (_Muséon_, 1884) that the monument is Ethiopian: what is decipherable in the inscription is purely Egyptian. Professor Wiedemann calls the animal on the left a ram, but my drawing made it a cow. At the feet of the cow, which has a garland round the neck, are two vases.

168 See the very interesting study of Maspero on “La Déesse Miritskro et ses guérisons miraculeuses” in _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie_, ii. pp. 402-419; _Recueil de Travaux_, ii. p. 109 sqq.

169 The Belmore collection of Egyptian antiquities contains several stelæ which commemorate the popular worship of the serpent; see _Belmore Collection_, pls. 7, 8, and 12. In one of them the uræus has the human head of the official deity; in another it stands on the top of a shrine; but on one (given in pl. 7) the worshipper is kneeling before a coluber of great length, which has none of the attributes of the State gods, and whose numerous coils remind us of Apophis.

170 Herodotos, i. 78.

171 Sayce, “Serpent Worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt,” in the _Contemporary Review_, Oct. 1893.

_ 172 Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas, fait en mdccxiv etc., par Ordre de Louis XIV._, ii. pp. 83-86.

_ 173 Voyage d’Égypte et de Nubie_, nouv. édit. par L. Langlés, ii. pp. 64-69.

174 See my article on “Serpent Worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt,” in the _Contemporary Review_, Oct. 1893. On a rock called Hagar el-Ghorâb, a few miles north of Assuan, I have found _graffiti_ of the age of the Twelfth Dynasty, which show that a chapel of “the living serpent” stood on the spot; and a native informed me that the rock is still haunted by a monstrous serpent, “as long as an oar and as thick as a man,” which appears at night and destroys, with the fire that blazes from its eyes, whoever is unfortunate enough to fall in its way. See _Recueil de Travaux_, xvi. p. 174.

175 In the _Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin_, 1889, No. 7.

176 The legend was first published by Pleyte and Rossi, “Les Papyrus hiératiques de Turin,” pls. 31, 77, 131-8. It was translated by Lefébure in the _Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1883, pp. 27-33.

177 The shrine of Horus, whom the legend here identifies with the son of Osiris, was called Mesen at Edfu. The winged solar disc, which seems to have originated there, is called sometimes “the lord of the city of Beḥudet,” sometimes “the lord of the city of Mesen.” Beḥudet was formerly read Hud, and it is possible that this was really the pronunciation of the name in later days. At all events it seems to be the origin of the modern Edfu, which, of course, has nothing to do with the verb _deb_, “to pierce.”

178 “The City of the Twins” seems to be the same as Ḥa-Zaui, “the House of the Twins,” which Dümichen identifies with the Greek Khnubis, close to Esna. An inscription at Esna says that it was also termed Pa-Saḥura, “the House of Saḥura” (of the Fifth Dynasty), a name which Dümichen finds in that of the modern village of Sahera, south of Esna. On a prehistoric slate found at Abydos the name of the city appears to be indicated by the figures of two twins inside the cartouche of a town (de Morgan, _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, i. pl. iii., first register).

179 Naville, _Mythe d’Horus_, pls. 12-18; Brugsch, _Abhandlungen der Götting. gelehrt. Akademie_, xiv.

180 Griffith, “Minor Explorations,” in the _Seventh Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund_ (1890), pp. 71-73; Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 169-171.

181 Cf. the 155th chapter of the Book of the Dead: “These words must be spoken over a gilded _dad_, which is made from the heart of a sycamore and hung round the neck of the dead. Then shall he pass through the gates of the other world.” When this chapter was written, however, the real origin of the _dad_—a row of four columns—had been forgotten, and it was imagined to represent the backbone of Osiris. We are transported by it into the full bloom of religious symbolism.

182 Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. tr., p. 273.

183 See Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, i. pp. 82-89.

184 See above, p. 90.

_ 185 Records of the Past_, first series, ii.

186 See Cudworth’s translation of Iamblichus.

187 Maspero, “La Pyramide du Roi Ounas,” in the _Recueil de Travaux_, iv. pp. 59-61.

188 Elsewhere in the Pyramid texts the Akhimu-seku or planets of the northern hemisphere are identified with the gods (_Unas_ 218-220); Unas himself rises as a star (_Unas_ 391); Sirius is the sister of Pepi (_Pepi_ 172); while the Khû or luminous spirits are identified with the planets (_Teta_ 289). We hear of the “fields of the stars” (_Unas_ 419), of the morning star in the fields of Alu (_Pepi_ 80), and of Akhimt, the grammatically-formed wife of Akhim “planet,” who is associated with “Babî, the lord of night” (_Unas_ 645, 646). One of the constellations frequently mentioned in the Pyramid texts is “the Bull of heaven,” which was also an important constellation in early Babylonian astronomy, where the name formed part of an astronomical system; in _Unas_ 421 the “Bull of heaven” is called the _An_ or “column” of Heliopolis. We hear also of “the fresh water of the stars” (_Unas_ 210). With the latter may be compared the goddess Qebḥu, or “Fresh Water,” the daughter of Anubis, the primitive god of the dead, who poured forth the liquid from four vases (_Pepi_ 393). With the name of the goddess the symbol of the Antæopolite nome of Upper Egypt is associated.

189 In the _Proc. SBA._ xv. p. 233.

190 Or rather, perhaps, was the Osiris of primeval Egypt.

191 Lepsius, _Chronologie der Aegypter_, pp. 78, 79. See Brugsch, _Die Aegyptologie_, ii. pp. 339-342.

192 Hommel, _Ausland_, 1892, p. 102; Ginzel, _Beiträge zur alten Geschichte_, i. pp. 12-15. Diodorus (ii. 30) states that the “councillor gods” were only thirty in number; but the list of planetary stations discovered by Hommel in _WAI._ v. 46, shows that the text must be corrected into thirty-six. Indeed, Diodorus himself adds that every ten days there was a change of constellation, so that in a year of 360 days there must have been thirty-six constellations in all.

193 The Egyptian _za_ is the Semitic _ẓi_, “ship,” from which it seems to have been borrowed.

194 Maspero, “La Pyramide du Roi Pepi 1er” in _Recueil de Travaux_, viii. p. 103.

195 For instance, in the Rhind Papyrus: Wiedemann, “Ein altägyptischer Weltschöpfungsmythus,” in the _Urquell_, new ser., ii. p. 64, “Heaven was not, earth was not, the good and evil serpents did not exist.”

196 See above, p. 86.

197 The serpent with the seven necks (_Unas_ 630, _Teta_ 305) is the Babylonian “serpent with the seven heads,” and points to Babylonia, where alone seven was a sacred number. Other coincidences between Egyptian and Babylonian mythology that may be noted are “the tree of life” (_khet n ânkh_) which grew in Alu, and was given by the stars to the dead that they might live for ever (_Pepi_ 431); and the “great house,” the Babylonian _ê-gal_, which is several times referred to in the Pyramid texts.

198 Thus in the Pyramid texts (_Unas_ 518) Unas is described as “eating” the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.

_ 199 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes_, ii. pp. 446, 447.

200 Golénischeff, in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xv. pp. 88, 89. The passage is found in Papyrus 1116 of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. The words “son of man” are a literal translation of the original _si-n-sa_.

201 For the scenes accompanying the text, see Gayet, “Le Temple de Louxor,” in the _Mémoires de la Mission archéologique française au Caire_, xv. 1, pl. lxxi., where, however, the copy of the inscriptions is very incorrect. My translation is made from a copy of my own. The whole inscription is as follows: “Said by Amon-Ra, etc.: He (the god) has incarnated himself in the royal person of this husband, Thothmes IV., etc.; he found her lying in her beauty; he stood beside her as a god. She has fed upon sweet odours emanating from his majesty. He has gone to her that he may be a father through her. He caused her to behold him in his divine form when he had gone upon her that she might bear a child at the sight of his beauty. His lovableness penetrated her flesh, filling it with the odour of all his perfumes of Punt.

“Said by Mut-em-ua before the majesty of this august god Amon, etc., the twofold divinity: How great is thy twofold will, how [glorious thy] designs in making thy heart repose upon me! Thy dew is upon all my flesh in ... This royal god has done all that is pleasing to him with her.

“Said by Amon before her majesty: Amon-hotep is the name of the son which is in thy womb. This child shall grow up according to the words which proceed out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and righteousness in this land unto its very end. My soul is in him: he shall wear the twofold crown of royalty, ruling the two lands like the sun for ever.”

202 Also written Telloḥ, on the assumption that the second syllable represents _loḥ_, “a tablet.” But the native pronunciation is Tello.

203 The palace is represented by the mound called El-Qasr, the temple by that called Tell ’Amrân ibn ’Ali.

204 The name of Khammu-rabi or Ammu-rabi is written Ammu-rapi in Harper, _Letters_, iii. p. 257, No. 255 (K 552), as was first noticed by Dr. Pinches (see the _Proc. of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, May 1901, p. 191); Dr. Lindl suggests that the final -_l_ of the Hebrew form is derived from the title _ilu_, “god,” so often given to the king. Professor Hommel further points out that the character _be_ with which the final syllable of the royal name is sometimes written also had the value of _pil_.

205 Eridû is a Semitised abbreviation of the Sumerian Eri-dugga, “good city.”

206 Years ago I pointed out that _uru_ was one of the words which (along with what it signified) was borrowed by the Semites from their Sumerian neighbours or predecessors (_Transactions of Society of Biblical Archæology_, i. 2, pp. 304, 305).

207 Literally, “the lord of the ghost(s),” “the ghost-lord.” The name has been so misunderstood and misinterpreted, that it is necessary to enter into some details in regard to it, though the facts ought to be known even to the beginner in Assyriology. The Sumerian _lilla_ or _lil_ meant a “ghost,” “spirit,” or “spook,” and was borrowed by the Semites under the form of _lilû_, from which the feminine _lilîtu_ was formed in order to represent the female _lil_ whom the Sumerians called _kiel lilla_, “handmaid of (the male) _lil_.” _Lilîtu_ is the Hebrew _Lîlîth_ (Isa. xxxiv. 14). In the lexical tablets the _lil_ is explained as “a breath of wind” (_saru_), or more exactly as a _zaqiqu_, or “dust-cloud” (not, of course, “a fog,” as it has sometimes been translated, in defiance alike of common sense and of modern Arab beliefs). When the spirit of Ea-bani rose from the ground, it naturally took the form of a “dust-cloud”; at other times, when the spirits appeared in the air, they revealed their presence by a draught of cold “wind.”

208 See Pinches, “Certain Inscriptions and Records referring to Babylonia and Elam,” in the _Journal of the Victoria Institute_, xxix. p. 44: “between the mouths of the rivers on both sides.”

209 It is significant that although the antediluvian kings enumerated by Berossos must have belonged to Eridu, as is shown by their connection with the Oannes-gods who rose from the Persian Gulf, they are not kings of Eridu, but of Pantibibla and Larankha (which seems to have been the Surippak of the cuneiform texts).

210 Thureau-Dangin, in the _Revue Sémitique_.

211 Heuzey, “Sceaux inédits des rois d’Agadé,” in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, iv. 1, pp. 1-12.

212 It is to this adoption by the god that the phrase met with in early Sumerian texts—“the king (or the man) the son of his god”—probably refers, though it may possibly have eventually come to be synonymous with “pious man.” Professor Hommel compares Hebrew names like Ben-Ammi, “the son of (the god) Ammi.”

213 A. H. 83-1-18, 1866, _Rev._ v., published by Pinches in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, xviii. 8 (1896), and explained by him, p. 255. I should myself prefer to render Par-Eṡu “the land of the offspring of the god Eṡu” (or Esau).

214 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 107, note.

215 This at least was the ease in the time of Gudea, to whom we owe all the more important theological references found in the Tello texts.

216 Thus we have the phrase “to swear by the _Zi_ of the king” (see Delitzsch, _Assyrisches Handwörterbuch_, s.v. _nisu_). The Zi included the _ekim_ or specific ghost, whose prominence belongs rather to post-Sumerian days than to the early ages of Babylonian history.

217 King, _Babylonian Religion_, p. 46.

_ 218 WAI._ ii. 36. 54, 56. 33-38.

219 See my Hibbert Lectures on _Babylonian Religion_, p. 375. A common phrase is “the Zi (Assyr. _nis_) of the great gods” (Delitzsch, _Assyrisches Handwörterbuch_, s.v. _nisu_). In the incantation text, _WAI._ iv. 1, 2, the gods of later times are still _Zi_s. A translation of part of the text will be given in a future chapter. For the possibility that the Zi and the Lil originally had much the same meaning, the one being used at Eridu and the other at Nippur, see the next lecture.

220 Scheil in _Recueil de Travaux_, xxii. p. 38.

221 See Sm. 1981. 3, where the _edinna_ or “desert” is called the home of the _lilla_.

222 Uda-kára.

223 By assimilation En-lil became El-lil. The name is literally “ghost-lord,” where the singular _lil_ represents a class. Hence En-lil is “lord of the ghosts” in general, conceived of as “the devil” is often conceived of in Christian literature, or as Hades sometimes meant all the denizens of the underworld in Greek. Dialectic forms of the name are Mul-lil and U-lil.

224 Under Semitic influence these “tablets of destiny” lost their primitive signification, and became, like the Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, simply a means of predicting the future.

225 At Eridu the Zi seems to have taken the place occupied by the Lil at Nippur; at all events, just as En-lil was the chief Lil or Lilla at Nippur, so Ea seems to have been the chief Zi at Eridu. On this see the next lecture.

_ 226 Zaqiqu_ is of course a “cloud of dust,” not “a wind,” as some scholars have translated it. A wind does not rise up out of the earth, but comes from the air or sky. In _WAI._ v. 6, vi. 64, the meaning of _zaqiqi_ can be “dust” and nothing else: _ilâni-su istarâti-su amnâ ana zakiki_, “its gods and goddesses I reduced to dust.”

_ 227 WAI._ v. 61, vi. 54, 55, where we must read _kibira_.

228 Professor Hommel has shown that among the Arabian and Western Semites (the Canaanites excepted) the original Baal was rather the moon-god than the sun-god. The supremacy of the sun-god belongs to Semitic Babylonia (_Aufsätze und Abhandlungen_, ii. pp. 149-165).

229 With this phrase, which is so frequent in the Babylonian texts, Hommel compares names like Ben-Ammi, “the son of (the god) Ammi.”

230 Thureau-Dangin in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xix. p. 186.

231 Quoted by King, _Babylonian Religion_, p. 49.

232 By assimilation En-lil became El-lil (and Ul-lil) in one of the Sumerian dialects (_WAI._ v. 37. 21). Hence the Illinos (for which Illillos must be read) of Damascius.

233 Aṡari-galu-dugga. We owe the interpretation of the name to the insight and learning of Fr. Lenormant, from whose untimely death the investigation of Babylonian religion has suffered grievously.

234 Is it possible that the original difference between the Zi and the Lil was that the one term was used at Eridu the other at Nippur, the meaning being pretty much the same in both cases? Unfortunately we have no materials at present for answering the question.

_ 235 WAI._ ii. 55. 43, 58. 57; iii. 67. 156.

236 Her assignment as a wife to the sun-god of Kis or to Nin-ip of Nippur belongs to a later period; see my Hibbert Lectures, p. 263.

237 Originally, however, she had been merely a spirit in the form of a heifer; _WAI._ ii. 62. 45, where “the ship of Bau” is called “the ship of the holy cow.” The name is doubtless Sumerian, and it seems to be the origin of the Baau of Phœnician cosmology, which asserted that the first men, Æôn and Protogonos, were born of “the wind Kolpia and his wife Baau, which is interpreted Night” (Eusebius, _Prœpar. Evang._ i. 10). Baau is probably the Hebrew _Bohu_.

238 See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 262, 374, 375. Ê-kur, “the house of the earth,” was the name of the temple of En-lil at Nippur. It was the abode of the “lord of the spirits” of the earth and the underworld.

239 She is called “the handmaid of the spirit of E-kura” (_WAI._ ii. 54. 18). The “spirit of E-kura” is En-lil, whose temple E-kura was, and consequently the title identifies her with the _kiel lilla_ or “handmaid of the Lil,” who eventually became the Lilith of Jewish folk-lore.

240 Hence in the hymn which describes the oraculur tree of Eridu (_WAI._ v. 15) the “couch” of Ea is called “the bed of Zi-Kum” in “the central place of the earth.”

241 See my Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, pp. 374, 375.

242 Similarly, as I first indicated in my Hibbert Lectures (p. 132), the first two antediluvian kings of Babylonia given by Berossos do not belong to the original list, but have been prefixed to it when Babylon became the leading city of the country, and it was accordingly necessary to make it the capital of the kingdom from the very beginning of time. It is worth notice that, just as the first two antediluvian Babylonian kings are a later addition to the original list, so the first two antediluvian patriarchs in the Book of Genesis seem to have been added to the original eight. Adam and Enos are synonyms like Cainan and Cain, for whom Seth, the Sutu or Bedâwin (Num. xxiv. 17), was substituted. In the Babylonian list, Amelon or Amilu, “man,” corresponds with Enos, just as Ammenon (Ummanu, “the craftsman”) corresponds with Cainan or Cain, “the smith.” For both the Babylonian and the Hebrew, man in the abstract was followed immediately by civilised man.

243 The Igigi are represented ideographically by v+ii (the ideograph of plurality). Perhaps, therefore, they were originally the spirits of the five planets duplicated according to their appearance in the evening and morning. If the opinion of Pognon (_L’Inscription de Bavian_, i. p. 25) could be sustained that the original ideograph was really vii and not v+ii, we should have a better explanation of them as the seven planets which, in Chaldæan astronomy, included the sun and moon. The meaning of the name is unknown. Guyard’s supposition, that it is derived from the Assyrian _agâgu_, “to be angry” (not “to be strong,” as he imagined), is devoid of probability. In K 2100, col. iv., it is also written Igâgâ, and explained by _isartum_, “justice,” or “straight direction.” In _WAI._ ii. 35. 37, the NUN-GAL (pronounced _Kisagal_) is called the _Rîbu_ which Jensen would connect with the Hebrew Rahab.

244 The divine “lord” of a place or territory, such as is met with in a South Arabian or Phœnician inscription, is totally different from the lord of the ghost-world at Nippur. The one was master of a definite territory on the surface of the earth, the other was a spirit ruling over other spirits in an underground world. The two conceptions have nothing in common with one another.

245 The evidence that has since come to light shows that I was wrong in my Hibbert Lectures (pp. 110, 193) in supposing that the origin of the triad was purely Sumerian. It was really due to the fusion of the Sumerian and Semitic elements in the official Babylonian religion. Possibly the astronomical triad of the sun, moon, and evening star may have suggested the artificial grouping of the gods of the three great seats of religious culture, but that was all. The origin of the triad must be sought in geography, or rather in the fact that Ana, En-lil, and Ea represented the three chief sanctuaries and centres of religious influence in Babylonia. I have already pointed out (_Hibbert Lectures_, p. 192) that from the fact that Ana is the first of the triad we may infer that the whole doctrine originated in the theological school of Erech. Erech, in fact, was the meeting-place of the Semite and Sumerian, where the Semitic influence first found itself supreme. The Baal of historical Semitic religion was a sky-god, despite Robertson Smith’s ingenious philological attempts to find a terrestrial source for him.

246 Cf. Hommel, _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen_, ii. pp. 149-165. Hommel has proved, with the help of the Minæan inscriptions, that primitive Semitic religion consisted of moon and star worship, the moon-god Athtar and an “angel” god standing at the head of the pantheon, while the sun-goddess was attached to them as daughter or wife. The supreme Baal of the Western Semites was thus originally the moon-god, a fact that throws light on his cult at Ur and Harran, which lay outside Babylonia proper, and were inhabited by a large West Semitic population.

_ 247 Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, p. 74.

248 The name of the Edomite king Â-rammu in the time of Sennacherib shows that the name and worship of  had been carried to the West. Compare also the name of Ehud (Judg. iii. 15).  seems to have been a title signifying “the father,” the actual Sumerian name of the deity being Sirrigam (see my Hibbert Lectures, p. 178).

249 For the absorption by Hadad of the Sumerian god of the air, Meri or Mermer, the divine patron of the city of Muru, my Hibbert Lectures, p. 202 sqq., may be consulted. Gubára, “the lady of the plain,” was apparently originally the wife of Meri; when Meri passed into Hadad, Gubára necessarily became the wife of the latter, “the lord of the mountain,” as he was called. As Hadad was already provided with a wife, Sala, the next step was to identify Sala and Gubára. Properly speaking, Gubára represented the Canaanitish goddess Ashêrah, Asirtum in Babylonian: see Reisner, “Sumerisch-babylonische Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit,” in the _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen zu Berlin_, x. p. 139, where the Sumerian _Martue mulu kharsagga-ga Gubarra gasan gu-edin_ is translated _Amurru bel sadî Asratum belit tseri_, “the Amorite god (Hadad), the lord of the mountain; Asratum (Ashêrah), the lady of the plain.”

250 The triad of Athtar, the moon-god and the “angel-messenger,” which Hommel has shown to be presupposed in the South Arabian inscriptions, was due to the influence of Babylonian culture. This is made clear by the Babylonian name of the moon-god, Sin, in the inscriptions of Hadhramaut, and of Aubây, _i.e._ Nebo, in those of Katabân. On the other hand, the addition of the sun-goddess to the triad is purely Semitic.

_ 251 East India House Inscription_, i. 52-ii. 5.

_ 252 East India House Inscription_, ix. 45-x. 5.

253 The solar character of Merodach was first pointed out by myself (_Trans. SBA._ (1873) ii. p. 246), and the proofs of it were given in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 100 sqq. The Sumerian poem in which the creation is ascribed to Ea makes Ê-Saggil originally the name of the temple of Ea at Eridu, from whence it must have been transferred to Babylon when Ea was supplanted by Merodach. From the list of Babylonian kings in which their names are explained, we may perhaps infer that the proper title of the temple at Babylon was E(s)-Guzi. Guzi had the same meaning in Sumerian as Ê-Saggil, “the house of the high head” (_WAI._ ii. 30. 4, 26. 58).

254 Compare _Ati_, “prince,” the title of Osiris.

255 This was first pointed out by Ball, _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, xii. 8, pp. 401, 402.

256 We may compare the statement in a hymn (_WAI._ v. 50. i. 5) that the sun-god “rises from the Du-azagga, the place of destinies,” where the Assyrian translation has “mountain of destinies.” The Du-azagga was on the horizon of Ea’s domain, the deep.

257 More commonly written Ṡumu.

258 Abil-Sin, “the son of the moon-god,” the god of the city of Ur, to which the preceding dynasty had belonged.

259 Though Zi is used here in its Semitic sense of “life” in the abstract, the position given to it as the first of the divine names and qualities bestowed on Merodach is significant. Before he can be identified with any of the gods of the official pantheon, he must become a Zi or “spirit,” or more strictly “_the_ spirit” of heaven. Similarly the divine essence of Ea is still called his Zi or “spirit,” a survival from a time when Ea was not yet a god.

260 It is probable that the word “wind” here, though its original sense was obscured or forgotten, goes back to an age when it signified the _lil_ of which in the lexical tablets it is given as an equivalent.

261 It must also be remembered that the attentions lavished by Nabonidos upon the older sanctuaries of Babylonia outside the walls of Babylon belonged to the earlier part of his reign.

_ 262 WAI._ ii. 54, No. 4; iii. 69, No. 1. In ii. 54, No. 3, the cosmic deities are made “the mother(s) and father(s) of Anu” instead of being identified with him. But the identification is doubtless really due to the fact that _ana_ meant “god” as well as “Anu.”

_ 263 Journal of the Victoria Institute_, xxviii. 8-10.

264 Thus the god Tispak (the Susinak of Susa, K 92691, _Rev._ ii. 35) is identified with Istar in _WAI._ 35. 18, comp. ii. 57. 35; and Iskhara, another name of Istar, is called a male deity with a wife, Almanâti (_Strassmaier_, 3901). Professor Barton notices (_Journal of American Oriental Society_, 21, pp. 186-188) that an inscription of Lugal-khaṡṡi, an early king of Kis, is dedicated to “the king Nana and the lady Nana.”

_ 265 WAI._ iii. 53. 30-9.

266 I can suggest no better etymology for the word Anunna than that proposed in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 182. It is supported by K 2100, col. iv., where the Sumerian pronunciation of Anunna-ki is given as Enu-kki, “the lord of the earth.” When the “spirits of the earth” came to be distinguished from “the angels” or “spirits” of the air, the form Anunna-ki or Anunna-ge, “the spirit of the earth” or “lower world,” became more usual than the simple Anunna. The latter is used of the Igigi or “angels” in K 4629, _Rev._, and of the Anunna-ki in _WAI._ iv. 1, 2, col. iv. 3.

267 Hoffmann remarks in regard to the Aramaic inscriptions of Zenjirli (_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, xi. p. 253): “The most interesting fact is that even the theological Hadad-stela makes no mention of a female goddess.”

268 The origin and nature of Tammuz have been investigated in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 220-245, and need not be repeated here. He was primarily a Zi or spirit worshipped at Eridu, where he was known as “the Son of the Spirit of the Deep,” _i.e._ Ea. He was, in fact, the primitive sun-god of Eridu, though his character underwent strange transformations in the course of his identification with Nin-girṡu (Inguriṡa) and other gods. But Tammuz was a sun-god who spent half his annual life in the underworld, or, according to another view, as fellow-warder with Nin-gis-zida of the gates of heaven. Hence he pastures his cattle in the fields beyond the river Khubur, the ocean-stream that encircles the earth, on the road to the land of the dead (Craig, _Religious Texts_, i. p. 17). On the other hand, he was also said to dwell in the midst of the cosmic temple of Ea at Eridu, between the Tigris and Euphrates (_WAI._ iv. 15. 58-59). It is possible, though not yet proved, that in Tammuz two deities have been combined together, the sun-god and the vegetation of the spring which the young sun of the year brings into existence. However this may be, in Tammuz and Nin-gis-zida I see the Babylonian prototypes of the two pillars Jachin and Boaz erected by Solomon in front of the temple (1 Kings vii. 21). Nin-gis-zida means “the lord of the upright post” (_bil itsi kêni_ in Semitic Babylonian), and thus corresponds with Jachin.

269 Thureau-Dangin in the _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xix. pp. 185-187.

270 Published and translated by me in the _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, v. (1877) p. 441, where I pointed out for the first time that the early Babylonian kings were deified.

271 Scheil in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xviii. p. 71, xxi. p. 27.

272 See Brünnow, _Classified List_, No. 8883.

_ 273 WAI._ ii. 55. 27, iv. 25. 40. _Dara_, Semitic _turakhu_, is shown to be “an antelope” by the figure of an antelope, ending in a fish, which is stated to represent Ea on a boundary-stone from Susa published in de Morgan’s _Délégation en Perse_, vol. i., and explained by Scheil in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xxiii. pp. 96, 97. The figure is accompanied by the symbol of Ea, a weapon which terminates in the head of a ram.

_ 274 WAI._ iii. 68. 12-14. See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 286. For “the cow” Bau, see above, p. 148. Nergal or Allamu was originally the gazelle (Brünnow, _Classified List_, Nos. 1906, 1907).

_ 275 WAI._ ii. 18. 57, 55. 69, iv. 3. 25.

276 Thus the monkey is associated with Nu-gidda, “the dwarf,” who in his turn accompanies the moon-god.

277 The last line of this hymn (_WAI._ iv. 15. 52 sqq.), of which I have given a translation in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 238, has been discovered by Dr. Pinches, and published by him in the _Journal of Transactions of the Victoria Institute_, xxix. p. 44.

278 In Reisner, “Sumerisch-babylonische Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit,” in the _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen_, x. p. 135, 25-32, and p. 139, 151-158, we read, “the great gods are 50; the gods of destiny are 7; the Anunnaki of heaven are 300; the Anunnaki of earth are 600.”

279 Hence he is called by Nebuchadrezzar _pakid kissat samê u irtsitim_, “marshaller of the hosts of heaven and earth” (_WAI._ i. 51. 13).

280 For the Anunna-ki and Igigi, see above, p. 344.

281 The solar character of Nin-ip was first pointed out by myself in the _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, ii. (1873) p. 246, and again in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 152, 153. He was probably called Bêr in Assyrian, but the Cilician Nineps shows that he was also known by his Sumerian title of Nin-ip. See my paper in the _Proc. SBA._ xx. 7, pp. 261, 262.

282 The ideograph denotes the _keffîya_, corresponding both to the veil and to the turban. In its earliest pictorial form it represents a veil covering both the head and face, and leaving only the hair at the back of the head visible. It was usually termed _uras_, a word borrowed by Semitic Babylonian under the form of _urasu_, which in its turn created the verb _arâsu_, “to veil,” and the word _aristu_, “a cloak.” The _keffîya_ was also known in Sumerian as _mutra_, Semitic _mutru_, from which the Greek μίτρα was borrowed. The _mitra_ properly signified the Oriental turban; but as no such head-dress was worn by the Greeks, it is already used by Homer for the girdle of the waist. Besides the value of _uras_, the ideograph also had the value of _dara_ (in Assyrian _nibittu_ and _iṡkhu_, “a veil”). It is possible that the actual pronunciation of the name Nin-ip was In-dar.

_ 283 WAI._ ii. 57. 39.

284 Gwydion induced Pryderi by stratagem to give some of them to him, and so carried them from Dyved to North Wales; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures on _Celtic Heathendom_, pp. 242-244.

285 Cf. _WAI._ ii. 19. 49_b_, “the spirits of the earth I made grope like swine in the hollows.”

286 See, for example, _WAI._ ii. 54. 3 _Obv._ 4-14, 4. 37-45.

287 There is no reason for holding that the temple of Ê-Zida rebuilt by Khammurabi at Borsippa, was any other than the old Ê-Zida which was dedicated to Nebo.

288 For names like Sippar-sadî, Sippar-saduni, Upê-semi, and Upê-natsir, see Pinches, _Revue de l’Histoire des Religions_, xliii. p. 277.

289 Support may be found for this etymology in the common title of Assur as “the good god,” which is written ideographically _an-dugga_. But even if the Assyrians believed that this was the proper signification of the name of their god, it does not follow that they were right; and since the characters representing the title could be read AN-SAR, it is possibly only a play on the supposed connection of the name with the Sumerian Ansar. The latter appears as Assoros in Damascius. Perhaps Assur (originally Asur) is merely _asurru_, “a wall.”

290 Glaser, _Skizze der Geschichte Arabiens_ (1889), pp. 64-74.

291 Du-azagga. As the “holy mound” was the home of Ea, it follows that it was originally part of the Persian Gulf; on the other hand, the name given to it implies that it resembled a mountain lifting itself up into the sky. The sun rose from it (_WAI._ v. 50. 5_a_); hence it must have been the eastern horizon, which, to an inhabitant of Eridu, would have been the horizon of the sea, that ascended towards the heavens like a great mound. A model was made of it, which became the _parakku_ or mercy-seat of Ea in his temple at Eridu. When Eridu and its god were supplanted by Babylon and Bel-Merodach, the Du-azagga was transferred to the latter city and became “the seat of the oracles” in the shrine of Bel-Merodach, “whereon,” according to Nebuchadrezzar, “at the festival of Zagmuku, at the beginning of the year, on the 8th and 11th days, the king of the gods of heaven and earth, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads.” When Nebo became the minister of Merodach, he too was addressed as “the god of the holy mound” (_WAI._ ii. 54. 71), and one of “the three great names of Anu” was said to be “the king who comes forth from the holy mound,” another of the names being “the creator of the heavenly hosts” (_WAI._ iii. 68. 19, 20). Even Istar, or rather Iskhara, is called “the goddess of the holy mound” (_WAI._ iii. 68. 27). It may be added that a lexical tablet makes the “holy mound” a synonym of the deep (_WAI._ v. 41, No. 1).

_ 292 WAI._ ii. 58. 57. His Sumerian title as the divine potter was Nunurra, which is explained as “god of the pot,” or more literally “lord of the pot” (Brünnow, _Classified List_, 5895). See Scheil, _Recueil de Travaux_, xx. p. 125.

293 El-lil, it should be noted, was called “the great mountain” (Kur-gal, Sadu-rabu in Semitic), and the name of his temple was Ê-kur, “the house of the mountain.” It is probable that the belief in the Kharsag-kurkurra, or “mountain of the world,” on which the gods lived, originated at Nippur. From Isa. xiv. 13 we gather that it was placed in the north. Nin-lil, the wife of En-lil, is called Nin-kharsag, “the lady of the mountain,” by Samsu-iluna, who describes her as “the mother who created me” (_Brit. Mus._, pl. 199, 1. 41).

294 These are the creatures described by Berossos as sprung from the bosom of Tiamât—winged men, with four or two faces, or with the feet of horses and goats; human-headed bulls; dog-headed horses, and the like—which were depicted on the walls of the temple of Bel-Merodach, the successor of Bel of Nippur (Syncell. p. 29; Euseb. _Chron. Armen._ p. 10, ed. Mai).

295 A variant fragment of the legend, as was first recognised by myself in the _Proc. SBA._ xx. pp. 187-189, was published by Dr. Scheil from an early Babylonian tablet in the _Recueil de Travaux_, xx. pp. 66, 67.

296 An indication may, however, be found in the statement that the Lillum or “Lil” was the “mother-father” of En-lil (_WAI._ iv. 27. 5), and the further reference to the Zi or “spirit” who was the “mother-father” of En-lil and Nin-lil (_WAI._ iv. 1. Col. ii. 25-28). The genderless Sumerian knew of no distinction of sex; the creative principle was at once female and male. It will be noticed that the female element takes precedence of the male in contradistinction to Semitic ideas.

297 These two lines are an interpolation.

298 These three lines have been interpolated.

299 The name of Merodach has been substituted for that of Ea.

300 A play on the name of Eri-dugga, “the good city.”

301 Probably an interpolation.

302 Originally Ea.

303 These two lines do not belong to the original poem.

304 For Tammuz and Nin-gis-zida, see above, p. 350, note. It may be added that in the Maqlû collection of incantation texts, Nin-gis-zida seems to be regarded as a goddess and the consort of Nusku, the fire-god. Nin, in Sumerian, more often signified “lady” than “lord.” It is possible that at Eridu she was held to be the wife of Tammuz.

305 Perhaps Hommel is right in translating “palm.”

306 Cp. Gen. iii. 8.

307 Zikum or Nammu, the abyss, who is called the mother of Ea. Nammu is given as the Sumerian name or title of Zikum in _Cuneiform Texts_, xii. p. 26, 1. 20.

308 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 238, and Pinches, _Journal of the Victoria Institute_, xxix. p. 44.

_ 309 WAI._ iv. 15, Col. ii. 5, 6.

310 So in _WAI._ iv. 25. 49, _an-sar ki-sar_ is translated “the hosts of heaven and earth.” In _WAI._ v. 43. 27, the Sumerian “the divine scribe, the creator of the hosts of earth,” is paraphrased by the Semitic translator _Nabû pakid kissat samê u irtsiti_, “Nebo, the captain of the hosts of heaven and earth.” For the Semite, the god he worshipped was lord of the hosts of heaven as well as of the spirits of the earth.

311 It is possible that the Hebrew Urim and Thummim were really connected with the Babylonian “tablets of destiny.” The latter were fastened “on the breast,” according to the Epic of the Creation, like the Urim and Thummim of the Israelitish high priest. In _WAI._ iv. 18, No. 3, Ea describes a sort of magical breastplate, made of gold, which was to be set with precious stones and fastened to the breast. Nine stones are named, which seem to have been carved into figures of the gods, like Egyptian amulets, since they are said to be “the flesh of the gods.” Professor Zimmern even suggests (_Beiträge zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion_, p. 91) that Urim is to be identified with the Assyrian _urtu_, a synonym of _tertu_ (_tôrâh_), “instruction” or “law.”

312 Compare the “ladder” of Jacob (Gen. xxviii. 12). A similar staircase or ladder is represented on the conical or egg-shaped stone which symbolised the moon-god of Harran (_e.g._ Lajard, _Culte de Mithra_, 54, 4).

_ 313 En-me_, literally, “lord of the voice,” appears to have been pronounced _ên_ in Sumerian, since the Semitic _ênu_ was borrowed from it. The word has the same root as _ên_, “an incantation,” and the _ênu_ denoted the priest who “recited” the incantatory ritual. He may thus be compared with the Egyptian _kher-heb_. There was an _ênu_ or “chanter of Istar,” whose technical name was _ukurrim_, and another of Ea, “the holy father,” who was called the _sennu_. The incantatory formulæ, it must be remembered, relate for the most part to Ea and Istar. Another class of the _ênu_ was called _sailu_, “the magian,” in Assyrian (literally, “the questioner” of the spirits who may have practised ventriloquism); in Sumerian the name may be read _ên-lil_, “the chanter of the _lil_.”

314 I can still see no better etymology for _dimmer_, _dingir_, “god,” than the one I proposed in my Hibbert Lectures (p. 143), viz. _dim_, “to create” or “make.” From the same root we have _dim_ or _dimma_, “offspring” (_WAI._ v. 29. 71), which illustrates the antithesis between the Sumerian who regarded generation as an act of creation, and the Semite who regarded creation as an act of generation. In _WAI._ ii. 47. 29, _dim_ takes the place of _dumu_, “son.” _Dimme_ and _dimmea_ show that in _dimmer_ the final consonant is a suffix.

_ 315 WAI._ ii. 55. 27, iv. 25. 40. I have retained here the ordinary rendering of “gazelle” for the Assyrian _ditanu_, though it is more probable that its Sumerian equivalent _elim_ (perhaps the Heb. _âyîl_) means “ram.” At all events _elim_ is given as _kuṡarikku_ or “ram” in Sc. 315. But there is a difficulty about the god to whom the name was originally applied. In _WAI._ ii. 55. 31-33, “the princely _elim_,” “the mighty _elim_,” and “the earth-creating _elim_” are given as names of Ea; whereas in _WAI._ v. 21. 11, _elim_ is a synonym of the god Aṡari, and in Sc. 312 it is the equivalent of El-lil. As “the ship” or ark of Ea was “the ship of the antelope of the deep,” Ea must have been the antelope (_turakhu_) rather than the ram or gazelle; and I believe, therefore, that the transference of what was properly the name of El-lil to Asari and Ea was due to the confusion that grew up between El-lil after his transformation into the Semitic Bel and Asari after his transformation into the Semitic Bel-Merodach. The ideograph which denotes _elim_ represents a quadruped, sometimes with an eye, sometimes with the ideograph of sheep, attached to it.

_ 316 WAI._ v. 52, Col. iv. 8.

317 Perhaps, however, the “divine seven” was descended from the seven gods who were sons of En-me-sarra, according to _WAI._ iv. 23, No. 1. En-me-sarra means “the incantation-priest of the (heavenly) hosts” (_ênu sa kissati_), and his “sons” therefore remind us of Job xxxviii. 7. It will not be forgotten that Philo Byblius made “the seven sons of Sydyk, the Kabeiri, with their eighth brother Asklêpios (Ashmûn),” the first writers of history (Euseb. _Prœp. evang._ i. 10).

318 It has been edited and translated by Tallqvist, _Die Assyrische Beschwörungsserie Maqlû_ (1894), who calculates that it contained 1550 lines, or more than 9000 words.

319 The whole work is in the metrical form characteristic of Semitic Babylonian. It has been edited by Zimmern, _Beiträge zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion; Die Beschwörungstafeln Shurpu_ (1896).

320 Isa. viii. 19. The beginning, for instance, of the second book of the Maqlû collection had to be recited in a whisper before a wax image.

321 As the title of the latter work is sometimes written UD-MA AN EN-LIL as well as UD AN EN-LIL, the real translation may be “when (_enu-ma_) Bel,” rather than “Illumination (_namaru_) of Bel,” these having been the opening words of the first tablet. Since, however, it was translated into Greek by Berossos as a work of “Bel” (Seneca, _Quæst. Nat._ iii. 29), the name assigned to it in the text is on the whole to be preferred.

_ 322 WAI._ iv. 19, No. 2.

_ 323 WAI._ iv. 28, No. 1.

324 Literally, “the prophetdom” or “college of prophets” (_isipputi_).

_ 325 WAI._ v. 4. 86-91.

_ 326 Terêti_, the Heb. _thôrâh_. The laws which the gods have to obey are meant.

327 Gilgames seems to mean “great father,” from _gilga_, “father,” and _mes_, _i.e._ _mas_, “great.”

_ 328 Hist. Anim._ xii. 21. Sokkaros, king of Babylonia, fearing that his daughter’s son would dethrone and slay him, imprisoned her in a tower. Gilgamos, however, was born to her. By his grandfather’s orders he was thrown from the tower, but saved by an eagle, which caught him upon its wings. Philologically it is possible to identify Sokkaros and Akris-ios.

329 Hilprecht, _The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania_, i. 15. 26; Hommel in the _Proc. SBA._ xvi. pp. 13-15. The inscription is as follows: “The deified Abil-ili(?), father of the army of Erech, the son of Bel-semea, has restored the walls of Erech, which were built in old times by the deified Gilgames.”

330 Professor Haupt, however, to whom we owe the “editio princeps” of the Epic of Gilgames, believes that the description of the siege of Erech does not belong to the Epic at all. He finds the beginning of it in the fragment K 2756 c, generally assigned to the third book of the poem. See his article on “The Beginning of the Babylonian Nimrod Epic” in the “Johns Hopkins Semitic Papers” (_Journal of the American Oriental Society_, xxii. 1 (1901)).

331 As Berossos has told us what was the pronunciation of the name of the hero of the Chaldean Deluge, the disputes of modern Assyriologists as to whether it was Pir-napistim or the like are but labour lost. The true analysis of the name Xisuthros is still unknown, though it is possible, but not probable, that George Smith was right in seeing in it a metathesis of the title Adra-khasis applied to several of the early Babylonian heroes. Adra-khasis means “the very clever,” reminding us of “Mohammed the clever” in modern Egyptian folk-lore.

_ 332 ´Samtu_, Heb. _shohem_ (Gen. ii. 12).

333 So Hommel, who is probably right in seeing in the word the name of Saba in Southern Arabia.

334 Zimmern, indeed, has suggested that this latter text belongs to the legend of Atarpi, which, however, has unfortunately come down to us in so mutilated a condition that no certain interpretation of it is possible. The discoverer of the tablet is more probably right in connecting it with the story of the Flood.

335 Who here takes the place of Aruru.

336 The words “I will no longer dwell in your city, and turn my face toward the ground of En-lil,” imply that Surippak was not far from Nippur.

337 The mountain of Nizir was in the country called Lulubi or Luluwi by the Assyrians, Lulu in the Vannic inscriptions. In the bilingual inscription of Topzawa, Lulu is made the equivalent of the Assyrian Urardhu, the Hebrew Ararat.

338 See my _Early History of the Hebrews_, p. 122 sqq.

_ 339 Loc. cit._, p. 126.

_ 340 Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit_ (1895).

341 It should be noticed that, as the voyage of Xisuthros lasted for a Babylonian week of seven nights, so the voyage of Deukalion lasted for a Greek week of nine days. Ogyges is but a local variant of Deukalion.

342 See Meissner, _Alexander und Gilgamos_ (1894).

343 See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 360-363, where the various passages relating to the Babylonian Olympos are quoted.

344 The land of Arallu or Hades.

345 This, however, is rather the “holy mound” of waters, in which Ea had his home, than the inland mountain of En-lil.

_ 346 Ur_ is the Sumerian word for “zone.” It is translated by _arâru_, “to bind”; _etsêdu_, “to bind the sheaves” for harvest; and _khamâmu_, “to bind” or “fix” laws.

347 From Mr. Smith’s words it is difficult to determine whether the gates were in the first or second court, or whether (as seems the more probable) the tablet intended us to understand that the gates belonged to both courts.

348 The first stage was 300 feet square and 110 feet high, while the topmost was 80 feet long by 70 broad and 50 high.

349 For the shewbread, see Zimmern, _Beiträge zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion_, pp. 94, 95; and Haupt, “Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual,” p. 59 (_Journal of Biblical Literature_, 1900). Sometimes six dozen cakes were laid before the god, sometimes three dozen, more often only one dozen, as among the Israelites. The shewbread is called _akal pani_, which is the exact equivalent of the Hebrew _lekhem happânîm_; and Professor Haupt has pointed out that it was required to be unleavened (_mutqu_).

350 Cp. Gen. xi. 5.

351 The Sumerian _du_ has, of course, nothing to do with the Semitic Babylonian _dû_, “a chapel” (unless, indeed, the latter is borrowed from the Sumerian word). It is properly the equivalent of _tilu_, “a mound” or “hill”; but as the _tilu_ or _tel_ was generally inhabited, it came further to acquire the signification of _subtu_, “a dwelling-place.”

_ 352 WAI._ v. 50. i. 5; 41. 1, _Rev._ 18.

353 See above, p. 374, note 1.

_ 354 Samassumukin_, ii. pp. 47-51. Nebuchadrezzar calls the Du-azagga, “the place of the oracles of the Ubsu-ginna, the mercy-seat of destinies, which on the festival of the New Year (Zag-muku), on the eighth and eleventh days,” Bel announces before the assembled gods. Jensen (_Kosmologie der Babylonier_, pp. 239-242) first pointed out that the Ubsu-ginna was “the assembly-place” of the gods, which was located in or upon Ê-kur, “the Mountain of the World” (_WAI._ iv. 63. 17.). It thus corresponds with “the mount of the Assembly” of Isa. xiv. 13, and illustrates the combination of the theology of Eridu with that of Nippur.

_ 355 WAI._ iv. 23, No. 1, translated in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 495.

356 De Sarzec, _Découvertes en Chaldée_, pp. 216, 217.

357 The _sangu_ was called _êbar_ in Sumerian, with which the name of Eber in Gen. xi. 15 may possibly be compared.

358 Not “astrologers,” as has sometimes been supposed. _Kalû_ is borrowed from the Sumerian _kal_, as _makhkhû_ is from _makh_. At their head was the _abba-kalla_, _aba-kul_, or _ab-gal_, a word which under the first form is used as a proper name in early Babylonian texts. Assyrian colonists carried it to Kappadokia, and Strabo accordingly tells us that the high priest of Komana was called Abaklês. A Hellenised form of the title, Bakêlos, is given by Hesychius, who renders it by “the grandee” and “the gallos-priest” (see my note in the _Proc. SBA._ xxiii. p. 106). _Abgal_ is stated to be the equivalent not only of the borrowed Assyrian _abkallu_, but also of _bil terti_, “master of the law”; _khassu_ and _imqu_, “the learned one” (like the Arabic _’alim_); and _mar ummani_, “the craftsman” or “professional” (_WAI._ v. 13. 37-42). The relation of _kalû_ to _gallu_ (Sumerian _kal_ and _galla_), “a servant,” is not yet clear, though it must be remembered that the _gallos_ was the “servant” of Kybelê. On the use of _kal_, “servant” in the Sumerian texts, see Reisner, _Tempelurkunden aus Telloh_, pp. 20, 21.

359 So in a text quoted in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 81, “like Bel on the mercy-seat of the destinies the prophecy shall be uttered, this shall be said: ‘Bel has come forth, the king has looked after me.’ ” A special class of “prophets” bore the name of _masmas_ (whence _masmasu_ in Assyrian), which is translated _mullilu_, “the praiser” of the gods (Heb. _hillêl_).

360 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 79.

361 Ê-kua and Mâ-Kua, _bit-assaputi_ and _elip-assaputi_ in Semitic. Jastrow mistranslates “dwelling-house” instead of “oracle” or “prophecy”; the true meaning of the word was already discovered by Oppert in the early days of cuneiform decipherment.

362 The _sabrû_ was distinct from the _barû_, whose name seems to have a more general signification, and Professor Haupt is probably right in regarding it as the _shaphel_ form of the latter. He gives _barû_, however, too wide a meaning when he makes it denote a “diviner” of every kind and sort. It is true that magic was taken under the ægis of Babylonian theology, and that just as the _asipi_ or “prophets” might be made to include the “enchanters” and “pronouncers” of spells, so the _bari_ might include those who sought to divine the future by examining the entrails of victims or by means of a cup (cp. Gen. xliv. 5). But, properly speaking, the _barû_, like the _sabrû_, “revealed” the future by means of dreams. Haupt’s correction of _baddîm_ into _bârîm_, “diviners,” in Isa. xliv. 25 and Jer. l. 36, is brilliant (_Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual_, p. 57). The Sumerian equivalent of _barû_ is KHAL (or more correctly _âkhal_); that of _sabrû_, PA-AL, where PA means “the official.”

363 Thureau-Dangin, “Tablettes chaldéennes inédites,” in the _Revue d’Assyriologie_, iv. 3, pl. xiii. 40, _Obv._

364 So too was a person of illegitimate birth, as has been pointed out by Haupt (_Journal of Biblical Literature_ (1900), p. 57).

365 J. D. Price in the _Journal of the American Oriental Society_, xxi. 2, pp. 1-22. In the hemerology published in _WAI._ iv. 32, the animal mentioned in col. 1, line 3, is not a gazelle, as I have supposed in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 70, but a “goat” (Sumerian _sikku_, Assyrian _sapparu_).

366 There is no question here of a scape-goat or anything similar. The word “offspring” is _uritsu_, which is the regular equivalent of Bir “suboles.” The addition of the words _sa amiluti_, “of mankind,” confines it in this case to man. Already, in 1875, in my _Elementary Assyrian Grammar_ (p. 123), I pointed out that it was connected with the Arabic warats, which I see (like many other things of the same sort) has recently been announced as a new discovery. The verb _ittadin_, by the way, is an Iphteal, not a Niphal, and therefore cannot be translated as a passive.

367 De Sarzec, _Découvertes en Chaldée_, iv. 1, pl. 4 _bis_. This was in the time of king E-anna-du. A bas-relief of the time of Entemena on the same plate, 5 _bis_ (_3b_), represents what may also be a human sacrifice, one naked captive lying on the ground already slain, while another is being led to execution.

368 References are given in Jastrow, _Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, p. 666.

369 The tithe was paid on the 5th of Ab; on the 16th of Tammuz, nineteen days earlier, Gobryas had entered Babylon with the soldiers of Cyrus.

370 A more comprehensive term was _ginû_, “the fixed offering,” which included not only the daily sacrifices, but all other stated sacrifices as well.

371 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 72, note 2.

_ 372 WAI._ i. 65, ii. 19-21; 54. iii. 48-50. See Trumbull, _The Threshold Covenant_, pp. 110, 116.

373 Cp. Lev. v. 7, 11.

374 Haupt, _Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual_, pp. 60, 61.

375 Zimmern, _Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Babylonischen Religion_, p. 127.

_ 376 L.c._, p. 88, note 2.

377 On the early Babylonian calendar, see Radau, _Early Babylonian History_, pp. 287-307.

378 The real reading of the god’s name is unknown. He was identified with Nin-ip (_WAI._ ii. 57. 68), the sun of the south (_WAI._ ii. 57. 51), and therefore the midday sun—not the morning sun, as has recently been maintained. Nin-ip was the messenger or “angel” of El-lil of Nippur, and consequently Bil-’si is further identified with “the moon of Nippur” (_WAI._ 57. 56), the angel of the lord of the ghost-world being more properly the moon than the sun. When Bel-Merodach of Babylon usurped the functions of El-lil, Bel-’si naturally became Nebo, “the power of strength” (_WAI._ v. 43. 37), who stood in the same relation to Merodach that Nin-ip did to El-lil. Bil-’si was also the seventh of the _tikpi_-stars (_WAI._ ii. 49. 10-13, iii. 50-52).

379 Amiaud’s translation in _Records of the Past_, new ser., ii. pp. 83, 84.

380 Athenæus, _Deipnosophist_, 14.

381 The most obvious derivation of the Hebrew Purim is that which I have proposed in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, xix. 7, pp. 280, 281, little as it may suit certain fashionable hypotheses. On the Black Obelisk (175), Shalmaneser says: “For the second time the Pûr-festival of Assur and Hadad I celebrated”; and a deed of sale (Rm. 2. 19) is dated in the eponymy of Bel-danan, B.C. 734, “in the year of his Pûr-office” (_ina sanê puri-su_). Pur, which is interpreted “a lot,” has naturally no connection with the Assyrian _bur_, which is stated to mean “a stone.” That we must read _bur_ and not _pur_, is shown by the variant spelling _ba-ar_ (Sa 5. iv. 10).

_ 382 WAI._ ii. 32. 16. The reading of Delitzsch and myself has been called in question, the tablet having apparently been damaged since we examined it, but all doubts have now been set at rest by K 93037, _Obv._ 24 (published in _Cuneiform Texts_, xii. 6), where _sabattum_ is the equivalent of a Sumerian “_the_ day” _par excellence_. Babylonia was the home of astronomy and of the sacredness of the number seven, due to the fact that there were seven planets, so that a seventh-day Sabbath was natural there.

383 Compare the Rabbinical phrase, “soiling the hands,” applied to the inspired books of Scripture.

384 A translation of the whole text is given in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 70-76. With the last prohibition, compare Isa. lviii. 13, “not speaking thine own words” on the Sabbath-day.

385 Jastrow, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, pp. 322, 323.

_ 386 Ædipus Judaicus_ (London, 1811).

387 So in the second book of the _Surpu_ series (_WAI._ iv. 59, Col. ii. 106, Col. iv. 7-9, translated in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 508, 509); _WAI._ iii. 66. _a_ 9, 13.

_ 388 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen_, ii. pp. 149-165.

389 See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 177, 178.

_ 390 Expository Times_, ix. (1898) p. 522; March 1900, p. 270.

391 P. 316.

_ 392 WAI._ i. 51. 1, 13.

393 Pronounced Ên-sarra, Ênu-sa-kissati in Semitic.

394 See the translation of the hymn in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 301. The text has been commented on by Fr. Martin, _Textes réligieux assyriens et babyloniens_, pp. 77-80.

395 The god of the “great mountain,” see above, pp. 376, 452.

396 Zimmern, _Die Beschwörungstafeln Shurpu_, p. 3 sqq.

397 We may notice that it is the people, and not the king, who will suffer for the misdeeds of the latter; cp. 2 Sam. xxiv. 17, and Horace, _Ep._ i. 12, 20: “quicquid delirant reges, plec tuntur Achivi.”

_ 398 WAI._ iv. 55. The inscription was first translated by George Smith, _Assyrian Discoveries_ (1875), pp. 409-411, and by myself in the _Records of the Past_, first ser., vii. (1876), pp. 119-122. Mr. King has recently given the first part of the text in his _Babylonian Religion_, pp. 217, 218.

399 Hommel suggests that _silân_, “the hollow place underneath the earth,” is derived from _sa’ûlânu_, “sheol” (_Aufsätze_ und _Abhandlungen_, iii. p. 347).

_ 400 Babylonian Religion and Mythology_, p. 83. See George Smith, _Chaldæan Account of Genesis_, pp. 78-80 (II. 10-13, 16-23).

401 K 255, _Obv._ i. 19, _Ablu dannu mutir gimilli Bili abi-su_, “the mighty son, the avenger of Bel his father.”

_ 402 Textes religieux assyriens et babyloniens_, p. xvi.

403 Martin, _l.c._, p. 14.

404 H. Gunkel, _Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit_ (1895).