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tween certain periods in the history of the religion,
RELIGION OF BABYLONIA
and can indicate political and intellectual factors that contributed to the gradual transformation of certain doctrines, while in a general way the literary process involved in the production of rituals, epics, myths, and legends can now be determined.
i. THE SouRCcES.—Until the middle of the 19th cent. our sources for the religion of Babylonia and Assyria were a few scattered notices in a number of classical and other authors, notably Herodotus, Eusebius, and Syncellus, and in the compilation of the Jewish Rabbis known as the Talmud, and some incidental though valuable allusions in the historical and prophetical portions of the Old Testament. Through the excavations so successfully conducted by French, English, American, and German explorers in the mounds scattered along the banks of the Tigris and in the Euphrates Valley,* since the year 1842, these notices and allusions have been relegated to the rank of secondary sources, and, instead, we have now, as primary sources, the unearthed temples and palaces of Babylonia and Assyria, with their statues, furnishings, and inscriptions, and, above all, the abundant literary archives found in the mounds. The royal library, more particularly, collected by king Assurbanipal (668-625 B.c.) in his palace at Nineveh and unearthed by Layard and Rassam (1849-1854),+ contained thousands of tablets with contents of a directly religious char- acter—incantations, omens, myths, legends, hymns, prayers, and entire rituals, while the affiliation existing in Babylonia and Assyria between _re- ligion on the one hand, and astronomy, medicine, and even law, on the other, also renders other portions of the library, which ranges over numerous branches of literary activity, valuable as sources for the study of the Babylono-Assyrian religion. The library at Nineveh, though datine—at least for the greater part—from the days of Assur- banipal, represents a considerably older literature ; for, as the king frequently informs us in the sub- scriptions of the tablets, the collection was formed by having copies made through his scribes from originals that existed in Babylonian archives. This statement carries with it the important corollary that Assurbanipal’s library represents the remains of a literature produced not in Assyria but in Babylonia ; and, in confirmation of this, many tablets have been found in the course of excavations in mounds in Babylonia proper, which are either duplicates of those in the Nineveh collection, or supplement them. The character of the writing, apart from other evidence, on some of these Babylonian ‘originals’ would justify us in carrying the literary activity of the scribes of the south back to about two millenniums before the days of Assurbanipal, while the discovery+ of extensive literary archives in connexion with the American excavations at Nippur, the tablets of which are all said to be earlier than the third millennium before our era, warrants an even earlier date for the beginnings of Babylonian literature.
*See the bibliographical references attached to articles AssyRIA and BaBYLONIA in vol. i., to which must now be added (1) Rogers’ History of Babylonia and Assyria (New York and London, 1900), which contains (vol. i. pp. 1-258) the best detailed agcount of the excavations; (2) Hilprecht’s Explorations in Bible Lands (Phila. 1908), pp. 3-577, supplementing Rogers in some particulars, and containing a full though severely criticised account of the excavations at Nippur ; and (3) the M@ ittheilungen der Deutschen Orient. Gesellschaft (1898 to date), furnishing regular reports of the German excavations in and around the city of Babylon, which are to be extended also to other mounds in Babylonia and Assyria.
+ For an account of this library, see, e.g., Kaulen, Assyrien und Babylonien (Sth ed., Freiburg, 1899, ch. vii.); Menant,
La Bibliotheque du Palais de Ninive (Paris, 1880); and, above all, Bezold’s invaluable catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection (London, 1889-99, 5 vols.).
t See Hilprecht’s Haplorations in Bible Lands (Philadelphia and Edinburgh, 1903), pp. 511-532.
RELIGION OF BABYLONIA
Roughly speaking, all the more important literary productions in Assurbanipal’s library were in existence before the year 2000 B.c., while many are no doubt considerably older.
In the south, where the religious literature grew up in connexion with the activity of the Baby- lonian temples, the latter formed the natural depositories for these collections, just as in the temples, as the courts of justice and as the centres of astronomical and medical science, the official legal archives and the extensive scientific col- lections were kept. It is characteristic of the general relationship of Assyria to Babylonian culture that the Assyrian monarch was not only obliged to import his literature from the south, but in doing so made the palace the depository for this foreign product instead of the temple. The zeal which animated him in sending his scribes to ransack the libraries of the south was neither literary nor religious, but due to a political and in part also to a personal ambition to emphasize, by a transfer thither of the culture of the south, the complete ascendency of Assyria as the dominant power, and as the legatee of the civilization that arose in Babylonia. Along with this civilization, the religion of the south was also carried to the north ; and while, in so far as the pantheon is con- cerned, the Assyrians manifested a certain origin- ality, and while the northern scribes also made contributions to the religious literature, in all but minor details the views and doctrines em- bodied in these productions are identical with those developed in the theological and religious centres of the south. Thus for all practical purposes the religion of Assyria may be regarded as identical with that of Babylonia. This identity extends to the cult, which naturally presented variations in each centre of both the south and the north, but which was everywhere based upon the same conceptions of the relationship between man and the higher Powers, and reflected the same general religious doctrines.