5. The union of the Babylonian States had defi- nitely secured for the patron deity of the city of Babylon —the god Marduk—his position as the head of the pantheon ; and, though attempts were made at times to set Marduk aside in favour of some other god,—Nebo, the god of Borsippa (opposite Babylon), or the old Bel of Nippur, or Shamash, the sun-god of Sippar,—they did not succeed in doing more than temporarily eclipsing the glory of Marduk, who on the whole maintained his position down to the fall of the New Babylonian empire. It is signifi-
RELIGION OF BABYLONIA
RELIGION OF BABYLONIA = 535
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cant that, when Cyrus entered Babylon in triumph jin the autumn of B.C. 539, the first act of the conqueror was to pay his devotion to Marduk, as whose deputy he claims to act. This commanding position of Marduk in the pantheon is the most notable feature, from the PoliniGie point of view, of the period following upon Hammurabi. It opens a new era in the religious history of Baby- lonia, and forms a convenient dividing line between the oldest and the second period in this history. That it was brought about through a political act, is an illustration of the close relationship in Babylonia and Assyria between political and religious conditions, upon which we have dwelt. With Marduk as the head of the pantheon, it was necessary to regulate the position of the other gods of the great religious centres towards him. The older attempts of the theologians to systema- tize the pantheon had to be re-shaped in accordance with the state of affairs created by the acknow- ledgment of Babylon as the centre of government for the entire Euphrates Valley. The old myths and legends, which even before Hammurabi’s days had been reduced to writing, were re-shaped so as to accord to Marduk the glory and rank due to him. Older gods, of whom stories were related, had to make way for Marduk, and this was done even at the risk of interfering with the original meaning of the myths.
The subsequent degradation of Babylonia to a position of greater or lesser dependence upon Assyria did not affect the position of Marduk, or the theological system based upon it. The kings of Assyria, when they came to Babylon, paid their homage to Marduk; they made no effort to put their chief deity—Ashur—in Marduk’s place, and at most ventured to place the former by the side of the latter in their invocations; and, when the New Babylonian empire was founded by Chaldeans, the rulers, though the two most important repre- sentatives of them bore names compounded with the god Nebo (Nabopolassar, Nebuchadrezzar), vied with their predecessors in manifestations of devo- tion to the great Marduk. The new city of Babylon reared by them was essentially Marduk’s metropolis.
6. Turning to the north, we encounter the same close bearing of the political development upon the cult. The rulers of Assyria, the earliest of whom known to us may be placed ¢. 1800 B.C., set out as patesis or ‘ governors’ of the city of Ashur, situated on the Tigris; and it is the god of this place—likewise known as Ashur—who advances in rank with the progress of Assyrian arms. But, while Marduk remains attached to the place where his cult originated, Ashur follows the shifting of the capital of Assyria ; and, whether the seat of government is at Calah or at Nineveh, it is Ashur who continues in the new capital his abode, as well as his guidance of the kings and of their armies. Parallel, therefore, to the supremacy of Marduk in the south, we have Ashur standing at the head of the pantheon in the north, from the earliest period to which Assyrian history can be traced back * down to the fall of Nineveh in 606 B.C. ; and just as in the south the position of the other gods is regulated with reference to Marduk, so in the north the priests of Ashur engage in a work of systematization which results in estab- lishing a court of deities grouped around Ashur as their king and leader.
jii. RELATION OF THE CULTURE AND RELIGION or ASSYRIA TO THOSE OF BABYLONIA. ealiy yyailll
* The existence of a city and district, A-usar, identical with Ashur, which represents a later designation of the god as well as of the city and of the district, can now be traced back to the days of Hammurabi. See Scheil, ‘Code de Hammourabi,’ col. iv. 55-64 (Délégation en Perse, Mémoires, iv. (Teaxtes Elamites-Sémitiques, ii.]).
have become clear from the above sketch, that, corresponding to the greater age of Babylonia as compared with Assyria, it was in the south that culture was first developed, and from the south was carried to the north. As a matter of fact, despite some contributions to architecture, art, science, and literature made by the Assyrians, the civilization of Assyria is a direct importation from Babylonia, and continues to bear the impress of its southern origin. The temples and palaces of ane were modelled upon those in Babylonia, with the important exception, however, that stone was far more liberally employed as a building material in place of clay—which remained the standard material in the south. In sculptural decorations and in statues, more originality was displayed by the Assyrians than in their building constructions, and, as a great military power, it was natural that Assyria should likewise have developed her own methods of attack and defence ; but, in all that pertains to the cult and to general religious doctrines, the originality of the Assyrians mani- fests itself only in the adaptation to their own con- ditions, of the modes of worship, of the ritual, and of the theology that were the outcome of the activity of a long series of generations of priests serving in the temples of the great religious centres of the south. When Assurbanipal, probably in imita- tion of an earlier example, resolved to collect a library in his palace, he was obliged to send his scribes to the temples of the south, in the archives of which the literary productions of the past—epies, myths, legends, collections of omens, rituals and magical incantations, hymns and prayers, as well as medical and astronomical compilations — were kept; and it does not appear that either his scribes or those of earlier days added much to this literary legacy, though, naturally, the Assyrian temples had their own rituals, prayers, and oracles specially adapted to Assyrian political and social conditions. The relationship between the religion of Baby- lonia and that of Assyria thus resolves itself into an adoption of doctrines, cult, and rites of the south by the north, with such modifications as were called for by the different conditions prevailing in the north, and which led, in the case of the pan- theon, to the assignment to Ashur of the place and rank occupied in the south by Marduk after the union of the States of the Euphrates Valley in the days of Hammurabi. We might also express this relationship in terms of a general extension north- ward of the religion of Babylonia, as a part of the culture that originated in the Euphrates Valley.