the god who far above any other reveals wrong- doing and brings wickedness to light. Sin, in short, while his cult remains prominent, loses his touch, as it were, with his worshippers. The personal element is moved into the background. As he no longer entered into the daily life of a population that became agricultural and then commercial, the later hymns to him do not breathe that spirit of genuine attachment which charac- terizes the addresses to such gods as Shamash, Ea, and Marduk. He retains his supreme position among the gods; but, calm and cold as his light, he is not the deity to whom the people turn in their distress, and it was due chiefly to the rever- ence in which such ancient centres as Ur and Harran were held by virtue of their great antiquity that he continued to be a member of a second great triad, consisting of Sin, Ishtar, and the sun- god. ~ "4. Shamash, Ninib, Nergal.—We have indicated the main reason for the steadily growing popu- larity of the sun cult, which is a feature of the development both of the popular religion and of the system of theology established by the influence of the priests. While the worship of the sun-god, as one of the great powers of nature, is no doubt much earlier among all nations than the period when the agricultural stage was reached, it is among agricultural communities that such a cult acquires a popularity corresponding to the import- ance of the sun in the life of the people. Hence the phenomenon, which at first sight may seem strange, that the majority of the local gods wor- shipped in the cities of ancient Babylonia are solar deities. Besides the two chief centres of sun worship—Sippar in northern Babylonia and Larsa in the southern portion—the patron deity of Shir- purla (known as Nin-girsw) is a solar deity ; a god Nergal, worshipped in another important centre— Cuthah—is likewise a sun-god ; similarly, Za-mal- mal, who belongs to an important city — Kish ; while Marduk, originally merely the god of the city of Babylon, but destined, with the growing dignity of the city as the capital of the united Babylonian States, to become the official head of the pantheon, is also distinctly a solar god. Besides these, we have a host of other deities belonging to cities and towns of minor importance that are distinctly solar in character. With that same tendency towards the systematization of beliefs which led to the concentration of the god- desses of the more important centres in the person of a single goddess Ishtar, so in the course of time these various local sun-gods came to be looked upon as so many forms or manifestations of the one great orb, though the tendency never went so far as to concentrate all the solar deities into a single one. By the side of a god, symbolical of the sun in general, and who receives the name of Shamash, the official Babylonian pantheon continues to recognize two other solar deities—one whose name is provisionally read Nini, and the other Nergal— exclusive of Marduk, who, although a sun-god, also acquires, as already intimated, a unique position. The real reason for the continued independent existence of Ninib and Nergal is, no doubt, to be sought again in the political and religious signifi- cance of the centres in which they were worshipped. That centre was, in the case of Nergal, the city of Cuthah, which is first referred to in an inscription of king Dungi of Ur (c. 2800 B.c.). As for Ninib, indications point to his identity with Nin-girsu, the chief god of Shirpurla, the capital of one of the oldest Babylonian States ; though the origin of the writing Nin-ib and its precise relationship to the form Nin-girsu are as yet unknown to us. In the systematized Babylonian theology, however, the distinction between Shamash, Ninib, and
RELIGION OF BABYLONIA
RELIGION OF BABYLONTA
543
Nergal was interpreted in such a manner, that, while Shamash was regarded as the sun-god par excellence and in general, Ninib was looked upon as the personification of the morning and spring sun, and Nergal as the sun of noon and of the summer season.* This differentiation was sug- gested by the two aspects which the sun as a great ower of nature presents in a climate like that of abylonia. It is, on the one hand, a beneficent power which, in the spring, drives away the rain and storms, and restores the life and vegetation of nature ; and, on the other hand, it is a destructive power which, during the hot season, by its too fierce and burning rays, brings about disease and suffering, and even causes ruin to the crops.
Confining ourselves for the moment to the personification of the sun in general, the name Shamash, having perhaps the force of ‘servitor,’ appears to go back to the very early period when the moon cult still enjoyed a supremacy over that of the sun. And if it be borne in mind that, both in the earlier and in the later inscriptions of Baby- lonia and Assyria,} the moon-god is, almost without exception, accorded the preference over Shamash in an enumeration of the pantheon, the conclu- sion appears to be warranted that the ‘service’ implied in the name had reference originally to the subservient relationship in which Shamash stood to Sin. We have, however, also had occasion ‘to note the causes that led to the later predomi- nance of the sun cult over that of the moon, at least in the popular phase of the religion, and the influence of this phase is to be seen in the absorp- tion on the part of Shamash of attributes that once belonged to Sin.