Beacon Lights of History, Volume 01 | Page 8

it its name,--his own being magnified and
deified by his warlike descendants. Assyria was the oldest of the great
empires, occupying Mesopotamia,--the vast plain watered by the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers,--with adjacent countries to the north, west, and
east. Its seat was in the northern portion of this region, while that of
Babylonia or Chaldaea, its rival, was in the southern part; and although
after many wars freed from the subjection of Assyria, the institutions of
Babylonia, and especially its religion, were very much the same as
those of the elder empire. In Babylonia the chief god was called El, or
Il. In Babylon, although Bab-el, their tutelary god, was at the head of
the pantheon, his form was not represented, nor had he any special
temple for his worship. The Assyrian Asshur placed kings upon their
thrones, protected their armies, and directed their expeditions. In
speaking of him it was "Asshur, my Lord." He was also called "King of
kings," reigning supreme over the gods; and sometimes he was called
the "Father of the gods." His position in the celestial hierarchy
corresponds with the Zeus of the Greeks, and with the Jupiter of the
Romans. He was represented as a man with a horned cap, carrying a
bow and issuing from a winged circle, which circle was the emblem of
ubiquity and eternity. This emblem was also the accompaniment of
Assyrian royalty.
These Assyrian and Babylonian deities had a direct influence on the

Jews in later centuries, because traders on the Tigris pushed their
adventurous expeditions from the head of the Persian Gulf, either
around the great peninsula of Arabia, or by land across the deserts, and
settled in Canaan, calling themselves Phoenicians; and it was from the
descendants of these enterprising but morally debased people that the
children of Israel, returning from Egypt, received the most pertinacious
influences of idolatrous corruption. In Phoenicia the chief deity was
also called Bel, or Baal, meaning "Lord," the epithet of the one divine
being who rules the world, or the Lord of heaven. The deity of the
Egyptian pantheon, with whom Baal most nearly corresponds, was
Ammon, addressed as the supreme God.
Ranking after El in Babylon, Asshur in Assyria, and Baal in
Phoenicia,--all shadows of the same supreme God,--we notice among
these Mesopotamians a triad of the great gods, called Anu, Bel, and
Hea. Anu, the primordial chaos; Hea, life and intelligence animating
matter; and Bel, the organizing and creative spirit,--or, as Rawlinson
thinks, "the original gods of the earth, the heavens, and the waters,
corresponding in the main with the classical Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune,
who divided between them the dominion over the visible creation." The
god Bel, in the pantheon of the Babylonians and Assyrians, is the God
of gods, and Father of gods, who made the earth and heaven. His title
expresses dominion.
In succession to the gods of this first trio,--Anu, Bel, and Hea,--was
another trio, named Siu, Shamas, and Vul, representing the moon, the
sun, and the atmosphere. "In Assyria and Babylon the moon-god took
precedence of the sun-god, since night was more agreeable to the
inhabitants of those hot countries than the day." Hence, Siu was the
more popular deity; but Shamas, the sun, as having most direct
reference to physical nature, "the lord of fire," "the ruler of the day,"
was the god of battles, going forth with the armies of the king
triumphant over enemies. The worship of this deity was universal, and
the kings regarded him as affording them especial help in war. Vul, the
third of this trinity, was the god of the atmosphere, the god of
tempests,--the god who caused the flood which the Assyrian legends
recognize. He corresponds with the Jupiter Tonans of the

Romans,--"the prince of the power of the air," destroyer of crops, the
scatterer of the harvest, represented with a flaming sword; but as god of
the atmosphere, the giver of rain, of abundance, "the lord of fecundity,"
he was beneficent as well as destructive.
All these gods had wives resembling the goddesses in the Greek
mythology,--some beneficent, some cruel; rendering aid to men, or
pursuing them with their anger. And here one cannot resist the
impression that the earliest forms of the Greek mythology were derived
from the Babylonians and Phoenicians, and that the Greek poets,
availing themselves of the legends respecting them, created the popular
religion of Greece. It is a mooted question whether the Greek
civilization is chiefly derived from Egypt, or from Assyria and
Phoenicia,--probably more from these old monarchies combined than
from the original seat of the Aryan race east of the Caspian Sea. All
these ancient monarchies had run out and were old when the Greeks
began their settlements and conquests.
There was still another and inferior class of deities among