The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria | Page 4

language, which furnishes us with satisfactory etymologies
for such names as Merodach, Nergal, Sin, and the divinities mentioned
in Berosus and Damascius, as well as those of hundreds of deities
revealed to us by the tablets and slabs of Babylonia and Assyria.
The documents.
Outside the inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria, there is but little
bearing upon the religion of those countries, the most important
fragment being the extracts from Berosus and Damascius referred to
above. Among the Babylonian and Assyrian remains, however, we
have an extensive and valuable mass of material, dating from the fourth
or fifth millennium before Christ until the disappearance of the
Babylonian system of writing about the beginning of the Christian era.

The earlier inscriptions are mostly of the nature of records, and give
information about the deities and the religion of the people in the
course of descriptions of the building and rebuilding of temples, the
making of offerings, the performance of ceremonies, etc. Purely
religious inscriptions are found near the end of the third millennium
before Christ, and occur in considerable numbers, either in the original
Sumerian text, or in translations, or both, until about the third century
before Christ. Among the more recent inscriptions--those from the
library of the Assyrian king Aššur-bani-âpli and the later Babylonian
temple archives,--there are many lists of deities, with numerous
identifications with each other and with the heavenly bodies, and
explanations of their natures. It is needless to say that all this material is
of enormous value for the study of the religion of the Babylonians and
Assyrians, and enables us to reconstruct at first hand their mythological
system, and note the changes which took place in the course of their
long national existence. Many interesting and entertaining legends
illustrate and supplement the information given by the bilingual lists of
gods, the bilingual incantations and hymns, and the references
contained in the historical and other documents. A trilingual list of gods
enables us also to recognise, in some cases, the dialectic forms of their
names.
The importance of the subject.
Of equal antiquity with the religion of Egypt, that of Babylonia and
Assyria possesses some marked differences as to its development.
Beginning among the non-Semitic Sumero-Akkadian population, it
maintained for a long time its uninterrupted development, affected
mainly by influences from within, namely, the homogeneous local cults
which acted and reacted upon each other. The religious systems of
other nations did not greatly affect the development of the early
non-Semitic religious system of Babylonia. A time at last came,
however, when the influence of the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia
and Assyria was not to be gainsaid, and from that moment, the
development of their religion took another turn. In all probably this
augmentation of Semitic religious influence was due to the increased
numbers of the Semitic population, and at the same period the Sumero-

Akkadian language began to give way to the Semitic idiom which they
spoke. When at last the Semitic Babylonian language came to be used
for official documents, we find that, although the non-Semitic divine
names are in the main preserved, a certain number of them have been
displaced by the Semitic equivalent names, such as Šamaš for the
sun-god, with Kittu and Mêšaru ("justice and righteousness") his
attendants; Nabú ("the teacher" = Nebo) with his consort Tašmêtu ("the
hearer"); Addu, Adad, or Dadu, and Rammanu, Ramimu, or Ragimu =
Hadad or Rimmon ("the thunderer"); Bêl and Bêltu (Beltis = "the lord"
and "the lady" /par excellence/), with some others of inferior rank. In
place of the chief divinity of each state at the head of each separate
pantheon, the tendency was to make Merodach, the god of the capital
city Babylon, the head of the pantheon, and he seems to have been
universally accepted in Babylonia, like Aššur in Assyria, about 2000
B.C. or earlier.
The uniting of two pantheons.
We thus find two pantheons, the Sumero-Akkadian with its many gods,
and the Semitic Babylonian with its comparatively few, united, and
forming one apparently homogeneous whole. But the creed had taken a
fresh tendency. It was no longer a series of small, and to a certain
extent antagonistic, pantheons composed of the chief god, his consort,
attendants, children, and servants, but a pantheon of considerable extent,
containing all the elements of the primitive but smaller pantheons, with
a number of great gods who had raised Merodach to be their king.
In Assyria.
Whilst accepting the religion of Babylonia, Assyria nevertheless kept
herself distinct from her southern neighbour by a very simple device,
by placing at the head of the pantheon the god Aššur, who became for
her the chief of the gods, and at the same time the emblem of her
distinct national aspirations--for Assyria had no intention whatever of
casting in her lot with