Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs - Archibald Henry Sayce (thriller books to read txt) 📗

who raises the dead to life," and Ea was held to be the first legislator and creator of civilized society.

How far the foreign influence which moulded the creed of Eridu was of Semitic origin it is impossible to say. Semitic influences, however, began to work upon Sumerian religion at a very early date. The Semite and the Sumerian intermingled with one another; at first the Semite received the elements of culture from his more civilized neighbor, but a time came when he began to give something in return. The result of this introduction of Semitic and Sumerian beliefs and ideas was the official religion of later Babylonia.

The "spirits" who had ranked above the rest now became gods in the Semitic sense of the term. Mul-lil of Nippur became the Semitic Baal or Bel, the supreme lord of the world, who governs the world below as well as the world above. He it was who conferred empire over mankind upon his worshippers and whose ministers and angels were the spirits of popular belief. Ea wanted but little to become a true god; his name remained unchanged and his dominion extended to all waters whatever, wherever they might be. His son Asari passed into Merodach, the patron-deity of Babylon, who, when his city became the capital of Babylonia, took the place of Bel of Nippur as the supreme Bel. As in Greek mythology the younger Zeus dethroned his father, so in Babylonia the younger Bel of Babylonia dethroned the older Bel of Nippur.

Similarly, Anu, the spirit of the sky, became the Semitic Sky-god Anu, whose temple stood at Erech. Ur, on the western bank of the Euphrates, was dedicated to the Moon-god under the name of Sin, like Harran in Mesopotamia; Larsa was dedicated to the Sun-god. When Borsippa became a suburb of Babylon its presiding deity became at the same time the minister and interpreter of Merodach under the title of Nabium or Nebo "the prophet." The Semitic god everywhere took the place of the Sumerian "spirit," while those among the "spirits" themselves who had not undergone the transforming process merged in the three hundred spirits of heaven and the six hundred spirits of earth. They formed the "hosts of heaven," of whom Bel was the lord.

But Semitic belief necessitated the existence of a goddess by the side of the god. It was, indeed, a grammatical necessity rather than a theological one; the noun in the Semitic languages has a feminine as well as a masculine gender, and the masculine Bilu or Bel, accordingly, implied a female Belit or Beltis. But the goddess was little more than a grammatical shadow of the god, and her position was still further weakened by the analogy of the human family where the wife was regarded as the lesser man, the slave and helpmeet of her husband.

One goddess only escaped the general law which would have made her merely the pale reflection of the god. This was Istar. Istar was an independent deity, owing no allegiance to a husband, and standing on a footing of equality with the gods. But this was because she had once been one of the chief objects of Sumerian worship, the spirit of the evening star. In the Sumerian language there was no gender, nothing that could distinguish the goddess or the woman from the god or man, and the "spirits," therefore, were indifferently of both sexes. Moreover, the woman occupied an important place in the Sumerian family; where the Semitic translation speaks of "man and woman" the Sumerian original makes it "woman and man." To the Sumerian mind, accordingly, the female "spirit" was as powerful as the male, acting independently and possessing the same attributes. Hence it was that in taking Istar over from their Sumerian predecessors the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia took over at the same time a goddess who was the equal of a god.

Among the mixed population of Babylonia, with its mixed culture and language and religion, the character and position of Istar underwent but little change. But when the conquerors of Sargon of Akkad and his predecessors carried the civilization of Babylonia to the West, Istar assumed a new form. Among the Canaanites she became Ashtoreth with the feminine termination, and was identified with the Moon, the consort and reflection, as it were, of Baal the Sun-god. But even so, the existence, of an independent goddess by the side of Baal seemed strange to the Semitic imagination, and among the Semites of Southern Arabia she was transformed into a male god, while the Moabites made her one with the god Chemosh. Even among the learned classes of Semitic Babylonia it was whispered that she was of both sexes, a goddess when imaged in the evening star, a god when visible in the star of the morning.

Closely connected with the worship of Istar was that of Tammuz. Tammuz among the Sumerians appears to have been the "spirit" of the rivulets and waters of spring, and his name signified literally "the son of life" or "of the spirit." But among the Semites he became the young and beautiful shepherd, the beloved of Istar, slain by the boar's tusk of winter, or, as others held, of the parching heats of the summer. He symbolized the fresh vegetation of the spring and the Sun-god who called it forth. Once each year, in the sultry heats of June, the women wept and tore their hair in memory of his untimely death, and Istar, it was said, had descended into Hades in the vain hope of bringing him back to life. One of the most famous of Babylonian poems was that which told of the descent of Istar through the seven gates of the underground world, and which was chanted at the annual commemoration of his death. At each gate, it is said, the goddess left behind her some one of her adornments, until at last she arrived stripped and naked before the throne of the goddess of the infernal world. The poem was composed at a time when astronomical conceptions had laid hold of the old mythology, and the poet has interwoven the story of the waning and waxing of the moon into the ancient tale.

The world was generally believed to have originated out of a watery chaos, and to float, as it were, upon the deep. This belief was derived from Eridu, where it was also taught that the deep surrounded the earth like the coils of a serpent.

But other ideas about the origin of things prevailed elsewhere. Inland it was supposed that the firmament of heaven rested on the peak of a mountain - "the mountain of the East," or "of the World," as it was commonly called - where the gods lived in an Olympus of their own and the stars were suspended from it like lamps. The firmament was regarded as a kind of extinguisher or as the upturned hull of one of the round coracles that plied on the Euphrates. Other ideas again were prevalent in other parts of the country. Thus at Eridu the place of "the mountain of the World" was taken by a magical tree which grew in the midst of the garden of Eden, or "plain" of Babylonia, and on either side of which were the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. It is probably to be identified with the tree of life which figures so frequently in the sculptures of Assyria and on the seal-cylinders of Chaldea, but it may be the tree of knowledge of which we hear in the old Sumerian texts, and upon which "the name of Ea was written." At all events it is "the holy tree of Eridu," of whose "oracle" Arioch calls himself "the executor."

The sun, it was believed, rose and set from between the twin mountains whose gates were guarded by men with the bodies of scorpions, while their heads touched the skies and their feet reached to Hades. The scorpion was the inhabitant of the desert of Northern Arabia, the land of Mas, where the mountains of the sunset were imagined to be. Beyond them were the encircling ocean and the waters of Death, and beyond these again the island of the Blest, where the favorites of the gods were permitted to dwell. It was hither that Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, was translated for his piety after the Deluge, and it was here, too, that the flower of immortality blossomed.

For the ordinary mortal a very different fate was reserved. He had to descend after death into the underground world of Hades, where the spirits of the dead flitted about like bats in the darkness, with dust only for their food. It was a land of gloom and forgetfulness, defended by seven gates and seven warders, who prevented the dead from breaking forth from their prison-house and devouring the living under the form of vampires. The goddess Allat presided over it, keeping watch over the waters of life that bubbled up under her golden throne. Before her sat the shades of the heroes of old, each crowned with a shadowy crown and seated on a shadowy throne, rising up only that they might salute the ghost of some human potentate who came to join them from the upper world. In later days, it is true, brighter and higher conceptions of the after life came to prevail, and an Assyrian poet prays that his King, when he dies, may pass away to "the land of the silver sky."

The various cosmological speculations and beliefs of ancient Chaldea were collected together in later times and an attempt made to combine them into a philosophical system. What this was like we learn from the opening lines of the epic which recounted the story of the Creation. In the beginning, we are told, was the chaos of the deep, which was the mother of all things. Out of it came first the primeval gods, Lakhum and Lakhamu, whose names had been handed down from the Sumerian age. Then came An-sar and Ki-sar, the Upper and Lower Firmaments, and, lastly, the great gods of the Semitic faith, Anu, Bel of Nippur, and Ea. All was ready at last for the creation of the present heavens and earth. But a struggle had first to be carried on between the new gods of light and order and Tiamat, the dragon of the "Deep," the impersonation of chaos. Merodach volunteered the task; Tiamat and her demoniac allies were overthrown and the sky formed out of her skin, while her blood became the rivers and springs. The deep was placed under fetters, that it might never again break forth and reduce the world to primeval chaos; laws were laid down for the heavenly bodies, which they were to keep forever and so provide a measure of time, and the plants and animals of the earth were created, with man at the head to rule over them. Though man was made of the dust, he was, nevertheless, the "son" of the gods, whose outward forms were the same as his.

It is not to be supposed that this philosophizing of the old myths and legends made its way beyond the circle of the learned classes, but the myths and legends themselves were known to the people and served instead of a cosmology. The struggle between Tiamat and Merodach was depicted on the walls of the temple of Bel at Babylon, and the belief that this world has arisen out of a victory of order over chaos and anarchy was deeply implanted in the mind of the Babylonian. Perhaps it goes back to the time when the soil of Babylonia was won by the cultivator and the engineer from wild and unrestrained nature.

Babylonian religion had its sacred books, and, like the official cosmology, a real knowledge of them