Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

The official creed itself was an artificial amalgamation of two different currents of belief. The Babylonian race was mixed; Sumerian and Semite had gone to form it in days before history began. Its religion, therefore, was equally mixed; the religious conceptions of the Sumerian and the Semite differed widely, and it was the absorption of the Sumerian element by the Semitic which created the religion of later days. It is Semitic in its general character, but in its general character alone. In details it resembles the religions of the other Semitic nations of Western Asia only in so far as they have been influenced by it.

The Sumerian had no conception of what we mean by a god. The supernatural powers he worshipped or feared were spirits of a material nature. Every object had its zi, or “spirit,” which accompanied it like a shadow, but unlike a shadow could act independently of the object to which it belonged. The forces and phenomena of nature were themselves “spirits;” the lightning which struck the temple, or the heat which parched up the vegetation of spring, were as much “spirits” as the zi, or “spirit,” which enabled the arrow to reach its mark and to slay its victim. When contact with the Semites had introduced the idea of a god among the Sumerians, it was still under the form of a spirit that their powers and attributes were conceived. The Sumerian who had been unaffected by Semitic teaching spoke of the “spirit of heaven” rather than of the god or goddess of the sky, of the “spirit of Ea” rather than of Ea himself, the god of the deep. Man, too, had a zi, or “spirit,” attached to him; it was the life which gave him movement and feeling, the principle of vitality which constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the bird to fly.

The zi of the Sumerians was thus a counterpart of the ka, or “double,” of Egyptian belief. The description given by Egyptian students of the ka would apply equally to the zi of Sumerian belief. They both belong to the same level of religious thought; indeed, so closely do they resemble one another that the question arises whether the Egyptian belief was not derived from that of ancient Sumer.

Wholly different was the idea which underlay the Semitic conception of a spiritual world. He believed in a god in whose image man had been made. It was a god whose attributes were human, but intensified in power and action. The human family on earth had its counterpart in the divine family in heaven. By the side of the god stood the goddess, a colorless reflection of the god, like the woman by the side of the man. The divine pair were accompanied by a son, the heir to his father's power and his representative and interpreter. As man stood at the head of created things in this world, so, too, the god stood at the head of all creation. He had called all things into existence, and could destroy them if he chose.

The Semite addressed his god as Baal or Bel, “the lord.” It was the same title as that which was given to the head of the family, by the wife to the husband, by the servant to his master. There were as many Baalim or Baals as there were groups of worshippers. Each family, each clan, and each tribe had its own Baal, and when families and clans developed into cities and states the Baalim developed along with them. The visible form of Baal was the Sun; the Sun was lord of heaven and therewith of the earth also and all that was upon it. But the Sun presented itself under two aspects. On the one side it was the source of light and life, ripening the grain and bringing the herb into blossom; on the other hand it parched all living things with the fierce heats of summer and destroyed what it had brought into being. Baal, the Sun-god, was thus at once beneficent and malevolent; at times he looked favorably upon his adorers, at other times he was full of anger and sent plague and misfortune upon them. But under both aspects he was essentially a god of nature, and the rites with which he was worshipped accordingly were sensuous and even sensual.

Such were the two utterly dissimilar conceptions of the divine out of the union of which the official religion of Babylonia was formed. The popular religion of the country also grew out of them though in a more unconscious way. The Semite gave the Sumerian his gods with their priests and temples and ceremonies. The Sumerian gave in return his belief in a multitude of spirits, his charms and necromancy, his sorcerers and their sacred books.

Unlike the gods of the Semites, the “spirits” of the Sumerian were not moved by human passions. They had, in fact, no moral nature. Like the objects and forces they represented, they surrounded mankind, upon whom they would inflict injury or confer benefits. But the injuries were more frequent than the benefits; the sum of suffering and evil exceeds that of happiness in this world, more especially in a primitive condition of society. Hence the “spirits” were feared as demons rather than worshipped as powers of good, and instead of a priest a sorcerer was needed who knew the charms and incantations which could avert their malevolence or compel them to be serviceable to men. Sumerian religion, in fact, was Shamanistic, like that of some Siberian tribes to-day, and its ministers were Shamans or medicine-men skilled in witchcraft and sorcery whose spells were potent to parry the attacks of the demon and drive him from the body of his victim, or to call him down in vengeance on the person of their enemy.

Shamanism, however, pure and simple, is incompatible with an advanced state of culture, and as time went on the Shamanistic faith of the Sumerians tended toward a rudimentary form of polytheism. Out of the multitude of spirits there were two or three who assumed a more commanding position than the rest. The spirit of the sky, the spirit of the water, and more especially the spirit of the underground world, where the ghosts of the dead and the demons of night congregated together, took precedence of the rest. Already, before contact with the Semites, they began to assume the attributes of gods. Temples were raised in their honor, and where there were temples there were also priests.

This transition of certain spirits into gods seems to have been aided by that study of the heavens and of the heavenly bodies for which the Babylonians were immemorially famous. At all events, the ideograph which denotes “a god” is an eight-rayed star, from which we may perhaps infer that, at the time of the invention of the picture-writing out of which the cuneiform characters grew, the gods and the stars were identical.

One of the oldest of the Sumerian temples was that of Nippur, the modern Niffer, built in honor of Mul-lil or El-lil, “the lord of the ghost-world.” He had originally been the spirit of the earth and the underground world; when he became a god his old attributes still clung to him. To the last he was the ruler of the lil-mes, “the ghosts” and “demons” who dwelt in the air and the waste places of the earth, as well as in the abode of death and darkness that lay beneath it. His priests preserved their old Shamanistic character; the ritual they celebrated was one of spells and incantations, of magical rites and ceremonies. Nippur was the source and centre of one of the two great streams of religious thought and culture which influenced Sumerian Babylonia.

The other source and centre was Eridu on the Persian Gulf. Here the spirit of the water was worshipped, who in process of time passed into Ea, the god of the deep. But the deep was a channel for foreign culture and foreign ideas. Maritime trade brought the natives of Eridu into contact with the populations of other lands, and introduced new religious conceptions which intermingled with those of the Sumerians. Ea, the patron deity of Eridu, became the god of culture and light, who delighted in doing good to mankind and in bestowing upon them the gifts of civilization. In this he was aided by his son Asari, who was at once the interpreter of his will and the healer of men. His office was declared in the title that was given to him of the god “who benefits mankind.”

Two strongly contrasted streams of religious influence thus flowed from Nippur in the north of Babylonia and from Eridu in the south. The one brought with it a belief in the powers of darkness and evil, in sorcery and magic, and a religion of fear; the other spoke of light and culture, of gods who poured blessings upon men and healed the diseases that afflicted them. Asari was addressed as “he 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 was probably confined to the priests and educated classes. But a considerable part of their contents must have been more widely known.

Some of the hymns embodied in them, as well as the incantations and magical ceremonies, were doubtless familiar to the people or derived from current superstitions. The work in which the hymns were collected and procured, and which has been compared with the Veda of India, was at once the Bible and the Prayer-book of Chaldea. The hymns were in Sumerian, which thus became a sacred language, and any mistake in the recitation of them was held to be fatal to the validity of a religious rite. Not only, therefore, were the hymns provided with a Semitic translation, but from time to time directions were added regarding the pronunciation of certain words. The bulk of the hymns was of Sumerian origin, but many new hymns, chiefly in honor of the Sun-god, had been added to them in Semitic times. They were, however, written in the old language of Sumer; like Latin in the Roman Catholic Church, that alone was considered worthy of being used in the service of the gods. It was only the rubric which was allowed to be written in Semitic; the hymns and most of the prayers were in what had come to be termed “the pure” or “sacred language” of the Sumerians. Each hymn is introduced by the words “to be recited,” and ends with amanû, or “Amen.”

The religious services were incessant. Every day the sacrifice was offered, accompanied by a special ritual, and the festivals and fasts filled up each month of the year. There were services even for the night as well as for the day. The new moons were strictly observed, and the seventh day was one of solemn rest. The very name Sabattu or “Sabbath” was derived by the native etymologists from the Sumerian words sa, “heart,” and bat, “to end,” because it was “a day of rest for the heart.” Not only were there Sabbaths on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the month, there was also a Sabbath on the nineteenth, that being the end of the seventh week from the first day of the previous month. On these Sabbaths no work was permitted to be done. The King, it was laid down, “must not eat flesh cooked at the fire or in the smoke; must not change his clothes; must not put on white garments; must not offer sacrifices; must not drive in his chariot; or issue royal decrees.” Even the prophet was forbidden to practise augury or give medicine to the sick.

From time to time extraordinary days of public humiliation or thanksgiving were ordered to be observed. These were prescribed by the government and were generally the result of some political crisis or danger. When the Assyrian empire, for instance, was attacked by the nations of the north in the early part of Esar-haddon's reign, public prayers and fasts “for one hundred days and one hundred nights” were ordained by the “prophets” in the hope that the Sun-god might “remove the sin” of the people and stave off the threatened attack. So, again, when Assur-bani-pal had suppressed the Babylonian revolt and taken Babylon after a long siege, he tells us that “at the instance of the prophets he purified the mercy-seats and cleansed the processional roads that had been polluted; the wrathful gods and angry goddesses he appeased with special prayers and penitential psalms.”

The temple was erected on ground that had been consecrated by libations of wine, oil, and honey, and was a square or rectangular building enclosing an open court, on one side of which was a ziggurat, or “tower.” The tower was built in successive stages, and in the topmost stage was the shrine of the god. Each “tower” had a name of its own, and was used for astronomical purposes. It corresponded with “the high-place” of Canaan; in the flat plain of Babylonia it was only by means of a tower that the worshipper could “mount up to heaven” and so approach the gods. Herodotus states that the topmost story of the tower attached to the temple of Bel Merodach at Babylon contained nothing but a couch and a table.

The image of the god stood in the innermost shrine or Holy of Holies of the temple itself. In front of it was the golden table on which the shew-bread was laid, and below was the parakku, or “mercy-seat,” whereon, according to Nebuchadnezzar, at the festival of the new year, “on the eighth and eleventh days, the king of the gods of heaven and earth, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads.” It was “the seat of the oracles” which were delivered from it by the god to his ministering priests.