The civilization of Babylonia and Assyria

Its remains, language, history, religion, commerce, law, art, and literature

by Morris Jastrow | 1915 | 168,585 words

This work attempts to present a study of the unprecedented civilizations that flourished in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley many thousands of years ago. Spreading northward into present-day Turkey and Iran, the land known by the Greeks as Mesopotamia flourished until just before the Christian era....

Bearing in mind this general aspect presented by the religion of Babylonia and Assyria, we may proceed to a consideration of the chief deities which we encounter in the pantheon. These deities are all, at least originally, personifications of nature an indication that among the Sumerians as among the Akkadians the basis of worship was an animistic conception of nature, as we find it among all peoples at a certain stage of culture, and which involves as a primary supposition the identification of all forms and manifestations of life in nature with that of which we are conscious in ourselves.

Life is power, according to this view, and vice versa where there is a manifestation of power, there must be life behind it. Moon and sun are two most obvious manifestations, active and powerful, moving from place to place, both spreading light, and the sun in addition to light also warmth.

Behind the manifestation, therefore, of these two powers there was life, and the same conclusion was dirawn with respect to trees and fields, renewing their life with uninterrupted regularity yearly after a period of steady decay and apparent death. Storms and rains to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning were by a similar logic ascribed to the activity of powers having the essential quality of life, and lastly there was life in the running waters and the bubbling springs and even in rocks and stones, which by their peculiar and often fantastic formations suggested a petrification of objects that once possessed activity.

As for the animal world around man, the activity put forth by the largest and the smallest species and one in so many respects of the same character as his own running, feeding, struggling, attacking, growing, languishing forced on him the conclusion that the life within them was identical with that which conditioned his being. The gods worshipped by a people in this stage of culture are thus merely personifications of powers of nature the sun, the moon, the power manifesting itself in the storm, in trees and fields, in the waters and in stones, while the form given by fancy to these powers may either be human or animal, or under certain conditions a combination of the two.

Naturally, the material at our disposal for the study of the religion of Babylonia and Assyria being of a literary character belongs to an age that has long left behind it the purely animistic conceptions and has advanced to more abstract views of the relationship of man to the powers around him. The growth of village communities living under agricultural conditions leads to the association of a particular deity as the special patron and protector of the community, though we must not fall into the error of supposing that such a specific association excludes the worship of other deities.

The importance of the sun for an agricultural community, since upon his favor the blessings of the fields depend, leads in many instances to the choice of the sun-god as the special deity of a place, though a cognate association of ideas, with the earth pictured as the gracious and fruit-bearing female element, might result elsewhere in making the great mother goddess the patron of some centre. Again, the presence of a large body of water flowing past some agricultural settlement would bring about a close affiliation with the life-spirit of the watery element, personified like the sun and like the earth as a divine power.

To a people in the nomadic stage the moon as the measurer of time and as the guide for wanderings by night is of more significance than the sun, and it may happen that, by force of tradition, in some centres the moon-god will be chosen as the patron saint. Be this as it may, we find in the earliest period to which our material leads us back, sun-gods, the earth-goddess, water deities and moon-gods closely bound up with the various centres of Sumerian and Akkadian settlements in the Euphrates Valley. The lists of deities drawn up by the priests show us a bewildering array of local deities, and in connection with each deity we must perforce assume a local cult.

Many of these local gods or goddesses play a minor part in the history of Babylonia so far as known to us, and still more of them no part at all, so that they are little more than names for us.

In many cases we cannot even tell whether the deities concealed behind the strange-sounding Sumerian appellations are personifications of the sun or of the earth-goddess, of the moon or of the watery element. Only in the case of those local cults which, because of the political role played by the respective centres, come within the historical horizon are we in a position to specify the attributes assigned to them.

When, in addition to votive inscriptions in their honor, we have hymns and prayers addressed to them, the details of the conceptions formed of them are clearly revealed. In this way we obtain a stately array of the main figures of the old Babylonian pantheon Enlil, Ninib, Ningirsu, Nergal, Anu, Ea, Shamash, Sin, Adad, Mar.duk, Nabu and their consorts, and of the chief goddess, Nana or Ishitar.

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