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....

In the preceding chapter we pointed out that the oldest historical and literary documents reveal a varying number of little states or principalities in the Euphrates Valley, grouped around some centre, with now one of these centres, now another, exercising a measure of control over a larger section.

This political picture is complemented on the religious side by the corresponding growth of the local deity to a position commensurate in proportion to the political control acquired by the centre in question; and as the local deity extends his sway, he is endowed with attributes that are quite independent of the power of nature which he originally personified. The tendency also becomes pronounced for the deity associated with a powerful centre not only to be given the attributes of other local deities but actually to absorb minor deities, so that the names of the latter become designations of the more powerful one.

The conquest of a district carried with it the conquest of its gods, and in case the latter are not entirely absorbed, they are placed in a dependent position, as children, servants or officials of the triumphant god. In this way, through the close interrelations between the states of the Euphrates Valley usually hostile in character and constantly shifting there arises a pantheon which involves a selection out of the large number of once existing local deities, prompted by the rise to prominence of a limited number of centres.

Naturally, in the development of religious doctrines and in the unfolding of religious organization other factors besides the political one enter into consideration, so that the parallel between the shifting political panorama and the relationship of the gods of the various centres to one another is not complete. The latter relationship, when once it becomes definite, is not changed by every turn in political affairs but only through transformations of a large character; and even then gods whose position in the pantheon is fixed by tradition are not seriously affected by the vicissitudes of the centres to which they originally belonged; they survive the decline and even the complete eclipse of these centres.

The religious life of a people is always more enduring than its political fortunes. The organization of a pantheon ensures for those gods fortunate enough to find a place therein a permanency, both theoretical and practical, which is often in contrast to the political history of the centres in which their worship arose. The god Enlil, to whom we had occasion to refer several times, is an illustration in point.

Through circumstances which we are no longer able to follow, the city of Nippur became the seat of the cult of Enlil. Nippur became so thoroughly identified with Enlil that the name of the city was written by a series of signs designating it as the "place of Enlil". A storm-god, partaking of the aggressive character of his worshippers, Enlil is naturally pictured as a mighty warrior who leads his subjects to victory. He is present in the midst of the fray. To him as the god of war the victories are ascribed and paeans are sung in his honor in his temple at Nippur, which in view of his original seat is appropriately known as E-kur, "the mountain house".

An invocation that occurs frequently in a series of lamentation songs, [1] bewailing catastrophes that have swept over the land, portrays the strength ascribed to him:

"Lord of lands,
Lord of the true word,
Enlil, father of Sumer,
Shepherd of the dark-headed people, [2]
Seeing through his own power,
Strong guide of (his) people,
Causing multitudes to dwell together."

The original personification of Enlil as the mighty, onrushing storm whose voice is heard in the roar of the thunder leads to an elaborate symbolism of the "word" of the deity, which becomes a synonym of his power. In many variations this "word" of the storm-god is celebrated. [3]

"The word which rages in the heavens above,
The word which causes the earth below to quake,
The word which strikes terror among the Anunnaki. [4]
Beyond the seer, beyond the diviner,
An onrushing storm which none can oppose,
Raging in the heavens above, causing the earth below to quake,
Tearing mother from daughter like a buru-reed.
It overwhelms the marshes in full verdure,
It overflows the harvest in season,
A flood tearing away the dams,
It uproots the huge mesu-trees,
Reducing all things to submission."

Such is Enlil who, as the chief god of Nippur, becomes the head of the pantheon with the Sumerian conquest of the country and who retains this position long after Nippur has ceased to be the political centre. The cult of Enlil, in fact, lends to his patron city a significance far outreaching its political prestige even in the heyday of its glory. As a religious centre, Nippur becomes a sacred city, not unlike that of centres of pilgrimage in our own days like Jerusalem, Benares, Mecca and Rome. The sanctity of Nippur survived the downfall of both Babylonia and Assyria, and the sacred quarter of the city in which the temple stood was converted into a burial place acquiring sanctification by its time-honored associations to which even Jews and Christians manifested their attachment down to the seventh century of our era. [5]

The position of the god as the head of the pantheon entailed as a natural consequence the grouping of the other chief deities and of many minor deities about him. Smaller temples and shrines were erected for these deities, forming as it were the court of Enlil, around the chief sanctuary. In the extracts from religious compositions above given, he is regarded also as the power which brings forth vegetation. The storm god has become a solar deity. The control of the watery element is likewise assigned to him so that he becomes a water deity as well. The tendency grew to associate with Enlil as many gods as possible, with the implication that the latter derived their powers from this association. The gods stand in dread of him, precisely as do his subjects. He is the god of all lands, controlling gods and men alike.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

See Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, pp. 90, 106, seq., 114, 126, etc.

[2]:

I.e., the Sumerians.

[3]:

E.g., Reisner, Sumerisch-Babylonische Hymnen, No vii rev 13-25.

[4]:

A collective name for a minor group of deities. Even the gods fear the word of Enlil.

[5]:

See Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (Philadelphia, 1913).

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