Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

by A. H. Sayce

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 [pg 234] 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 [pg 235] 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, [pg 236] 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 [pg 237] 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 [pg 238] 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.