Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs

by A. H. Sayce

It is not to be supposed that this philosophizing [pg 244] 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, [pg 245] 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.

In front of the shrine was an altar cased in gold, and another altar stood in the outer court. Here also was the great bason of bronze for purificatory purposes, which was called “the deep,” and corresponded with the “sea” of Solomon's temple. Like the latter, it sometimes stood on the heads of twelve bronze oxen, as we learn from a hymn in which the construction of one of these basons is described. They were supposed to represent the primeval “deep” out of which the world has arisen and on which it still floats.

The chapel found by Mr. Hormund Rassam at Balawât, near Nineveh, gives us some idea of what the inner shrine of a temple was like. At its north-west end was an altar approached by steps, while in front of the latter, and near the entrance, was a coffer or ark in which two small slabs of marble were deposited, twelve and one-half inches long by eight wide, on which the Assyrian King Assur-nazir-pal in a duplicate text records his erection of the sanctuary. [pg 248] It is not surprising that when the Nestorian workmen found the tablets, they believed that they had discovered the two tables of the Mosaic Law.

The temple sometimes enclosed a Bit-ili or Beth-el. This was originally an upright stone, consecrated by oil and believed to be animated by the divine spirit. The “Black Stone” in the kaaba of the temple of Mecca is a still surviving example of the veneration paid by the Semitic nations to sacred stones. Whether, however, the Beth-els of later Babylonian days were like the “Black Stone” of Mecca, really the consecrated stones which had once served as temples, we do not know; in any case they were anchored within the walls of the temples which had taken their place as the seats of the worship of the gods. Offerings were still made to them in the age of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors; thus we hear of 765 “measures” of grain which were paid as “dues to the Beth-el” by the serfs of one of the Babylonian temples. The “measure,” it may be stated, was an old measure of capacity, retained among the peasantry, and only approximately exact. It was calculated to contain from 41 to 43 qas.