The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

On the platform the temple buildings were piled. There was no stone in Babylonia; it was a land of mud, and of mud bricks, accordingly, baked in the sun, the temple of the god was constructed. What was lost in beauty or design was gained in solidity. The Babylonian temples were huge masses of brick, square for the most part, and with the four corners facing the four cardinal points. It was only exceptionally that the four sides, instead of the four corners, were made to front the four “winds.”

These masses of brick were continually growing in [pg 450] height. The crude bricks soon disintegrated, and the heavy rains of a Babylonian winter quickly reduced them to their primeval mud. Constant restorations were therefore needed, and the history of a Babylonian temple is that of perpetual repairs. Efforts were made to keep the walls from crumbling away by building buttresses against them, and the bricks were cemented together with bitumen. But all precautions were in vain. A period of national decay inevitably brought with it the decay also of the temples, and a return of prosperity meant their restoration on the disintegrated ruins of the older edifice. The artificial platform became a tel or mound.

But the growth in height was not displeasing to the priestly builders. The higher the temple rose above the level of the plain, the better they were pleased. A characteristic of the Babylonian temple, in fact, was the ziggurat or “tower” attached to each, whose head it was designed should “reach to heaven.” The word ziggurat means a “lofty peak,” and the royal builders of Babylonia vied with one another in making the temple towers they erected as high as possible.

There was more than one reason for this characteristic feature of religious Babylonian architecture. The first settlers in the plain of Babylonia must soon have discovered that the higher they could be above the surface of the ground the better it was for them. The nearer they ascended to the clouds of heaven, the freer they were from the miasmata and insects of the swamp. The same cause which led them to provide a platform for their temples, would have also led them to raise the temple as high as they could above the level of the plain. This, however, will not explain the origin of the tower itself. It would have been a reason for building the temple as high as possible, not for attaching to it a [pg 451] tower. Nor was the tower suitable for defence against an enemy, like the pylons of an Egyptian temple. At most it was a convenient watch-tower from which the movements of a hostile band could be observed. There must have been some other reason, more directly connected with religious beliefs or practices, which found its outward expression in the sacred tower.

The sanctuary of Nippur, it will be remembered, was the oldest in Northern Babylonia. And from time immemorial it had been known as Ê-kur, “the house of the mountain-land.” It represented that underground world which was the home of En-lil and his ghosts; and this underground world, we must observe, was conceived of as a mountain. In fact, the cuneiform character which signifies “country” also signifies “mountain,” and the hieroglyphic picture out of which it developed is the picture of a mountain-range. The land in which it was first drawn and stereotyped in writing must, it would seem, have been a mountainous one, like the land in which the subterranean realm of En-lil was regarded as a lofty hill. In other words, the Sumerians must have been the inhabitants of a mountainous country before they settled in the plain of Babylonia and laid the foundations of the temple of Nippur.

And this mountainous country lay to the north or east, where the mountains of Elam and Kurdistan border the Babylonian plain. In the story of the Deluge the ark is made to rest on the summit of the mountain of Nizir, which is probably the modern Rowandiz, to the north-east of Assyria; and the gods were believed to have been born in “the mountain of the world,” in the land of Arallu.[343] Here, too, they held their court; “I will ascend into heaven,” the Babylonian monarch is made [pg 452] to say in the 14th chapter of Isaiah, “I will exalt my throne above the stars of El; I will sit also upon the mount of the assembly (of the gods), in the extremities of the north;[344] I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” More than one temple in both Babylonia and Assyria took its name from this “mountain of the world”; the ziggurat at Kis was known as “the house of the mountain of mankind,” while a temple at Ur was entitled “the house of the mountain,” and the shrine of Gula at Babylon was “the house of the holy hill.”[345]

All over Babylonia, accordingly, the mountain is brought into close connection with the religious cult. Not at Nippur only, but in other cities as well, the home of the gods is on the summit of an Olympos, within whose subterranean recesses they were born when as yet the primitive ghost or spirit had not become a god. Sumerian religion must have grown up rather among the mountains than in the plain, and the memory of its birthplace was preserved by religious conservatism. The ziggurat of the temple goes back to the days when the gods were still gods of the mountain, and the builders of the temple sought to force a way into the heavenly Olympos by raising artificially an imitation of the mountain on the alluvial plain. The tower was a mimic representation of the Ê-kur, or mountain of the earth itself, where En-lil, “the god of the great mountain” (sadu rabu), had his seat. And the earth could have been figured as a mountain only by the inhabitants of a mountainous land.

But this conception of the world of gods and men stands in glaring contrast to the cosmology of Eridu. [pg 453] There the primeval earth was not a mountain peak, but the flat lands reclaimed from the sea. The gods and spirits had their home in the abysses of the ocean, not in the dark recesses of a mountain of the north; the centre of the world was the palace of Ea beneath the waves, not “the mountain-house” of En-lil, or the dark caverns of “the mountain of Arallu.” Once more we are confronted by a twofold element in Babylonian thought and religion, and a proof of its compound nature. Like the contradictory elements in Egyptian religion, which can best be explained by the composite character of the people, the contradictory elements in Babylonian religion imply that mixture of races which is described in the fragments of Berossos.

In the tower or ziggurat, accordingly, we must see a reflection of the belief that this nether earth is a mountain whose highest peak supports the vault of the sky. Around it float the stars and clouds, concealing the heaven of the gods from the eyes of man. But this Olympian heaven was really an afterthought. It was not until the ghosts of the lower world had developed into gods, and been transferred from the heart of the mountain to its summit, that it had any existence at all. It belongs to the age of astro-theology, to the time when the moon and sun and host of heaven became divine, and received the homage of mankind. This is an age to which I shall have to refer again in my next and concluding lecture. It was the time when the ziggurat began to consist of seven storeys, dedicated to the seven planets, when the ziggurat of Erech was called “the house of the seven black stones,” and that of Borsippa, “of the seven zones of heaven and earth.”[346]

The ziggurat occupied but a small part of the temple area. What the temple was like we know to a certain extent, not only from the American excavations at Nippur, but more especially from the accounts given us by Herodotos and by a cuneiform tablet which describes the great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon. The latter was called Ê-Saggila, “the house of the exalted head”; and though the account of Herodotos is probably quoted from an earlier author, while the cuneiform tablet, which was seen and translated by Mr. George Smith at Constantinople, has unfortunately been lost, there is nevertheless no ground in either case for mistrust. The description given by Herodotos fully agrees with that of the tablet.