The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

Lecture X. Astro-Theology And The Moral Element In Babylonian Religion.

A hundred years ago, writers on the history or philosophy of religion had much to say about what they called Sabaism. The earliest form of idolatry was supposed to have been a worship of the heavenly bodies. A passage in the Book of Job was invoked in support of the fact, and beautifully executed drawings of Babylonian seal-cylinders were made for the sake of the pictures of the sun and moon and stars that were upon them. Sir William Drummond resolved the sons of Jacob into the signs of the Zodiac;[386] Dupuis derived Christianity itself from a sort of allegorical astronomy.

“Sabaism” has long since fallen into disrepute. Anthropology has long since taught us that primitive religion is not confined to a worship of the stars. The cult of the heavenly bodies was not the source of polytheism; indeed, there are systems of polytheism in which it has never existed at all. Of late the tendency has been to discount it altogether as a factor in the history of religion.

But the tendency has gone too far. There was one religion, at all events, in which it played an important part. This was the religion of ancient Babylonia and of those other countries which were influenced by Babylonian culture. But even here the decipherment of the [pg 480] inscriptions seemed to show that it belonged to a late age, and was an artificial product which never affected the people as a whole. When I delivered my Hibbert Lectures, I believed that I could dismiss it in a few words as merely a kind of subsidiary chapter added to the religion of the State by pedants and scholars.

Certain it is that the elaborate system of astro-theology which characterised Babylonian religion was an artificial creation. It was the result of a combination of religion with astronomy which was elaborated in the schools. Astronomy, like all other sciences, was under the control of the priests, the observatory rose by the side of the school within the precincts of the temple, and the dependence of the calendar on the observations of the astronomer gave them a religious character. Moreover, the astro-theology of Babylonia did not go back to primeval times. The identification of the official gods with the heavenly bodies belongs to an age when the official religion had already been crystallised into shape, and a map of the heavens had been made. We can almost watch its rise and trace its growth.

Nevertheless the rise and growth are of far earlier date than was formerly imagined. Astro-theology was not a mere learned scheme of allegorised science, the plaything of a school of pedants; it exercised a considerable influence upon the religion of Babylonia and upon the history of its development. It had, moreover, a background in the faith of the people. Like the rivers and streams, the stars also were really worshipped,[387] and the symbols drawn on the seal-cylinders show that this worship must go back to the oldest period of Babylonia. Even the ideograph that denotes “a god” represents an [pg 481] eight-rayed star. The fact is significant. At the time when the pictorial hieroglyphics were first being formed out of which the cuneiform characters were to grow, the star was already the symbol and representative of the divine. It was not as yet the more general and abstract “sky,” it was the particular star that was adored as a god. Babylonian religion, as far back as its written history leads us, really begins with Sabaism.

How is this fact to be reconciled with the further fact that the gods of Babylonia were once spirits and ghosts, the zi's of Eridu and the lil's of Nippur? To this question no answer at present is possible; at most we can only suggest that the zi, or spirit, was localised in the star. A spirit of the sun was as conceivable as a spirit of Ea, and the son of Ea, it must be remembered, became a sun-god. “The zi of the god” meant originally in the primitive picture-writing “the spirit of the star,” and the literal rendering of the invocation in the early spells would be “the spirit of the star who is lord of Du-azagga,” “the spirit of the star who is mistress of the holy hill.” In the Book of Isaiah the Babylonian king is made to say that he would enthrone himself among the gods on the summit of the Chaldæan Olympos “above the stars of El”; and Nin-ip, the interpreter of En-lil, was at once the sun-god and the moon. Istar, it must not be forgotten, was primarily the evening star; and Istar was not only supreme among the goddesses of Babylonia, she was the type and representative of them all. The signs of the Zodiac had once been the monster allies of the dragon of chaos.

With all this, it may hereafter prove that the conception of the divine as a star was introduced by a different race from that which saw in it a spirit or a ghost. At all events, it was a conception which the inscriptions of Southern Arabia have shown to have prevailed [pg 482] among the Western Semites. Professor Hommel has made it clear[388] that the Semitic tribes to which the Arabs of the south, the Aramæans, and the Hebrews alike belonged, worshipped four supreme deities—Athtar, the evening and morning star; the moon-god and its messenger or “Prophet”; and the goddess of the sun. Athtar is the Babylonian Istar, who has become a male god in her passage to the Semites; and, while the people of Hadhramaut borrowed the name of Sin from Babylonia, those of Qatabân borrowed the name of Nebo (Anbây). Samas, the sun, has become a goddess; the moon-god has taken the foremost place in the pantheon, and the sun has accordingly been transformed into his colourless reflection. As in the case of Istar, so too in that of the sun-god, the genderless grammar of Sumerian facilitated the change. Â, the sun-god of Sippara, had become his wife under Semitic influence,[389] and from Sippara the conception of a solar goddess passed to the Semites on the western side of the Euphrates.

The supreme Baalim of the South Arabian inscriptions must thus have been of Babylonian origin. Name and character alike were derived from Sumerian Babylonia. And from this the further inference is obvious: Arabian and West Semitic “Sabaism,” with its worship of the heavenly bodies, was not indigenous. It must have been the result of contact with Babylonian civilisation, a contact which gave Ur and Harran a mixed population, and caused them to be the seats and centres of the worship of the moon-god. The primitive Semitic Baal—the “lord” of a specific plot of earth or tribal territory—became a moon-good or an evening star, while his wife was embodied in the sun.

This conclusion is confirmed by a study of the religion [pg 483] of Canaan. Here the place occupied by the moon-god among Arabians and Hebrews is taken by the sun. The supreme Baal is the sun-god, and the female Ashtoreth is identified with the moon. As I endeavoured to show in an earlier lecture, there was a period in the history of Babylonian religion when here also the sun-god was supreme. The gods were resolved into solar deities, or rather were identified with the sun. The solar element in Merodach threatened to absorb his human kingship; it was only his likeness to man that saved him from the fate of the Egyptian gods.