You must not, therefore, expect either so complete or so detailed an account of Babylonian religion as that which it is now possible to give of the religion of Egypt. There are no pictures from the walls of tombs, no bas-reliefs from the temples, to help us; we have to depend almost wholly on the literature that has come down to us, mutilated and only half examined as it is. Our efforts to interpret it are without the assistance of pictorial representations such as are at the disposal of the Egyptologist; they rest upon philology alone, and [pg 275] the element of uncertainty in them is therefore considerable.
The advances made in our knowledge of Babylonian religion, since I lectured upon it some fifteen years ago, are consequently not so great as the inexperienced student might be tempted to believe. There are some things to be added, there is more to be corrected, but the main facts and principles which I then tried to place before the world of scholars remain intact. In some cases confirmation has come of suggestions which seemed only possible or probable; in other cases others have worked with greater success and better materials upon the foundations which I laid. If, therefore, the progress made during the past few years may appear disappointing, there is no reason for surprise; the fault lies not with the Assyriologist, but with the materials with which he has to deal. The labourer is ready, but the harvest is not yet ripe.
Lecture II. Primitive Animism.
Deep down in the very core of Babylonian religion lay a belief in what Professor Tylor has called animism. It belonged to the Sumerian element in the faith of the people, and, as we shall see, was never really assimilated by the Semitic settlers. But in spite of Semitic influences and official attempts to explain it away, it was never eradicated from the popular creed, and it left a permanent impress upon the folk-lore and superstitions of the nation. As in Egypt, so too in Babylonia, animism was the earliest shape assumed by religion, and it was through animism that the Sumerian formed his conception of the divine.
In Egypt it was the Ka which linked “the other world” with that of living men. In Babylonia the place of the Ka was taken by the Zi. We may translate Zi by “spirit,” but like the Ka it was rather a double than a spirit in our sense of the term. Literally the word signified “life,” and was symbolised in the primitive picture-writing of the country by a flowering plant. Life, however, meant a great deal more to early man than it does to us. It was synonymous with motion, with force and energy. All that moved was endowed with life; life was the only force known to man which explained motion, and, conversely, motion was the sign and manifestation of life. The arrow which sped through [pg 277] the air or the rock which fell from the cliff did so in virtue of their possessing life, or because the motive force of life lay in some way or other behind them. The stars which slowly moved through the sky, and the sun which rose and set day by day, were living beings; it was life which gave them the power of movement, as it gave the power of movement to man himself and the animals by whom he was surrounded. The power of movement, in fact, separated the animate from the inanimate; all that moved possessed life; the motionless was lifeless and dead. Man's experience was necessarily his measure of the universe; the only force he knew of was the force we call life, and his reason seemed to demand that what held true of himself must hold true also of the rest of the world.
But, like the Egyptian, the Sumerian could not conceive of life except under visible and concrete form. The abstract was still embedded, as it were, in the concrete; it could not be divorced from it in thought any more than in those pictorial characters which were used by the scribes. What we mean by “force” would have been unintelligible to the primitive Babylonian; for him life was something real and material, which had a shape of its own, even though this shape was but an unsubstantial shadow, seen indeed by the eye, but eluding the grasp. At the same time it was more than a shadow, for it possessed all the qualities of the object or person to whom it belonged. It was not life in the abstract, but the counterpart of an individual object, which endowed that object with the power of motion, and gave it a place in the animate world.
The Sumerian Zi, therefore, closely resembled the Egyptian Ka. The human Zi was the imperishable part of man; it made him a living soul while he was in this world, and after death continued to represent him in the [pg 278] shadowy world below.[216] Unlike the lilla or “ghost,” it represented the man himself in his personality; if that personality were destroyed, it also ceased to exist. While on the one side it was the Zi which gave man life and the power of movement, on the other side, without the individual man there could be no individual Zi. Food and drink were offered to the Babylonian dead as they were to the Egyptian, and the objects the dead man had loved during his lifetime were deposited in his grave. His seal was attached to his wrist, his spear or staff was laid at his side, and at times even dates or fish or poultry were buried with him, lest he might feel hungry in the darkness of the tomb. The child had his favourite toys to play with, the woman her necklace of beads. The water-jar was there, filled with “the pure water” for which the dead thirsted, along with the bowl of clay or bronze out of which it might be drunk. “A garment to clothe him,” says an old hymn, “and shoes for his feet, a girdle for his loins and a water-skin for drinking, and food for his journey have I given him.”[217]
Like men, the gods too had each his Zi. We hear of the Zi of Ea, the god of the deep;[218] and the primeval “mother, who had begotten heaven and earth,” was Zi-kum or Zi-kura, “the life of heaven” and “earth.”[219]