The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

The culture of Eridu spread northward, along with the religious ideas which formed so integral a part of it. The worship of Ea was adopted in other cities of Babylonia, and the god of Babylon was identified with his son. The lil which had been pictured under animal shape put on human form, and the Sumerian accepted the conviction of the Semite, that man was made in the likeness of his god. En-lil of Nippur had to yield to the influence of the stranger. The antiquity of his worship, the sanctity of his temple, could not save him from his fate. He too became a Semitic god; his old name became an unmeaning title, which survived in literature but not in the mouths of the people, and he was henceforth addressed as a Semitic Bilu or Baal. He ceased to be the chief of the ghosts of night, and was transformed into the divine “Lord” of Semitic worship, who, like the sun, watched over this nether earth. It was a transformation and not a development.

As the Semitic Bel, the god of Nippur continued for [pg 302] long centuries to retain the ancient veneration of the people. Unlike the Greek Kronos, he was not as yet dethroned by the younger gods. The position occupied by the great sanctuary of Nippur and its priesthood long prevented this. But the destiny of Kronos at last overtook him. Babylon became the capital of the kingdom, and its god accordingly claimed precedence over all others. Merodach of Babylon assumed the title of Bel, and little by little the old god of Nippur was robbed of his ancient rank. For the Babylonia of later history Merodach and not En-lil was the supreme Baal, and even the legends that had been told of the god of Nippur were transferred to his younger rival. The memories that still gathered round Nippur were too deeply tinged with the colours of a religion that had passed away, and the beliefs of a darker and less civilised form of faith. Merodach was the champion of the gods of light, En-lil had been the lord of the demons of darkness. Theologically as well as politically it was needful that Merodach should supplant En-lil.

The spread of the worship of Ea, or rather of the religious conceptions with which it was associated, brought with it the effacement of Dam-kina. Dam-kina had once been the earth; just as En-lil at Nippur was “the lord of ghosts,” of whom he was himself one, so at Eridu Dam-kina was the “lady of the earth,” with which, as its Zi or “spirit,” she was herself identified. Sumerian grammar knew no distinction of gender, and in the Sumerian family the woman held a foremost place by the side of the man. It was otherwise among the Semites. The distinction between the masculine and the feminine is engrained in the Semitic languages, but the distinction is attained by forming the feminine out of the masculine. While a considerable part of Semitic flexion is the result of vowel changes within the word [pg 303] itself, the feminine is created by attaching an affix to the masculine form. The masculine presupposes the feminine, but the feminine is dependent on the masculine.

Semitic grammar merely reflects the fundamental ideas of the Semitic mind. For the Semite the woman is the lesser man, formed out of him and dependent upon him. Like the feminine of the noun, she is the colourless reflection of her husband, though without the reflection there can be no husband. Wherever the Semitic spirit has prevailed, the woman has been simply the helpmeet and shadow of the man; for the orthodox Mohammedan she hardly possesses a soul. It is only where the Semitic spirit has been met and checked by the influence of another race that this is not the case; the high place retained by the woman in Babylonian society would of itself have been a proof that Semitic culture had here been engrafted on that of an older people, even if the monuments had not revealed to us that such was indeed the fact.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the goddesses or female spirits of Sumerian faith faded away as the Semitic element in Babylonian religion became stronger. At first Semitic influence had done no more than transform the “handmaid of the lil” into a goddess; then the goddesses themselves became like the woman in Semitic thought, pale and colourless, existing merely for the sake of the god. Dam-kina, the lady of the earth, was remembered only by the antiquarian or by the compiler of a cosmological system. When she became the wife of Ea her fate was sealed.

Her attributes and office, in fact, were transferred to him. At Eridu he had necessarily been more than the lord of the deep; he was lord of the city as well. He had as it were migrated from the deep; he had left his [pg 304] palace of the sea and come to dwell in a sanctuary on land. The ground on which Eridu stood was the gift of the sea, the soft silt which the retreating waves of the Persian Gulf had left behind them. It had once been part of the domain of Ea, if not Ea himself. Ea accordingly came to be addressed as the “lord of the earth” as well as of the sea, and Eridu, his city, was the “city of the lord of the land.” The men who inhabited it were his creation: he had formed them like a potter out of the clay, and as the divine “potter” he was therefore known unto them.[235] Like the Egyptian Khnum at the Cataract, he was the first artist in clay, and the models that he made were the first men.

The god of culture was thus also the creator of mankind. He brought civilisation to them from his home beneath the waves, but it was because he had already created them. They were not indeed his children, but the creation of his hands, for the culture-god was necessarily an artist, and the men he moulded were the highest products of his skill. Water and earth had alike gone to their formation; Ea was master not only of the sea, but of the land of Eridu as well.

The heritage of Dam-kina was thus usurped by the god whom Semitic influence had given to her as husband. And therewith the heritage of another goddess of the Sumerian cult was usurped as well. This was Bau, whose native home was probably farther to the north, though she had been as it were domesticated at Eridu in early days. As Dam-kina was made the wife of Ea, so Bau was made his mother. For this there was a special reason. Bau was known as “the great mother,” from whom mankind had received the herd and the flock as well as the crops of the field. She it was who gave fertility to the soil, and protected those who tilled it. [pg 305] The heifer was her symbol, and she may have been originally the local spirit of some field in the neighbourhood of Eridu.[236] But in the days when she is first known to us by contemporaneous inscriptions, she is already a goddess, and the Semitic conception of a divine mother is already attached to her.[237] She thus resembles another goddess, Aruru by name, whom an old cosmological poem associates with Merodach (or rather Ea) in creating “the seed of man,” which springs forth from her bosom like the reed from the marsh or “the wild cow with its young.” In their origin Bau and Aruru are alike but Dam-kina under other names,—the earth-spirits of the old Sumerian religion, who beget or create all living things. The underground world over which En-lil held rule was not only the home of the dead, it was also the place where the seed must be buried before it can spring up into the green herb. That same ghost-world, consequently, to which the dead must journey, is also the source of life. The lil (or rather the Zi) who inhabits it is the mother of mankind, even though it is also the home of the demon who plagues them with disease.

Hence it was that when Bau assumed the dress of a Semitic goddess, she became first the creatress-mother, and then the mother of the creator. As such, however, she entered into rivalry with another deity who was similarly in process of development out of an earlier form. This was Zi-Kum or Zi-Garum, “the spirit of the sky,” [pg 306] who is called “the mother that has begotten heaven and earth,” and “the seeress of the spirit of the earth” (Ê-kur), that is to say, of En-lil.[238] To the primitive seafarer of Babylonia the waters of the Persian Gulf seemed to descend from the vault of heaven which rested upon them; the streams which intersected the ground were fed by the rains, and it was therefore natural to suppose that the sea which blended with the sky was similarly derived from it. The deep was embosomed in the heavens, and the spirit of the deep accordingly must have been begotten by the spirit of the sky.

But this spirit of the sky necessarily owned obedience to the “lord of the ghost-world,” and the mother of Ea of Eridu was thus at the same time a ministering handmaid of En-lil.[239] The Zi who was worshipped at Eridu was also a Lil in the theology of Nippur, and the home of the Lil was beneath the earth. In this way we must explain how it is that Zi-Kum, “the heaven,” is also, under another aspect, Zi-Kura, “the earth,” and as such identical with Dam-kina and Bau.[240] That she should have coalesced with Bau rather than with Dam-kina, was due to the fact that the one was made the mother of Ea, while the other became his wife. But the lineaments of the old “spirit of the sky” were soon obliterated. As the religion of Babylonia moved further and further away from the animism of the past, the spirit's existence faded [pg 307] into the background and Bau stepped into its place. Zi-Kum, “the spirit of the sky,” ended by becoming a symbol of that primordial deep from which Ea had derived his wisdom, and whose waters were above the visible firmament as well as below it.[241] Ea, the god of the mixed Babylonian race, had absorbed the spirits and ghosts of the Sumerian faith. Their attributes had been taken from them, and they had been transformed into goddesses whose sole end was to complete the family of the culture-god.