Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar.
It is thus that Nebuchadrezzar addresses his god in the plenitude of his glory and power—
“To Merodach, my lord, I prayed; I began to him my petition; the word of my heart sought him, and I said: ‘O prince that art from everlasting, lord of all that exists, for the king whom thou lovest, whom thou callest by name, as it seems good unto thee thou guidest his name aright, thou watchest over him in the path of righteousness! I, the prince who obeys thee, am the work of thy hands; thou hast created me, and hast intrusted to me the sovereignty over multitudes of men, according to thy goodness, O lord, which thou hast made to pass over them all. Let me love thy supreme lordship, let the fear of thy divinity exist in my heart, and give what seemeth good unto thee, since thou maintainest my life.’ Then he, the firstborn, the glorious, the leader of the gods, Merodach the prince, heard my prayer and accepted my petition.”[251]
“To Merodach, my lord, I prayed, and lifted up my hand: ‘O Merodach, (my) lord, the wise one of the gods, the mighty prince, thou didst create me and hast intrusted to me the dominion over multitudes of men; as my own dear life do I love the height of thy court; among all mankind have I not built a city of the earth fairer than thy city of Babylon. As I have loved the [pg 324] fear of thy divinity and have sought after thy lordship, accept the lifting up of my hands, hearken to my petition, for I the king am the adorner (of the shrine) who rejoices thy heart, an instructed ruler, the adorner of all thy fortresses.’ ”[252]
The god before whom the great Babylonian conqueror thus humbles himself in passionate devotion, was the divine guardian and lord of his capital city. Ever since the days when Babylon had been but one of the many villages of Babylonia, Merodach had been its presiding god. It was to him that Ê-Saggil, its sanctuary, was dedicated, and from him and his priesthood the kings of Babylon derived their right to rule. Merodach had given them their supremacy, first in Babylonia and then throughout Western Asia, and the supremacy he bestowed upon them was reflected upon himself. The god followed the fortunes of his city, because through him his city had risen to power; and he became Bel, “the lord,” not for the inhabitant of Babylon only, but for all the civilised world. Like Amon of Thebes, Bel-Merodach of Babylon supplanted the older gods of the country because the city wherein he was worshipped supplanted the earlier seats of Babylonian power.
Like Amon of Thebes, moreover, Merodach of Babylon owed much to his solar character. Youngest of the gods though he might be, he was yet a form of the sun-god,[253] and as such a representative and impersonation [pg 325] of the supreme Baal. However much his solar features were overshadowed by other attributes in later days, they were never wholly obscured, and his solar origin was remembered to the last. It was never forgotten that before he became the supreme Bel or “lord” of Babylonian theology he had been merely a local sun-god, like Utu of Larsa or Samas of Sippara.
We can even trace his cult to Sumerian days. A punning etymology, proposed for his name in an age when the true origin of it had been lost, made him the amar-utuki or “heifer of the goblin”; and the fact that the sun-god was known to have once been an utuk or “goblin” seemed to lend countenance to it. But when we first catch glimpses of his worship, he has already ceased to belong to the goblins of the night. He has been identified with Asari the son of Ea of Eridu, and has thus became the messenger and interpreter of the culture-god.
In the language of Sumer, Asari signified “the strong one” or “prince.”[254] His name was expressed by two ideographs which denoted “place” and “eye,” and had precisely the same meaning and form as the two which expressed the name of the Egyptian Osiris.[255] Between the Sumerian Asari and the Egyptian Osiris, therefore, it seems probable that there was a connection. And to my mind the probability is raised to practical certainty by the fact that the character and attributes of both Asari and Osiris were the same. Osiris was Un-nefer, “the good being,” whose life was spent in benefiting and civilising mankind; Asari also was “the good heifer” [pg 326] (amar-dugga), and his common title was that of “the prince who does good to men” (Aṡari-galu-dugga). He it was who conveyed to men the teaching of Ea, who healed their diseases by means of his father's spells, and who “raised the dead to life.” Asari and Osiris are not only the same in name and pictorial representation, they play the same part in the history of religion and culture.
But there was one important difference between them. Osiris was a dead god, whose kingdom was in the other world; Asari brought help to the living, whom he restored from sickness and delivered from death. Even in Egypt, however, it was remembered that Osiris had been a god of the living before he was god of the dead. Tradition told how he had instructed men in the arts of life, and done for primeval Egypt what Ea and Asari had done for Chaldæa. The difference between him and Asari is a difference that runs through the whole of Egyptian and Babylonian theology. The Egyptian of the historical period fixed his eyes on the future life, and the god he worshipped accordingly was the god who judged and saved him in the other world; the religion of the Babylonian was confined to this world, and it was in this world only that he was judged by the sun-god, and received his sentence of reward or punishment. The mummified sun-god did not exist for the Babylonians, for the practice of mummification was unknown among them.
It is possible that Aṡari, “the prince who does good to men,” had been originally a title of Ea. If so, the title and the god had been separated from one another at an early epoch, and the title had become itself a god who owned Ea as his father. This relationship between Ea and his son betrays Semitic—or at all events foreign—influence. The ghosts and spirits of primitive Sumerian belief were not bound together by any such family ties; [pg 327] the demons of the night had little in common with the men they terrified and plagued. Asari had once been conceived of as a ram, Ea as an antelope; and between the ram and the antelope no genetic relationship was possible. They might be united together like the composite creatures which had come down to the Babylonians from the old Sumerian days, but there could be no birth of one from the other. Birth characterises the present creation in which like springs from like; it was only in the time of chaos that unlike forms could be mingled together in disorderly confusion.