History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12)

by G. Maspero

Animals never became objects of habitual worship as in Egypt: some of them, however, such as the bull and lion, were closely allied to the gods, and birds unconsciously betrayed by their flight or cries the secrets of futurity.* In addition to all these, each family possessed its household gods, to whom its members recited prayers and poured libations night and morning, and whose statues set up over the domestic hearth defended it from the snares of the evil ones.** The State religion, which all the inhabitants of the same city, from the king down to the lowest slave, were solemnly bound to observe, really represented to the Chaldæans but a tithe of their religious life: it included some dozen gods, no doubt the most important, but it more or less left out of account all the others, whose anger, if aroused by neglect, might become dangerous. The private devotion of individuals supplemented the State religion by furnishing worshippers for most of the neglected divinities, and thus compensated for what was lacking in the official public worship of the community.

If the idea of uniting all these divine beings into a single supreme one, who would combine within himself all their elements and the whole of their powers, ever for a moment crossed the mind of some Chaldæan theologian, it never spread to the people as a whole. Among all the thousands of tablets or inscribed stones on which we find recorded prayers and magical formulas, we have as yet discovered no document treating of the existence of a supreme god, or even containing the faintest allusion to a divine unity. We meet indeed with many passages in which this or that divinity boasts of his power, eloquently depreciating that of his rivals, and ending his discourse with the injunction to worship him alone: “Man who shall come after, trust in Nebo, trust in no other god!” The very expressions which are used, commanding future races to abandon the rest of the immortals in favour of Nebo, prove that even those who prided themselves on being worshippers of one god realized how far they were from believing in the unity of God. They strenuously asserted that the idol of their choice was far superior to many others, but it never occurred to them to proclaim that he had absorbed them all into himself, and that he remained alone in his glory, contemplating the world, his creature. Side by side with those who expressed this belief in Nebo, an inhabitant of Babylon would say as much and more of Merodach, the patron of his birthplace, without, however, ceasing to believe in the actual independence and royalty of Nebo. “When thy power manifests itself, who can withdraw himself from it?—Thy word is a powerful net which thou spreadest in heaven and over the earth:—it falls upon the sea, and the sea retires,—it falls upon the plain, and the fields make great mourning,—it falls upon the upper waters of the Euphrates, and the word of Merodach stirs up the flood in them.—O Lord, thou art sovereign, who can resist thee?—Merodach, among the gods who bear a name, thou art sovereign.” Merodach is for his worshippers the king of the gods, he is not the sole god. Each of the chief divinities received in a similar manner the assurance of his omnipotence, but, for all that, his most zealous followers never regarded them as the only God, beside whom there was none other, and whose existence and rule precluded those of any other. The simultaneous elevation of certain divinities to the supreme rank had a reactionary influence on the ideas held with regard to the nature of each. Anu, Bel, and Ea, not to mention others, had enjoyed at the outset but a limited and incomplete personality, confined to a single concept, and were regarded as possessing only such attributes as were indispensable to the exercise of their power within a prescribed sphere, whether in heaven, or on the earth, or in the waters; as each in his turn gained the ascendency over his rivals, he became invested with the qualities which were exercised by the others in their own domain. His personality became enlarged, and instead of remaining merely a god of heaven or earth or of the waters, he became god of all three simultaneously. Anu reigned in the province of Bel or of Ea as he ruled in his own; Bel joined to his own authority that of Anu and Ea; Ea treated Anu and Bel with the same absence of ceremony which they had shown to him, and added their supremacy to his own. The personality of each god was thenceforward composed of many divers elements: each preserved a nucleus of his original being, but superadded to this were the peculiar characteristics of all the gods above whom he had been successively raised. Anu took to himself somewhat of the temperaments of Bel and of Ea, and the latter in exchange borrowed from him many personal traits. The same work of levelling which altered the characteristics of the Egyptian divinities, and transformed them little by little into local variants of Osiris and the Sun, went on as vigorously among the Chaldæan gods: those who were incarnations of the earth, the waters, the stars, or the heavens, became thenceforth so nearly allied to each other that we are tempted to consider them as being doubles of a single god, worshipped under different names in different localities. Their primitive forms can only be clearly distinguished when they are stripped of the uniform in which they are all clothed.

* Animal forms are almost always restricted either to the
genii, the constellations, or the secondary forms of the
greater divinities: Ea, however, is represented by a man
with a fish’s tail, or as a man clothed with a fish-skin,
which would appear to indicate that at the outset he was
considered to be an actual fish.
** The images of these gods acted as amulets, and the fact
of their presence alone repelled the evil spirits. At
Khorsabad they were found buried under the threshold of the
city gates. A bilingual tablet in the British Museum has
preserved for us the formula of consecration which was
supposed to invest these protecting statuettes with divine
powers.
3. Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the terra-cotta figurine of
Assyrian date now in the Louvre.

The sky-gods and the earth-gods had been more numerous at the outset than they were subsequently. We recognize as such Anu, the immovable firmament, and the ancient Bel, the lord of men and of the soil on which they live, and into whose bosom they return after, death; but there were others, who in historic times had partially or entirely lost their primitive character,—such as Nergal, Ninib, Dumuzi; or, among the goddesses, Damkina, Esharra, and even Ishtar herself, who, at the beginning of their existence, had represented only the earth, or one of its most striking aspects. For instance, Nergal and Ninib were the patrons of agriculture and protectors of the soil, Dumuzi was the ground in spring whose garment withered at the first approach of summer, Damkina was the leafy mould in union with fertilizing moisture, Esharra was the field whence sprang the crops, Ishtar was the clod which again grew green after the heat of the dog days and the winter frosts. All these beings had been forced to submit in a greater or less degree to the fate which among most primitive races awaits those older earth-gods, whose manifestations are usually too vague and shadowy to admit of their being grasped or represented by any precise imagery without limiting and curtailing their spheres. New deities had arisen of a more definite and tangible kind, and hence more easily understood, and having a real or supposed province which could be more easily realized, such as the sun, the moon, and the fixed or wandering stars. The moon is the measure of time; it determines the months, leads the course of the years, and the entire life of mankind and of great cities depends upon the regularity of its movements: the Chaldæans, therefore, made it, or rather the spirit which animated it, the father and king of the gods; but its suzerainty was everywhere a conventional rather than an actual superiority, and the sun, which in theory was its vassal, attracted more worshippers than the pale and frigid luminary. Some adored the sun under its ordinary title of Shamash, corresponding to the Egyptian Râ; others designated it as Merodach, Ninib, Nergal, Dumuzi, not to mention other less usual appellations. Nergal in the beginning had nothing in common with Ninib, and Merodach differed alike from Shamash, Ninib, Nergal, and Dumuzi; but the same movement which instigated the fusion of so many Egyptian divinities of diverse nature, led the gods of the Chaldæans to divest themselves little by little of their individuality and to lose themselves in the sun. Each one at first became a complete sun, and united in himself all the innate virtues of the sun—its brilliancy and its dominion over the world, its gentle and beneficent heat, its fertilizing warmth, its goodness and justice, its emblematic character of truth and peace; besides the incontestable vices which darken certain phases of its being—the fierceness of its rays at midday and in summer, the inexorable strength of its will, its combative temperament, its irresistible harshness and cruelty. By degrees they lost this uniform character, and distributed the various attributes among themselves. If Shamash continued to be the sun in general, Ninib restricted himself, after the example of the Egyptian Harmakhis, to being merely the rising and setting sun, the sun on the two horizons. Nergal became the feverish and destructive summer sun.* Merodach was transformed into the youthful sun of spring and early morning;** Dumuzi, like Merodach, became the sun before the summer. Their moral qualities naturally were affected by the process of restriction which had been applied to their physical being, and the external aspect now assigned to each in accordance with their several functions differed considerably from that formerly attributed to the unique type from which they had sprung. Ninib was represented as valiant, bold, and combative; he was a soldier who dreamed but of battle and great feats of arms. Nergal united a crafty fierceness to his bravery: not content with being lord of battles, he became the pestilence which breaks out unexpectedly in a country, the death which comes like a thief, and carries off his prey before there is time to take up arms against him. Merodach united wisdom with courage and strength: he attacked the wicked, protected the good, and used his power in the cause of order and justice. A very ancient legend, which was subsequently fully developed among the Canaanites, related the story of the unhappy passion of Ishtar for Dumuzi. The goddess broke out yearly into a fresh frenzy, but the tragic death of the hero finally moderated the ardour of her devotion. She wept distractedly for him, went to beg the lords of the infernal regions for his return, and brought him back triumphantly to the earth: every year there was a repetition of the same passionate infatuation, suddenly interrupted by the same mourning. The earth was united to the young sun with every recurring spring, and under the influence of his caresses became covered with verdure; then followed autumn and winter, and the sun, grown old, sank into the tomb, from whence his mistress had to call him up, in order to plunge afresh with him by a common impulse into the joys and sorrows of another year.

* The solar character of Nergal, at least in later times, is
admitted, but with restrictions, by all Assyriologists. The
evident connection between him and Ninib, of which we have
proofs, was the ground of Delitzsch’s theory that he was
likewise the burning and destructive sun, and also of
Jensen’s analogous concept of a midday and summer sun.
** Pr. Lenormant seems to have been the first to distinguish
in Merodach, besides the god of the planet Jupiter, a solar
personage. This notion, which has been generally admitted by
most Assyriologists, has been defined with greater
exactitude by Jensen, who is inclined to see in Merodach
both the morning sun and the spring sun; and this is the
opinion held at present.

The differences between the gods were all the more accentuated, for the reason that many who had a common origin were often separated from one another by, relatively speaking, considerable distances. Having divided the earth’s surface between them, they formed, as in Egypt, a complete feudal system, whose chiefs severally took up their residence in a particular city. Anu was worshipped in Uruk, Enlil-Bel reigned in Nipur, Eridu belonged to Ea, the lord of the waters. The moon-god, Sin, alone governed two large fiefs, Uru in the extreme south, and Harran towards the extreme north-west; Shamash had Larsam and one of the Sipparas for his dominion, and the other sun-gods were not less well provided for, Nergal possessing Kutha, Zamama having Kish, Ninib side by side with Bel reigning in Nipur, while Merodach ruled at Babylon. Each was absolute master in his own territory, and it is quite exceptional to find two of them co-regnant in one locality, as were Ninib and Bel at Nipur, or Ea and Ishtar in Uruk; not that they raised any opposition on principle to the presence of a stranger divinity in their dominions, but they welcomed them only under the titles of allies or subjects. Each, moreover, had fair play, and Nebo or Shamash, after having filled the rôle of sovereign at Borsippa or at Larsam, did not consider it derogatory to his dignity to accept a lower rank in Babylon or at Uru. Hence all the feudal gods played a double part, and had, as it were, a double civil portion—that of suzerain in one or two localities, and that of vassals everywhere else—and this dual condition was the surest guarantee not only of their prosperity, but of their existence. Sin would have run great risk of sinking into oblivion if his resources had been confined to the subventions from his domain temples of Harran and Uru. Their impoverishment would in such case have brought about his complete failure: after having enjoyed an existence amid riches and splendour in the beginning of history, he would have ended his life in a condition of misery and obscurity. But the sanctuaries erected to him in the majority of the other cities, the honours which these bestowed upon him, and the offerings which they made to him, compensated him for the poverty and neglect which he experienced in his own domains; and he was thus able to maintain his divine dignity on a suitable footing. All the gods were, therefore, worshipped by the Chaldeans, and the only difference among them in this respect arose from the fact that some exalted one special deity above the others. The gods of the richest and most ancient principalities naturally enjoyed the greatest popularity. The greatness of Uru had been the source of Sin’s prestige, and Merodach owed his prosperity to the supremacy which Babylon had acquired over the districts of the north. Merodach was regarded as the son of Ba, as the star which had risen from the abyss to illuminate the world, and to confer upon mankind the decrees of eternal wisdom. He was proclaimed as lord—“bîlu”—par excellence, in comparison with whom all other lords sank into insignificance, and this title soon procured for him a second, which was no less widely recognized than the first: he was spoken of everywhere as the Bel of Babylon, Bel-Merodach—before whom Bel of Nipur was gradually thrown into the shade. The relations between these feudal deities were not always pacific: jealousies arose among them like those which disturbed the cities over which they ruled; they conspired against each other, and on occasions broke out into open warfare. Instead of forming a coalition against the evil genii who threatened their rule, and as a consequence tended to bring everything into jeopardy, they sometimes made alliances with these malign powers and mutually betrayed each other. Their history, if we could recover it in its entirety, would be marked by as violent deeds as those which distinguished the princes and kings who worshipped them. Attempts were made, however, and that too from an early date, to establish among them a hierarchy like that which existed among the great ones of the earth. The faithful, who, instead of praying to each one separately, preferred to address them all, invoked them always in the same order: they began with Anu, the heaven, and followed with Bel, Ea, Sin, Shamash, and Bamman. They divided these six into two groups of three, one trio consisting of Anu, Bel, and Ea, the other of Sin, Shamash, and Bamman. All these deities were associated with Southern Chaldoa, and the system which grouped them must have taken its rise in this region, probably at Uruk, whose patron Anu V occupied the first rank among them. The theologians who classified them in this manner seem never to have dreamt of explaining, like the authors of the Heliopolitan Ennead, the successive steps in their creation: these triads were not, moreover, copies of the human family, consisting of a father and mother whose marriage brings into the world a new being. Others had already given an account of the origin of things, and of Merodach’s struggles with chaos; these theologians accepted the universe as it was, already made, and contented themselves with summing up its elements by enumerating the gods which actuated them.* They assigned the first place to those elements which make the most forcible impression upon man—beginning with Anu, for the heaven was the god of their city; following with Bel of Nipur, the earth which from all antiquity has been associated with the heaven; and concluding with Ea of Eridu, the terrestrial waters and primordial Ocean whence Anu and Bel, together with all living creatures, had sprung—Ea being a god whom, had they not been guided by local vanity, they would have made sovereign lord of all. Anu owed his supremacy to an historical accident rather than a religious conception: he held his high position, not by his own merits, but because the prevailing theology of an early period had been the work of his priesthood.

* I know of Sayce only who has endeavoured to explain the
historical formation of the triads. They are considered by
him as of Accadian origin, and probably began in an
astronomical triad, composed of the moon-god, the sun-god,
and the evening star, Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar; alongside
this elementary trinity, “the only authentic one to be found
in the religious faith of primitive Chaldæa,” the Semites
may have placed the cosmogonical trinity of Anu, Bel, and
Ea, formed by the reunion of the gods of Uruk, Nipur, and
Eridu.

The characters of the three personages who formed the supreme triad can be readily deduced from the nature of the elements which they represent. Anu is the heaven itself—“ana”—the immense vault which spreads itself above our heads, clear during the day when glorified by the sun, obscure and strewn with innumerable star clusters during the night. Afterwards it becomes the spirit which animates the firmament, or the god which rules it: he resides in the north towards the pole, and the ordinary route chosen by him when inspecting his domain is that marked out by our ecliptic. He occupies the high regions of the universe, sheltered from winds and tempests, in an atmosphere always serene, and a light always brilliant. The terrestrial gods and those of middle-space take refuge in this “heaven of Anu,” when they are threatened by any great danger, but they dare not penetrate its depths, and stop, shortly after passing its boundary, on the ledge which supports the vault, where they loll and howl like dogs. It is but rarely that it may be entered, and then only by the highly privileged—kings whose destiny marked them out for admittance, and heroes who have fallen valiantly on the field of battle. In his remote position on unapproachable summits Anu seems to participate in the calm and immobility of his dwelling. If he is quick in forming an opinion and coming to a conclusion, he himself never puts into execution the plans which he has matured or the judgments which he has pronounced: he relieves himself of the trouble of acting, by assigning the duty to Bel-Merodach, Ea, or Eamman, and he often employs inferior genii to execute his will. “They are seven, the messengers of Anu their king; it is they who from town to town raise the stormy wind; they are the south wind which drives mightily in the heavens; they are the destroying clouds which overturn the heavens; they are the rapid tempests which bring darkness in the midst of clear day, they roam here and there with the wicked wind and the ill-omened hurricane.” Anu sends forth all the gods as he pleases, recalls them again, and then, to make them his pliant instruments, enfeebles their personality, reducing it to nothing by absorbing it into his own. He blends himself with them, and their designations seem to be nothing more than doublets of his own: he is Anu the Lakhmu who appeared on the first days of creation; Ahu Urâsh or Ninib is the sun-warrior of Nipur; and Anu is also the eagle Alala whom Ishtar enfeebled by her caresses. Anu regarded in this light ceases to be the god par excellence: he becomes the only chief god, and the idea of authority is so closely attached to his name that the latter alone is sufficient in common speech to render the idea of God. Bel would have been entirely thrown into the shade by him, as the earth-gods generally are by the sky-gods, if it had not been that he was confounded with his namesake Bel-Merodach of Babylon: to this alliance he owed to the end the safety of his life, in presence of Anu. Ea was the most active and energetic member of the triad.* As he represented the bottomless abyss, the dark waters which had filled the universe until the day of the creation, there had been attributed to him a complete knowledge of the past, present, and future, whose germs had lain within him, as in a womb. The attribute of supreme wisdom was revered in Ea, the lord of spells and charms, to which gods and men were alike subject: no strength could prevail against his strength, no voice against his voice: when once he opened his mouth to give a decision, his will became law, and no one might gainsay it. If a peril should arise against which the other gods found themselves impotent, they resorted to him immediately for help, which was never refused. He had saved Shamashnapishtirn from the Deluge; every day he freed his votaries from sickness and the thousand demons which were the causes of it. He was a potter, and had modelled men out of the clay of the plains. From him smiths and workers in gold obtained the art of rendering malleable and of fashioning the metals. Weavers and stone-cutters, gardeners, husbandmen, and sailors hailed him as their teacher and patron. From his incomparable knowledge the scribes derived theirs, and physicians and wizards invoked spirits in his name alone by the virtue of prayers which he had condescended to teach them.

* The name of this god was read “Nisrok” by Oppert,
“Nouah” by Hincks and Lenormant. The true reading is Ia, Ea,
usually translated “house,” “water-house”; this is a popular
interpretation which appears to have occurred to the
Chaldæans from the values of the signs entering into the
name of the god. From the outset H. Rawlinson recognized in
Ea, which he read Hea, Hoa, the divinity presiding over the
abyss of waters; he compared him with the serpent of Holy
Scripture, in its relation to the Tree of Knowledge and the
Tree of Life, and deduced therefrom his character of lord of
wisdom. His position as lord of the primordial waters, from
which all things proceeded, clearly denned by Lenormant, is
now fully recognized. His name was transcribed Aôs by
Damascius, a form which is not easily explained; the most
probable hypothesis is that of Hommel who considers Aos as a
shortened form of Iaôs = Ia, Ea.

Subordinate to these limitless and vague beings, the theologians placed their second triad, made up of gods of restricted power and invariable form. They recognized in the unswerving regularity with which the moon waxed and waned, or with which the sun rose and set every day, a proof of their subjection to the control of a superior will, and they signalized this dependence by making them sons of one or other of the three great gods. Sin was the offspring of Bel, Shamash of Sin, Kamman of Anu. Sin was indebted for this primacy among the subordinate divinities to the preponderating influence which Uru exercised over Southern Chaldæa. Mar, where Ramman was the chief deity, never emerged from its obscurity, and Larsam acquired supremacy only many centuries after its neighbour, and did not succeed in maintaining it for any length of time. The god of the suzerain city necessarily took precedence of those of the vassal towns, and when once his superiority was admitted by the people, he was able to maintain his place in spite of all political revolutions. Sin was called in Uru, “Uruki,” or “Nannar the glorious,” and his priests sometimes succeeded in identifying him with Anu. “Lord, prince of the gods, who alone in heaven and earth is exalted,—father Nannar, lord of the hosts of heaven, prince of the gods,—father Nannar, lord, great Anu, prince of the gods,—father Nannar, lord, moon-god, prince of the gods,—father Nannar, lord of Uni, prince of the gods....—Lord, thy deity fills the far-off heavens, like the vast sea, with reverential fear! Master of the earth, thou who fixest there the boundaries [of the towns] and assignest to them their names,—father, begetter of gods and men, who establishest for them dwellings and institutest for them that which is good, who proclaimest royalty and bestowest the exalted sceptre on those whose destiny was determined from distant times,—chief, mighty, whose heart is great, god whom no one can name, whose limbs are steadfast, whose knees never bend, who preparest the paths of thy brothers the gods....—In heaven, who is supreme? As for thee, it is thou alone who art supreme! As for thee, thy decree is made known in heaven, and the Igigi bow their faces!—As for thee, thy decree is made known upon earth, and the spirits of the abyss kiss the dust!—As for thee, thy decree blows above like the wind, and stall and pasture become fertile!—As for thee, thy decree is accomplished upon earth below, and the grass and green things grow!—As for thee, thy degree is seen in the cattle-folds and in the lairs of the wild beasts, and it multiplies living things!—As for thee, thy decree has called into being equity and justice, and the peoples have promulgated thy law!—As for thee, thy decree, neither in the far-off heaven, nor in the hidden depths of the earth, can any one recognize it!—As for thee, thy decree, who can learn it, who can try conclusions with it?—O Lord, mighty in heaven, sovereign upon earth, among the gods thy brothers, thou hast no rival.” Outside Uru and Harran, Sin did not obtain this rank of creator and ruler of things; he was simply the moon-god, and was represented in human form, usually accompanied by a thin crescent, upon which he sometimes stands upright, sometimes appears with the bust only rising out of it, in royal costume and pose.