CHAPTER III.
The Morphology of the Compared Religions.
As I said in a previous lecture,[40.1] “we must regard the religious structure to which the cults of Anatolia and Mesopotamia belonged as morphologically the same as the Hellenic.” The grounds of this judgment may be now briefly shown. In his Histoire des anciennes Religions, Tiele classifies most of these together under the category of Nature-Religions, which he distinguishes from the ethical: he is thinking of the distinction between that religious view in which the divinity is closely associated, or even identified, with some natural object, and that in which the divinity is a moral being merely, stript of all attributes that are derived from the world of nature. Serious objection may be taken to the terms in which this classification of religions is expressed. The only religions which would fall under the ethical class would be the Judaic, the Moslem, and the Christian: and yet the Hebrews in the most exalted period of their religion prayed to their god for rain and crops, and the Christian Churches do the same to this day. A deity whose interest is purely ethical has only existed in certain philosophic systems: he has never had an established cult. On the other hand, a nature-religion, at the stage when personal deities have been somewhat developed, which is not also moral, has yet to be discovered. Religion, in its origin possibly non-moral, must, as society advances, acquire the closest relations with the social moral code. A Sun-god or Thunder-god—Shamash, for instance, of Babylon, Mithras of Persia, Sol Invictus of the later Roman Empire—may become a great divinity of an ethical cult and yet retain his association with the element. And it is fruitless to classify higher religions at least on such a basis of distinction as “moral” and “non-moral.”[41.1]
It is more to the purpose of our present comparison to employ as one of our test-standards the degree of personality in the cult-objects of the different races. Is the popular imagination still on the level of animism which engenders mere vaguely conceived daimones, shadowy agents, working perhaps in amorphous groups, without fixed names or local habitations or special individuality? Or has it reached that stage of religious perception at which personal deities emerge, concrete individualities clothed with special attributes, physical, moral, spiritual? The most superficial study of the cuneiform texts and the religious monuments of the Sumerian-Babylonian society does not leave us in doubt how we should answer these questions in behalf of the peoples in the Mesopotamian valley. When the Semitic tribes first pushed their way into these regions, swarming probably, as usual, from Arabia, at some remotely early date, they found there the non-Semitic Sumerian people possessed of a highly complex religious pantheon. Bringing with them their own Shamash the sun-god, Adad the storm-god, and the great goddess Ishtar, and perhaps other divinities, they nevertheless took over the whole Sumerian pantheon, with its elaborate liturgy of hymns and incantations; and for the record of this great and fascinating hieratic literature the Sumerian language—with interlinear Babylonian-Assyrian paraphrase—was preserved down to the beginning of our era. This religious system of dateless antiquity suffered little change “from the drums and tramplings” of all the conquerors from the time of Sargon 1st and the kings before Hammurabi to the day of the Macedonian Seleukos. And in a sketch of this system as it prevailed in the second millennium B.C. it is quite useless for our purpose to try to distinguish between Sumerian and Semitic elements. It is more valuable to formulate this obvious fact, that a widespread belief in personal concrete divinities, upon which an advanced polytheism was based, was an immemorial phenomenon in this region. Tiele’s hypothesis[42.1] that the earliest Sumerian system was not so much a polytheism as a polydaimonism, out of which certain definite gods gradually emerged some time before the Semitic period, is merely a priori theorising. The earliest texts and monuments reveal as vigorous a faith in real divine personalities as the latest: witness[42.2] that interesting relief recently found on a slab in the caravan route near Zohab, on which the goddess In-Hinni is bringing captives to the King Annubanini: the evidence of the text accompanying it points to a period earlier than that of King Hammurabi. We may compare with this the impressive relief which shows us the stately form of Hammurabi receiving his code of laws from the sun-god Shamash seated on his throne[43.1]; and of a later date, the alabaster relief from Khorsabad showing a sacrifice to Marduk, a speaking witness to the stern solemnity of the Babylonian worship and to the strength of the faith in personal divinity.[43.2] That this faith was as real in the polytheistic Babylonian as in the monotheistic Israelite is evinced not merely by the monuments, but still more clearly and impressively by the Sumerian hymns and liturgies.
Nevertheless the phenomena of animism coexist in all this region with those of developed theism. By the side of these high personal deities we find vague companies of divine powers such as the Igigi and the Anunnaki, who are conceived more or less as personal but without clearly imagined individuality, the former being perhaps definable as the daimones of heaven, the latter as the daimones of earth. Similarly, in the Hellenic system we note such nameless companies of divine agencies as the Ἐρινύες and Πραξιδίκαι, conceived independently of the concrete figures of the polytheism. But, further, in the Mesopotamian religion we must reckon seriously with lower products of polydaemonism than these, the demons of evil and disease who so dominated the imagination and much of the religious life of the private person that the chief object of the elaborate ritual was, as we shall see, to combat these. Only, as the curtain gradually rolls away from the remote past of this earliest home of human culture, it is not given us to see the gradual emergence of the divine personalities, or trace—as perhaps we may elsewhere—the process from polydaimonism to theism. The gods, as far as we can discern, were always there, and at least it is not in the second millennium B.C. that me may hope to find the origins of theistic religion.
As regards the other Semitic stocks, the cumulative evidence of early inscriptions, literary records, and legends is sufficient proof that the belief in high personal divinities was predominant in this millennium. It is not necessary to labour here at the details of the proof; the other lines of inquiry that I am soon going to follow will give sufficient illustration of this; and it is enough to allude to the wide prevalence of the designation of the high god as Baal or Bel, which can be traced from Assyria through Syria, in the Aramaean communities, in Canaan and Phoenicia, and in the Phoenician colonies: the Moabite Stone tells us of Chemosh; the earliest Carthaginian inscriptions of Baal-Hammon and Tanit; from our earliest witness for Arabian religion, Herodotus,[44.1] we learn that the Arabs named their two chief divinities, Orotal and Alilat, a god and a goddess, whom he identifies with Dionysos and Aphrodite Ourania.
It is still more important for us to know the stage reached by the Hittite religion in this early period; for in the latter half of the second millennium the influence of the Hittite culture had more chance of touching the earliest Greek societies than had that of the remote Mesopotamia or of the inaccessible Canaanites. In the last thirty years the explorers of Asia Minor, notably Sir William Ramsay and Dr. Hogarth, have done inestimable service to the comparative study of the Mediterranean area by the discovery and interpretation of the monuments of Hittite art: and the greatest of them all, the rock-cut reliefs of Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, has given material to Dr. Frazer for constructing an elaborate theory of Hittite sacrifice in his ‘Attis, Adonis, Osiris.’ But, before dealing with the Hittite monuments, the student should note the literary evidence which is offered by the treaty inscribed on a silver tablet (circ. 1290 B.C.) found in Egypt, which was ratified between Ramses II. and the Hittite King Chattusar;[45.1] the witnesses to the treaty are the thousand gods and goddesses of the Hittite land and the thousand gods and goddesses of Egypt. We are certainly here not dealing with mere vague pluralities of spirits, such as may be found in an animistic system of Shamanism; the thousand is only a vague numeral for the plurality of divinities in the Hittite and Egyptian polytheism; the difference of sex would alone suffice to prove that the Hittite had developed the cult of personal deities, and the document expressly quotes the great heaven-god of the Hittites, called by the Egyptian name Sutekh, and regarded as compeer of the Egyptian Ra. Other personal Hittite deities are alluded to in the document, and among them appears to be mentioned a certain “Antheret of the land of Kheta.”[45.2] Possibly a witness of still earlier date speaks in the Tel-Amarna letters, the earliest diplomatic correspondence in the world; one of these, written in cuneiform to Amenhotep III., in the fifteenth century B.C., is from Tushratta, the King of the Mitani people.[45.3] Tushratta sends his daughter in marriage to Pharaoh, and prays that “Shamash and Ishtar may go before her,” and that Amon may “make her correspond to my brother’s wish.” He even dispatches a statue of Ishtar of Nineveh, that “she may exercise her beneficent power in the land of Egypt”; for she had revealed her desire by an oracle—“to Egypt to the land that I love will I go.”
The Mitani chieftains bear names that show a convincingly Aryan formation, and we know from the momentous inscriptions found in 1907 at Boghaz-Keui recording treaties between the king of the Hittites and the king of the Mitani (B.C. 1400), that the dynasts of the latter people had Aryan gods in their pantheon.[46.1] But the Mitani themselves were not Aryans, and are assumed by Winckler and Messerschmidt to be Hittites.[46.2] If this were proved, the theory which it is the general aim of these lectures to consider, that the Babylonian religious system may have reached the Mediterranean in the second millennium, would receive a certain vraisemblance from the fact revealed by the letter of King Tushratta, namely, that the Mitani of this period had adopted some of the Mesopotamian personal divinities, and might therefore have transmitted them to the coast of Asia Minor. Yet the Hittites had their own local divine names; from the cuneiform inscriptions written in the Hittite language found at Van in Armenia, we gather the names of various Hittite gods, Teshup, for instance, who appears on a column found at Babylon holding the lightning, and in his right hand a hammer, which, from the analogy of other religions, we may interpret as the fetich-emblem of the thunder.[46.3]
In fact, apart from the literary evidence, the Hittite monuments would be proof sufficient of the high development of personal religion in these regions. A relief with Hittite inscriptions, found near Ibriz, the old Kybistra, near the Cilician gates north of Tauros, shows us a deity with corn and grapes, and a priest adoring;[47.1] he is evidently conceived, like Baal by the Semites of Canaan, as a local god of the earth and of vegetation. But the most striking of all the Hittite monuments, and one that is all-sufficient in itself for our present purpose, is the great series of reliefs on the rock at Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, not far from the site of the ancient Pteria.[47.2] Here is revealed a great and probably mystic pageant of an advanced polytheism with an elaborate ritual and a clear faith in high gods and goddesses: the whole procession seems to be passing along the narrowing gorge towards a Holy of Holies, the inner cave-shrine of the Mystery.
As we draw nearer to the Mediterranean, the facts are too well known to need reiteration here. Everywhere we find proofs of a personal theism reaching far back into prehistoric times: whether it be the cult of a high god such as the Cilician divinity, called Zeus or Herakles by the later Greeks, or the Lycian “Apollo,” or a great goddess such as Ma of Comana, Cybele of Phrygia and Lydia. And now to all this testimony we can add the recently discovered monuments of a developed Minoan-Mycenaean religion with the elaborate ritual and worship of personal divinities, anthropomorphically imagined on the whole.
Such was the religious world lying before the feet of the Aryan Hellenes descending from the north; and when their expansion across the islands to the Asiatic shores began, they would find everywhere a religion more or less on the same plane of development. Therefore if, as some students appear to imagine, the aboriginal Hellene had not developed personal gods before he arrived,[48.1] it would be irrational to conclude that Babylon had taught him to worship such beings in place of the vague and flitting daimon. His immediate teachers would be the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples; and that their theistic system was derived from Babylon is a theory lacking both positive evidence and a priori probability, as I may afterwards indicate. But that the proto-Hellenic peoples were in that backward condition of religious thought, is in the highest degree improbable. We must suppose that early in the second millennium they were slowly pushing their way down through the Balkans and through the country that is afterwards Thrace. So far as the earliest myths and records of this region throw some light on its prehistoric darkness, it appears to have been dominated by a great god. When the Thraco-Phrygian race, and possibly their kinsmen the Bithynoi, penetrated into the same region, they brought with them a father-god, who accompanied members of these stocks into Asia Minor, and settled in Phrygia, Pontus, and Bithynia by the side of an earlier goddess. Their cousins of the Indo-Iranian stock had certainly reached the stage of personal polytheism before 1400 B.C., as the epoch-making discovery of the Hittite-Mitani inscriptions at Boghaz-Keui, referred to above, sufficiently indicates.[48.2] We cannot believe that the Hellenes of the earliest migration were inferior in culture to those Thracians, Bithynians, or even Indo-Iranians; for various reasons we must believe the reverse. And we now know from modern anthropology that peoples at a very low grade of culture, far lower than that which the Aryan stocks had reached at the time of the great migrations, have yet attained to the idea of personal and relatively high gods. In fact, that scepticism of certain philological theorists who, a few years ago, were maintaining that the Aryans before their separation may have had no real gods at all, is beginning to appear audacious and uncritical. At any rate, in regard to the Hellenes, the trend of the evidence is to my mind weighty and clear, making for the conviction that the different stocks not only possessed the cult of personal gods, but had already the common worship of certain deities when first they entered Greece. Otherwise, when we consider the mutual hostility of the various tribes and the geographical difficulties in the way of intercourse in early Greece, it would be difficult to explain the religious facts of the Homeric poems. We might, indeed, if Homer was our only witness, suspect him of representing what was merely local Achaean religion as common to all Greece. But we can check him by many other witnesses, by ancient myths and cults of diverse localities. Zeus was worshipped by some, at least, of the main tribes, when they were in the neighbourhood of Olympus: he is no more Thessalian than he is Dryopian. One of the earliest Hellenic immigrants were perhaps the Minyai, and their aboriginal god was Poseidon. The ritual of Apollo preserves the clearest reminiscence of his entry from the north, and he is the high god of one of the oldest Hellenic tribes, the Dryopes, and the wide diffusion of his cult suggests that aboriginally it was a common inheritance of several stocks. The force of the evidence that may be urged for this view is ignored by Wilamowitz in his brilliant but fallacious theory of the Lycian origin of the god. We must reject the hypothesis of a proto-Hellenic godless period; but, on the other hand, the mere fact that the early Greek religion appears on the same plane as the Mesopotamian, in respect of the worship of personal beings, gives no support at all to the theory of Oriental influence. If it is to be accepted, it must be sustained by more special evidence.