The evidence of Anatolia is late, but it tells the same story: Sir William Ramsay has emphasised the importance for early political history of such names as Hieroupolis, the City of the Temple, developing into Hierapolis, the Holy City.[118.1] In Hellas the evidence is fuller and older of the religious origin of some, at least, of the πόλεις, for some of the old names reveal the personal name or the appellative of the divinity. Such are Athenai (the settlements of Athena); Potniai, “the place of the revered ones”; Alalkomenai, “the places of Athena Alalkomene”; Nemea, “the sacred groves of Zeus”; Megara, probably “the shrines of the goddess of the lower world”; Diades, Olympia and others. The reason of such development is not hard to seek: the temple would be the meeting-place of many consanguineous tribes, and its sanctuary would safeguard intertribal markets, and at the same time demand fortification and attract a settlement. Mecca, the holy city of Arabia in days long before and after Islam, had doubtless this origin.[118.2] We have traces of the same phenomenon in our English names: Preston, for instance, showing the growth of a city out of a monastery. In the later history of Hellenism the religious origin of the πόλεις is still more frequently revealed by its name: the god who leads the colonists to their new home gives his name to the settlement; hence the very numerous “Apolloniai.”
But though it is not permissible to dogmatise about the origin of the great cities in the valley of the Euphrates, we have ample material supplied by Babylonian-Assyrian monuments and texts of the close interdependence of Church and State, to illustrate what I remarked upon in my inaugural lecture, the political character of the pantheon. This emerges most clearly when we consider the relations of the monarch to the deity. Of all Oriental autocracies, it may be said with truth that the instinctive bias of the people to an autocratic system is a religious instinct: the kingship is of the divine type of which Dr. Frazer has collected the amplest evidence. And this was certainly the type of the most ancient kingship that we can discover in the Mesopotamian region. The ancient kings of the Isin dynasty dared to speak of themselves as “the beloved consort of Nana.”[119.1] But more usually the king was regarded as the son or fosterling of the divinity, though this dogma need not have been given a literal interpretation, nor did it clash with the well-established proof of a secular paternity. An interesting example is the inscription of Samsuilina, the son of Hammurabi, who was reigning perhaps as early as the latter part of the third millennium:[119.2] the king proclaims, “I built the wall in Nippur in honour of the goddess Nin, the walls of Padda to Adad my helper, the wall of Lagab to Sin the god, my begetter.” The tie of the foster-child was as close as that of actual sonship; and Assurbanipal is regarded as the foster-child of the goddess of Nineveh. Nebo himself says to him in that remarkable conversation between the god and the king that an inscription has preserved,[119.3] “weak wast thou, O Assurbanipal, when thou sattest on the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh, and didst drink from her four breasts.” Similarly, the early King Lugalzaggisi declares that he was nourished by the milk of the goddess Ninharsag, and King Gudea mentions Nina as his mother.[119.4] In an oracle of encouragement given by the goddess Belit to Assurbanipal, she speaks to him thus, “Thou whom Belit has borne, do not fear.”[120.1]
Now a few isolated texts might be quoted to suggest that this idea of divine parentage was not confined to the kings, but that even the private Babylonian might at times rise to the conception that he was in a sense the child of God. At least in one incantation, in which Marduk is commissioned by Ea to heal a sick man, the man is called “the child of his god”;[120.2] and Ishtar is often designated “the Mother of Gods and men” and the source of all life on the earth, human, animal, and vegetative.[120.3] But the incantation points only to a vague spiritual belief that might be associated with a general idea that all life is originally divine. We may be sure that the feeling of the divine life of the king was a much more real and living belief than was any sense that the individual might occasionally cherish of his own celestial origin. The king and the god were together the joint source of law and order. The greatest of the early Babylonian dynasts, Lugalzaggisi, whose reign is dated near to 4000 B.C., styles himself the vicegerent (Patesi) of Enlil, the earth-god of Nippur;[120.4] and in early Babylonian contracts, oath was taken in the names both of the god and the king.[120.5] Hammurabi converses with Shamash and receives the great code from his hands, even as Moses received the law from Jahwé or Minos from Zeus. Did any monument ever express so profoundly the divine origin of the royal authority and the State institutions as the famous Shamash relief?[121.1] It is the gods who endow Hammurabi with his various mental qualities: he himself tells us so in his code, “Marduk sent me to rule men and to proclaim Righteousness to the world”;[121.2] and he speaks similarly of the sun-god Shamash: “At the command of Shamash, the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, shall Righteousness arise up in the land.”[121.3] He proclaims himself, therefore, the political prophet of the Lord; and curses with a portentous curse any one who shall venture to abolish his enactments. The later Assyrian kings have the same religious confidence: Sargon (B.C. 722-705) proclaims that he owes his penetrating genius to Ea, “the Lord of Wisdom,” and his understanding to the “Queen of the crown of heaven.”[121.4] We find them also, the Assyrian kings, consulting the sun-god by presenting to him tablets inscribed with questions as to their chances of success in a war, or the fitness and loyalty of a minister whom they proposed to appoint.[121.5]
And this religion affords a unique illustration of the intimacy of the bond between the king as head of the State and the divine powers. The gods are the rulers of destiny: and in the Hall of Assembly at Esagila each year the Council of the Gods under the presidency of Nebo fixed the destiny of the king and the Empire for the ensuing year.[121.6] This award must have signified the writing down of oracles concerning the immediate future, and no doubt the questions were prepared by the king and the priests. The good king who was devoted to the service of the gods was glorified by the priesthood in much the same terms as are applied in the Old Testament to the king who was devoted to the service of Jahwé: in the cult-inscription of Sippar in the British Museum,[122.1] Nabupaladdin, who reigned 884-860 B.C., and who re-established the cult of Shamash, is praised by the priest as “the called of Marduk, the darling of Anu and Ea, the man wholly after the heart of Zarpanit.”
The king, then, is the head of the church, himself a high-priest, as Gudea was high-priest of Ningirsu, and as the Assyrian kings described themselves as the priests of Asshur, the professional priesthood serving as their expert advisers and ministers. Was he actually worshipped in his life? This is maintained by some Assyriologists, and certain evidence points to the practice. In the conversation between Nebo and Assurbanipal, to which reference has been made, the god promises to the king, “I will raise up thy head and erect thy form in the temple of Bit-Mashmash”;[122.2] the names of old Babylonian kings are marked with the ideogram of divinity, and Professor Jastrow[122.3] mentions an inscription of the fourth millennium B.C. in which Gudea ordains sacrifices to his own statues. A document is quoted by Mr. Johns,[122.4] recording the dedication of a piece of land by a private citizen “for his life,” that is to say, to bring a blessing on himself, to the King Lugalla who is called a god, and to his consort. But Zimmern[122.5] considers that the direct deification of kings was a practice of the earliest period only, and was never pushed so far as it was in Egypt. There is reason to suppose that the king or patesi who controlled Nippur had alone the right to be deified, Nippur being the original centre of the Sumerian religion.[123.1]
The sacred character of the king implied that he could exercise miraculous functions or put forth divine “mana” on behalf of his people. We find him in the earlier period reciting incantations in the dark of the moon to avert evil from the land.[123.2] One of the kings of the dynasty of Ur assumed the title “the exorciser of the holy tree of Eridu,” which may point to certain magic functions performed by the king on the sacred tree.[123.3]
This political aspect of religion appears pronounced also in other early communities of the Semitic race; the high god or goddess is the head of the State; the people of Moab are the sons and daughters of Chemosh; the goddess of Askalon and Sidon wears the mural crown. And doubtless the early Semitic kingship was of the same sacred character elsewhere as in Mesopotamia. The King of Moab on the Mesha Stone calls himself the son of Chemosh; and Ben-Hadad, King of Damascus, is the son of Hadad.[123.4] In the Aramaic inscription found at Sinjerli,[123.5] the gods Hadad, El-Reschef, and Shamash are regarded as special protectors of the kings. One of the last kings of Sidon, Tabnit, in the inscription on his sarcophagus, places his priestly office before his royal title, “I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte, King of the Sidonians.”[123.6] King of Byblos or Gobal, in the fifth century B.C., regards himself as called to his high office by the Baalat, the goddess of the State, and prays that she may bless him and give him length of days “because he is a just king”:[124.1] and mention has already been made of Phoenician monuments showing the King of Sidon seated with Astarte and embraced by her. The claim to actual godship may have really been made by the King of Tyre, as the prophet Ezekiel twice reproaches him with the blasphemy: “Thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the Seat of God, in the midst of the Seas.”[124.2]
The Hittite monuments and the text of the Hittite treaty with Rameses II. reveal a religion of the same political type. The gods are not only witnesses to the political contract, but the great Hittite god of heaven puts his own seal to it; and the last few lines of the text contain a careful description of that seal, which reveals the sacrosanct character of the Hittite kingship; for the design chosen was a group of the god and the Hittite king whom he is embracing. The same significance belongs to certain scenes in the great relief of Boghaz-Keui: on one of the slabs we discern an armed god with his arm round the neck and his hand grasping the hand of a smaller figure, whose emblem and dress suggest a sacerdotal rather than a royal personality. But the happy coincidence of the description in the Hittite-Egyptian treaty proves that this is no mere priest, but a Hittite King[124.3] of sacred function and semi-divine character in affectionate union with his god; it suggests also a date not far from the thirteenth century for the Boghaz-Keui relief; and it makes unnecessary and improbable the mystic explanation of this scene that Dr. Frazer has ventured.[125.1] At this early period of the Hittite empire, the kingship may not yet have been detached from the priesthood; even later at Comana, in the same country of Cappadocia, the priests and the kings were drawn from the same stock.[125.2] One more detail bearing perhaps on the present subject may be noted in this monument at Boghaz-Keui: the goddess wears a crenelated cap, that reminds us somewhat of the later mural or turreted crown borne by Cybele and Astarte. May we suppose that this was the origin of those, and had the same political significance?
Again, it may be noted that in Phrygia itself, the land of the goddess, we have vague evidence in the legend of Midas that the early kings called by that name were regarded as the sons of Kybele.[125.3]
As regards the Minoan-Mycenaean religion and its relation to the State, the excavations on the site of Knossos suggest that there at least the whole of the state-cult was in the hands of the kings; for no public temples have been found, but only shrines in the palaces. This is the strongest proof of the sacral power of the Minoan ruler, and we can well believe that he was deified after his death; nor need we wholly discredit that vague statement of Tzetzes that the old kings of Crete were given the divine name of Zeus [Δίες].[125.4] There is value, then, in Homer’s picture of Minos as the friend of God who holds converse with him.