But no evidence has as yet been gathered that the ordinary Babylonian expected any such distinguished lot. Nor does it appear that prayers were ever offered for his soul, as they might be for the king’s, and as they habitually were for the ordinary Athenian’s in the Anthesteria. For the Babylonian, on the whole, the only distinction of lot between one person and another after death was between him whose ghost was well cared for by surviving relatives and him who died an outcast and was neglected. And this was no moral distinction, nor one that was likely to engender the belief in a righteous judgment. The duty to the dead was a family duty merely; nor can I find in the Mesopotamian records any indication of that tender regard of the alien dead which leads in Greece to a certain higher morality, and which informs Homer’s pregnant phrase—“it is not righteous to vaunt oneself over the slain.” We find Assyrian kings revenging themselves by mutilation and exposure of their enemies’ corpses;[218.1] and Semitic ferocity and Hellenic αἰδώς are nowhere more vividly contrasted than in this matter.
Finally, there appears a difference in character between the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic deities who were concerned with the surveillance of the world below. In the religion of the Western people, the latter are as essentially concerned with life as with death; and Demeter, Kore-Persephone, Plouton, Zeus Χθόνιος, are benign divinities whose sombre character is only the reverse of the picture; there is a chance of development for a more hopeful creed when the dead are committed to the care of the gentle earth-goddess: and it was through this double aspect of Demeter-Kore that the eschatologic promise of the Greek mysteries was confirmed. But the Babylonian Queen of Hell, Allatu, is wholly repellent in character and aspect, nor do we find that she was worshipped at all; the only indication of a softer vein in her is the passage in “The Descent of Ishtar,” which describes the sorrow of Allatu for the sufferings brought upon men through the departure of the goddess of life and love. Nergal, who is probably an usurper of the older supremacy of Allatu, has indeed a celestial character as the upper god of Kutha, but even in the upper world his nature was regarded as terrible and destructive. Only once or twice is the gentler Greek conception concerning the rulers of the lower world found in Babylonian literature.[219.1] Enmesharra—a name that may be a synonym for Nergal[219.2]—is hailed as “Lord of Earth, of the land from which none returns (Aralu), great Lord, without whom Ningirsu allows nothing to sprout in field and canal, no growth to bloom.”[219.3] Tammuz himself also is once at least styled “the Lord of the lower world.”[219.4] And if Ningirsu is another name of the underworld-god, which is possible, it is significant that in an old Babylonian document the cultivator of the soil is called “the servant of Ningirsu.”[219.5] These isolated utterances, if they had penetrated the popular religious thought, might have engendered a softer and brighter sentiment concerning the world of death. But it is doubtful if they were potent enough to effect this.[219.6] If the gentle Tammuz had displaced Allatu and Nergal as the Lord of death, Babylonian eschatology might have had a different career. But it does not appear that he ever did. Deeply beloved as he was, he never reached the position of a high god either in heaven or the lower world.[219.7] Nor did his resurrection from the dead evoke any faith, as far as we see at present, that might comfort the individual concerning his own lot. The personality and the rites of Attis, “the Phrygian shepherd,” are closely akin to those of Tammuz, and may be partly of Babylonian origin: and from these were evolved a higher eschatologic theory that became a powerful religious force in later Paganism. On the other hand, in Babylonia the germs of higher religion in the Tammuz-ritual seem to have remained unquickened; possibly because they were not fostered and developed by any mystic society. For it is perhaps the most salient and significant difference between Hellenic and Mesopotamian religions that in the latter we have no trace of mysteries at all, while in the former not only were they a most potent force in the popular religion, but were the chief agents for developing the eschatologic faith.
This exposition of the Eastern and Western ideas concerning death and the ritual of the dead is merely a slight sketch of a great subject; but may serve the present purpose, the testing the question of early religious contact. We have noted much general resemblance, but only such as is found among various races of the world: on the other hand, certain striking differences, both in detail and general conception, that argue strongly against the theory of contact or borrowing in the second millennium. Nor can we discover in the earliest Greek mythology a single Mesopotamian name or myth associated with the lower world.[220.1]
CHAPTER XIII.
Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.
A comparison of the forms observed in these regions, both in regard to the minute details and to the general underlying ideas, ought to contribute independent evidence to the solution of our question. The transmission of precise rules of ritual from one people to another, implies an intercourse of some duration, and more or less regulated; for while the name of a god or a single myth is volatile, and can be wafted down remote routes by an itinerant trader, or nomad, or hunter, the introduction of any organised ritual implies, as a rule, the presence of the missionary or the foreign priest. If, then, there is any evidence suggesting that Greece in its earliest period learnt its ritual from Babylon, the importance of this for the ethnic history of religion will be great indeed. Therefore it may seem that a detailed comparison of the Eastern and Western ritual is forced upon us at this point: but it would be premature to expect at present any finality in the result, because the Mesopotamian documents have only been very incompletely examined and published by the linguistic experts. However, the material that they have presented to us reveals certain salient facts of immediate value for our present purpose that cannot be wholly illusory, however much we may have to modify our interpretation of them in the light of future discovery.
As regards the Greek evidence, we are not without fairly ample testimony concerning the earliest period. The Homeric poems present us with the contemporary religious practices of at least a portion of the population whom we may conveniently call the Achaeans; though we have no right to suppose that they give us a complete account even of those. Again, as ritual does not spring up in a day, and has a singular longevity, we may be sure that much of Homeric ritual is a tradition of the second millennium. Furthermore, we can supplement Homer by later testimony, of which the lateness of date is no argument against the primitiveness of the fashions that it may attest.
The first superficial comparison of Mesopotamian and Aegean ceremonies exhibits a general similarity in the mechanism of religion; an established priesthood, temples, images, altars, prayers, sacrifice, religious music, holy days, consultation of the gods by methods of divination, a certain ceremonious tendance of the dead, these are common features of East and West. But if we were comparing Hellenic with Egyptian or Vedic, or even Mexican and Peruvian religion, we should be able to point to the same general agreement in externals, and many of these institutions are found broadcast over the modern world of savage society. It will be more important for the present question, if when we examine the Babylonian, Anatolian, and Hellenic ritual more minutely we discern salient differences, especially if these are found in certain organic centres of the religious life such as was the sacrifice. And we must first try to determine whether the Hellas of the pre-Homeric days already possessed all those religious institutions roughly enumerated above. We can deal to some extent with both these problems together.
The erection of temples is an important stage in the higher development of anthropomorphic religion. By the beginning of the second millennium B.C. this had become an immemorial tradition of Mesopotamia. But we are not sure at what period the other polytheistic Semites first evolved the architectural shrine, or how long they were content to use the natural cave as the house of a divinity, or a high place or “temenos” with altar or sacred pillar. The recent excavations at Gezer have revealed a glimpse into the religion of the prehistoric Semites of Canaan; and one shrine that seems nothing more than a row of sacred monoliths, but also another that has more the appearance of an elaborate building of a sacred character.[223.1] Of still greater antiquity was the shrine that Professor Petrie has discovered at Serabit in the Sinaitic peninsula, an original cave-temple complicated with the addition of porticoes and chambers, which he believes to have been devoted to a double cult, the Egyptian and Semitic.[223.2] At all events, we may conclude that before 1000 B.C. most of the more cultured Semitic communities in Asia Minor had come to house their divinities in more or less elaborated shrines.
As regards the other race that dominated the early period of Anatolian history, the Hittite, we have the priceless evidence of the Boghaz-Keui monuments: these reveal a complex temple hewn out of and into the rocky ravine with a “Holy of Holies” and what appears to be a sleeping-chamber for the god.[223.3] In Phrygia, the artificial shrine may have been late in supplanting the natural cavern or hole in the rock that was once the sufficient home of the cult of the great goddess.[223.4] From the coast of Asia Minor we have no evidence concerning the site of any ancient temple that carries us back to the early period with which we are dealing.[224.1] But the Homeric poems alone are sufficient proof that the Greeks, for whom they were composed, were beginning to be familiar with some architectural type of the deity’s habitation. Apollo Smintheus already has his shrine and professional priest.[224.2] We hear of the temple and priestess of Athena in Troy,[224.3] of her shrine at Athens, which she shared with Erechtheus,[224.4] and the stone-threshold of Apollo at Delphi, that guarded already many treasures within it.[224.5] And we also know from the excavations of the last few years that the Aryan invaders from the North, the proto-Hellenes, would find temples on some at least of the sites of the Minoan culture. Crete has preserved certain shrines of the second millennium; but except the temple-cave on Dikte all of them so far are found to be merely domestic chapels in the king’s palace, as though the king were personally responsible for the religion of the community: and so at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens, the oldest temples have been found on the foundations of “Mycenaean” palaces.[224.6] But the temples of Hera on the public hill of Argos and at Olympia are now dated near to 800 B.C.[224.7]
We have, then, proof sufficient of temple-construction in Greece and the Aegean islands before the period of Homer; and if we must have recourse to the theory that the peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture took their cue in this important evolution from some foreign civilisation, we should look to Egypt rather than to Assyria, as nearer and more closely in touch with early Crete.