It is strange to think that after the fall of Carthage the goddess Tanit became identified with Dido by the new Roman colonists of the city. Virgil had celebrated her misfortunes, and a public Dido cult grew up, the colonists even claiming to have discovered the very house from which she had watched the departure of Æneas.
It is not unlikely that through the agency of the Phœnicians some fragments of the Babylonian religion may have penetrated even to our own shores. We know that they traded for tin with the ancient inhabitants of Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and some writers believe they have philology on their side when they try to show that several Cornish names are of Phœnician origin. For example, the name Marazion appears to mean in Semitic 'Hill by the Sea,' and Polgarth, say some, owes its second syllable to the Phœnician word for 'city.' But it will not do to be dogmatic regarding these names, which may after all be explicable from Cornish or other sources.
We see then that the Semitic religion travelled over a considerably wide area, that beginning in all probability in Arabia it spread itself through Mesopotamia northward as far as Lake Van, and southward through the Sinaitic peninsula into Egypt and the north of Africa. It is strange to observe that the later Semitic religion of Mohammed followed almost precisely the same course, and that its early progress westward halted almost on the very site of ancient Carthage; that when it overflowed into Spain its disciples were acting precisely as Carthaginian Hannibal had done long before, and that it was beaten back by European effort in almost exactly the same way.
Robertson Smith in his valuable work, The Religion of the Semites, mentions that in his view Semitic religion does not differ so fundamentally from the other types of world religion as many writers on the subject appear to think. But the longer one considers it the greater do the barriers between Semitic and other religions appear and the more clearly marked their lines of demarcation. The prolonged isolation to which the Semitic peoples seem to have been subjected appears to have greatly affected their manner of religious thought. They are in truth a 'peculiar people,' practical yet mystical, strongly of the world yet finding their chief solace in those things which are not of the world.
The materials for a complete inquiry into the history of Semitic religion are lacking, and we must perforce fill up the gaps which are many by comparative methods. But in this we are greatly assisted by the numerous manifestations of Semitic faith which, including as it does Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanitish, Phœnician, Arabian, and Mohammedan cults, provides us with rich comparative material.
The Religion of Zoroaster
The faith which immediately supplanted that of ancient Babylonia and Assyria could not fail to draw considerably from it. This was the Zoroastrian faith, the religion of the Persians introduced by the reformer Zarathustra, the earliest form of Zoroaster's name as given in the Avesta. Uncertainty hangs over the date and place of his birth. The Greeks spoke of him as belonging to a remote age, but modern scholars assign the period of his life to the latter half of the seventh and early sixth century B.C. It seems certain that he was not a Persian, but a Mede or a Bactrian, either supposition being supported by indications of one kind or another. From the whole tenor of the Gathas, the most ancient part of the Avesta, we are led, says Dr. Haug, their translator, to feel that he was a man of extraordinary stamp acting a grand part on the stage of his country's history. Zarathustra speaks of himself as a messenger from God sent to bring the people the blessing of civilization and to destroy idolatry. Many legends grew up around his memory, of miraculous signs at his birth, of his precocious wisdom, whereby even as a child he confounded the Magi, of his being borne up to the highest heaven and there receiving the word of life from Deity itself, together with the revelation of all secrets of the future. He retired as a young man from the world to spend long years of contemplation before he began his teaching at thirty, and he lived to the age of seventy-seven. The religion he taught was the national religion of the Persians from the time of the Achæmenidæ, who dethroned Cyaxares' son, 558 B.C., to the middle of the seventh century A.D. It declined after Alexander's conquest under the Seleucidæ and the succeeding dynasty of the Arsacidæ, but was revived by the Sassanian rulers and flourished for the four centuries A.D. 226-651. Then followed the Mohammedan conquest, accompanied by persecution, before which the faithful followers of Zarathustra fled to India, where they are now represented by their descendants, the Parsis of Bombay.
The religious belief taught by Zarathustra is based on the dual conception of a good principle, Ahura Mazda, and an evil principle, Anra Mainyu, and the leading idea of his teaching is the constant conflict between the two, which must continue until the end of the period ordained by Ahura Mazda for the duration of the world, when evil will be finally overcome; until then the god's power is to some degree limited, as evil still withstands him. Zarathustra's doctrine was essentially practical and ethical; it was not in abstract contemplation, or in separation from the world, that man was to look for spiritual deliverance, but in active charity, in deeds of usefulness, in kindness to animals, in everything that could help to make the world a well-ordered place to live in, in courage and all uprightness. To build a bridge or dig a canal was to help to lessen the power of evil. As Reinach has concisely expressed it, "a life thoroughly occupied was a perpetual exorcism."
The two figures of Ahura Mazda and Anra Mainyu, the one with his attendant archangels and angels, and the other with his arch-demons and demons, or Divs, compose the Zarathustrian celestial hierarchy, as represented in the earlier sacred writings; in the later ones other figures are introduced into the pantheon. The sacred writings that have been preserved are of different periods, and outside the range of Zarathustra's moral system of religion there are traces in them of revivals of an older primitive nature worship, and of the beliefs of an early nomadic shepherd life, as, for instance, the sacredness in which cow and dog are held, as well as reminiscences of general Indo-Germanic myths.