In regard to none of these deities do we find any conceptions different from those developed in the period of Hammurabi, any more than in the conceptions of those gods who occupy a more prominent place in the pantheon. Shamash is the judge, Sin is the wise one, Ramman the thunderer, and so on throughout the list. It was not a period favorable to the production of new religious thought, but only to the more or less artificial revival of old cults.
With the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus in 539 B.C., we reach the close of the period to be embraced in a history of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion. True, the Marduk and Nabu cults were upheld by the Persian rulers, and the policy of the latter in not disturbing the religious status was continued by the Greeks when they in turn succeeded the Persians in their control of Babylonia, but the presence of strange civilizations with totally different religious trains of thought was bound to affect the character of the old faith, and in time to threaten its existence. At all events, it ceases to have any interest for us. There are no further lines of development upon which it enters. The period of decay, of slow but sure decay, has set in. The cuneiform writing continues to be used till almost the beginning of our era, and so the religious cults draw out their existence to a late period; but as the writing and the civilization yield before new forces that entirely alter the character of Oriental culture, so also the religion, after sinking ever lower into the bogs of superstition, disappears, much as the canals and little streams of the Euphrates valley, through the neglect which settled over the country, become lost in the death-breeding swamps and marshes.
FOOTNOTES:
[331] Babylonian Chronicle B, col. iv. ll. 34, 35.
[332] Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, II. 72, col. i. ll. 2, 3.
[334] See a paper by Tiele, on "Cyrus and the Babylonian Religion," in the Proceedings of the Amsterdam Academy, 1896.
[335] For the identity of Nin-Karrak and Gula, see the 'Shurpu' Incantation Series, iv. l. 86 (ed. Zimmern), where the former is called the 'great physician,'—the epithet peculiar to Gula.
[336] East India House Inscription, col. iv. l. 44.