Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria

by Zénaïde A. Ragozin

6. This religion, as it was definitely established and handed down unchanged through a succession of twenty centuries and more, had a twofold character, which must be well grasped in order to understand its general drift and sense. On the one hand, as it admitted the existence of many divine powers, who shared between them the government of the world, it was decidedly Polytheistic—"a religion of many gods." On the other hand, a dim perception had already been arrived at, perhaps through observation of the strictly regulated movements of the stars, of the presence of One supreme ruling and directing Power. For a class of men given to the study of astronomy could not but perceive that all those bright Beings which they thought so divine and powerful, were not absolutely independent; that their movements and combinations were too regular, too strictly timed, too identical in their ever recurring repetition, to be entirely voluntary; that, consequently, they obeyed—obeyed a Law, a Power above and beyond them, beyond heaven itself, invisible, unfathomable, unattainable by human thought or eyes. Such a perception was, of course, a step in the right direction, towards Monotheism, i.e., the belief in only one God. But the perception was too vague and remote to be fully realized and consistently carried out. The priests who, from long training in abstract thought and contemplation, probably could look deeper and come nearer the truth than other people, strove to express their meaning in language and images which, in the end, obscured the original idea and almost hid it out of sight, instead of making it clearer. Besides, they did not imagine the world as created by God, made by an act of his will, but as being a form of him, a manifestation, part of himself, of his own substance. Therefore, in the great all of the universe, and in each of its portions, in the mysterious forces at work in it—light and heat and life and growth—they admired and adored not the power of God, but his very presence; one of the innumerable and infinitely varied forms in which he makes himself known and visible to men, manifests himself to them—in short, an emanation of God. The word "emanation" has been adopted as the only one which to a certain extent conveys this very subtle and complicated idea. An emanation is not quite a thing itself, but it is a portion of it, which comes out of it and separates itself from it, yet cannot exist without it. So the fragrance of a flower is not the flower, nor is it a growth or development of it, yet the flower gives it forth and it cannot exist by itself without the flower—it is an emanation of the flower. The same can be said of the mist which visibly rises from the warm earth in low and moist places on a summer evening—it is an emanation of the earth.

7. The Chaldeo-Babylonian priests knew of many such divine emanations, which, by giving them names and attributing to them definite functions, they made into so many separate divine persons. Of these some ranked higher and some lower, a relation which was sometimes expressed by the human one of "father and son." They were ordered in groups, very scientifically arranged. Above the rest were placed two Triads or "groups of three." The first triad comprised Anu, Êa and Bel, the supreme gods of all—all three retained from the old Shumiro-Accadian list of divinities. Anu is Ana, "Heaven," and the surnames or epithets, which are given him in different texts, sufficiently show what conception had been formed of him: he is called "the Lord of the starry heavens," "the Lord of Darkness," "the first-born, the oldest, the Father of the Gods." Êa, retaining his ancient attributions as "Lord of the Deep," the pre-eminently wise and beneficent spirit, represents the Divine Intelligence, the founder and maintainer of order and harmony, while the actual task of separating the elements of chaos and shaping them into the forms which make up the world as we know it, as well as that of ordering the heavenly bodies, appointing them their path and directing them thereon, was devolved on the third person of the triad, Bel, the son of Êa. Bel is a Semitic name, which means simply "the lord."

8. From its nature and attributions, it is clear that to this triad must have attached a certain vagueness and remoteness. Not so the second triad, in which the Deity manifested itself as standing in the nearest and most direct relation to man as most immediately influencing him in his daily life. The persons of this triad were the Moon, the Sun, and the Power of the Atmosphere,—Sin, Shamash, and Ramân, the Semitic names for the Shumiro-Accadian Uru-Ki or Nannar, Ud or Babbar, and Im or Mermer. Very characteristically, Sin is frequently called "the god Thirty," in allusion to his functions as the measurer of time presiding over the month. Of the feelings with which the Sun was regarded and the beneficent and splendid qualities attributed to him, we know enough from the beautiful hymns quoted in Chap. III. (see p. [172]). As to the god Ramân, frequently represented on tablets and cylinders by his characteristic sign, the double or triple-forked lightning-bolt—his importance as the dispenser of rain, the lord of the whirlwind and tempest, made him very popular, an object as much of dread as of gratitude; and as the crops depended on the supply of water from the canals, and these again could not be full without abundant rains, it is not astonishing that he should have been particularly entitled "protector or lord of canals," giver of abundance and "lord of fruitfulness." In his more terrible capacity, he is thus described: "His standard titles are the minister of heaven and earth," "the lord of the air," "he who makes the tempest to rage." He is regarded as the destroyer of crops, the rooter-up of trees, the scatterer of the harvest. Famine, scarcity, and even their consequence, pestilence, are assigned to him. He is said to have in his hand a "flaming sword" with which he effects his works of destruction, and this "flaming sword, which probably represents lightning, becomes his emblem upon the tablets and cylinders."[AS]

9. The astronomical tendencies of the new religion fully assert themselves in the third group of divinities. They are simply the five planets then known and identified with various deities of the old creed, to whom they are, so to speak, assigned as their own particular provinces. Thus Nin-dar (also called Ninip or Ninêb), originally another name or form of the Sun (see p. [172]), becomes the ruler of the most distant planet, the one we now call Saturn; the old favorite, Meridug, under the Semitized name of Marduk, rules the planet Jupiter. It is he whom later Hebrew writers have called Merodach, the name we find in the Bible. The planet Mars belongs to Nergal, the warrior-god, and Mercury to Nebo, more properly Nabu, the "messenger of the gods" and the special patron of astronomy, while the planet Venus is under the sway of a feminine deity, the goddess Ishtar, one of the most important and popular on the list. But of her more anon. She leads us to the consideration of a very essential and characteristic feature of the Chaldeo-Babylonian religion, common, moreover, to all Oriental heathen religions, especially the Semitic ones.

10. There is a distinction—the distinction of sex—which runs through the whole of animated nature, dividing all things that have life into two separate halves—male and female—halves most different in their qualities, often opposite, almost hostile, yet eternally dependent on each other, neither being complete or perfect, or indeed able to exist without the other. Separated by contrast, yet drawn together by an irresistible sympathy which results in the closest union, that of love and affection, the two sexes still go through life together, together do the work of the world. What the one has not or has in an insufficient degree it finds in its counterpart, and it is only their union which makes of the world a whole thing, full, rounded, harmonious. The masculine nature, active, strong, and somewhat stern, even when merciful and bounteous, inclined to boisterousness and violence and often to cruelty, is well set off, or rather completed and moderated, by the feminine nature, not less active, but more quietly so, dispensing gentle influences, open to milder moods, more uniformly soft in feeling and manner.

60.—A BUST INSCRIBED WITH THE NAME OF NEBO.

(British Museum.)

11. In no relation of life is the difference, yet harmony, of masculine and feminine action so plain as in that between husband and wife, father and mother. It requires no very great effort of imagination to carry the distinction beyond the bounds of animated nature, into the world at large. To men for whom every portion or force of the universe was endowed with a particle of the divine nature and power, many were the things which seemed to be paired in a contrasting, yet joint action similar to that of the sexes. If the great and distant Heaven appeared to them as the universal ruler and lord, the source of all things—the Father of the Gods, as they put it—surely the beautiful Earth, kind nurse, nourisher and preserver of all things that have life, could be called the universal Mother. If the fierce summer and noonday sun could be looked on as the resistless conqueror, the dread King of the world, holding death and disease in his hand, was not the quiet, lovely moon, of mild and soothing light, bringing the rest of coolness and healing dews, its gentle Queen? In short, there is not a power or a phenomenon of nature which does not present to a poetical imagination a twofold aspect, answering to the standard masculine and feminine qualities and peculiarities. The ancient thinkers—priests—who framed the vague guesses of the groping, dreaming mind into schemes and systems of profound meaning, expressed this sense of the twofold nature of things by worshipping a double divine being or principle, masculine and feminine. Thus every god was supplied with a wife, through the entire series of divine emanations and manifestations. And as all the gods were in reality only different names and forms of the Supreme and Unfathomable One, so all the goddesses represent only Belit, the great feminine principle of nature—productiveness, maternity, tenderness—also contained, like everything else, in that One, and emanating from it in endless succession. Hence it comes that the goddesses of the Chaldeo-Babylonian religion, though different in name and apparently in attributions, become wonderfully alike when looked at closer. They are all more or less repetitions of Belit, the wife of Bel. Her name—which is only the feminine form of the god's, meaning "the Lady," as Bel means "the Lord,"—sufficiently shows that the two are really one. Of the other goddesses the most conspicuous are Anat or Nana (Earth), the wife of Anu (Heaven), Anunit (the Moon), wife of Shamash (the Sun), and lastly Ishtar, the ruler of the planet Venus in her own right, and by far the most attractive and interesting of the list. She was a great favorite, worshipped as the Queen of Love and Beauty, and also as the Warrior-Queen, who rouses men to deeds of bravery, inspirits and protects them in battle—perhaps because men have often fought and made war for the love of women, and also probably because the planet Venus, her own star, appears not only in the evening, close after sunset, but also immediately before daybreak, and so seems to summon the human race to renewed efforts and activity. Ishtar could not be an exception to the general principle and remain unmated. But her husband, Dumuz (a name for the Sun), stands to her in an entirely subordinate position, and, indeed, would be but little known were it not for a beautiful story that was told of them in a very old poem, and which will find its place among many more in one of the next chapters.

12. It would be tedious and unnecessary to recite here more names of gods and goddesses, though there are quite a number, and more come to light all the time as new tablets are discovered and read. Most of them are in reality only different names for the same conceptions, and the Chaldeo-Babylonian pantheon—or assembly of divine persons—is very sufficiently represented by the so-called "twelve great gods," who were universally acknowledged to be at its head, and of whom we will here repeat the names: Anu, Êa and Bel, Sin, Shamash and Ramân, Nin-dar, Maruduk, Nergal, Nebo, Belit and Ishtar. Each had numerous temples all over the country. But every great city had its favorite whose temple was the oldest, largest and most sumptuous, to whose worship it was especially devoted from immemorial times. Êa, the most beloved god of old Shumir, had his chief sanctuary, which he shared with his son Meridug, at Eridhu (now Abu-Shahrein), the most southern and almost the most ancient city of Shumir, situated near the mouth of the Euphrates, since the Persian Gulf reached quite as far inland in the year 4000 b.c., and this was assuredly an appropriate station for the great "lord of the deep," the Fish-god Oannes, who emerged from the waters to instruct mankind. Ur, as we have seen, was the time-honored seat of the Moon-god. At Erech Anu and Anat or Nana—Heaven and Earth—were specially honored from the remotest antiquity, being jointly worshipped in the temple called "the House of Heaven." This may have been the reason of the particular sacredness attributed to the ground all around Erech, as witnessed by the exceeding persistency with which people strove for ages to bury their dead in it, as though under the immediate protection of the goddess of Earth[AT] (see Ch. III. of Introduction). Larsam paid especial homage to Shamash and was famous for its very ancient "House of the Sun." The Sun and Moon—Shamash and Anunit—had their rival sanctuaries at Sippar on the "Royal Canal," which ran nearly parallel to the Euphrates, and Agadê, the city of Sargon, situated just opposite on the other bank of the canal. The name of Agadê was lost in the lapse of time, and both cities became one, the two portions being distinguished only by the addition "Sippar of the Sun" and "Sippar of Anunit." The Hebrews called the united city "The two Sippars"—Sepharvaim, the name we find in the Bible.