Assyria, Its Princes, Priests and People

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s. The Accadians believed that every object and phenomenon of nature had its Zi or 'spirit,' some of them beneficent, others hostile to man, like the objects and phenomena they represented. Naturally, however, there were more malevolent than beneficent spirits in the universe, and there was scarcely an action which did not risk demoniac possession. Diseases were due to the malevole

l-ge, 'the earth;' and Ea, 'the deep,' were the most conspicuous. At their side stood the 'spirits' of the heavenly bodies-the Moon-god, the Sun-god, the evening st

solar; the Sun-god was addressed as Bel or Baal, the supreme 'lord,' and adored under various forms. He appeared to them, moreover, under two aspects, sometimes as the kindly deity who gives life and light to all things, sometimes as the scorching sun of summer who d

wife of Bel, was nothing more than the feminine complement of the god. The Accadians had known of one great goddess, Istar, the evening star; but Istar was an independent deity, with attributes as strongly and individually marked as those of the gods. Among the Semites, Istar became Ashtoreth, with the feminine suffix th, and though in Babylonia the ol

lief; female deities were introduced, who were, however, mere reflections of the gods; while the inferior deities of the Accadians were classed among 'the 300

background, especially after the rise of Babylon, of which city Merodach was the patron deity. At Nipur, now Niffer, alone, he continued to be worshipped down into late times. His consort was Bilat, or B

e, in the Semitic period, stood the goddess Anat, whose attributes were derived from his. The worship of Anat spread from Babylonia to the Canaanites, as is shown by the geographical names Beth Anath, 'the temple of Anat' (Josh. xix. 38; xv. 59), and Anathoth, the city of 'the goddesses Anat.' It was even introduced into Egypt after the Asiatic wars of the eighteenth dynasty. In the pr?-Semitic days

re of the world, where the tree of life and knowledge had its roots. It was Ea who had given to mankind not only life, but all the arts and appliances of culture also, and it was his help that the Babylonian invoked when in trouble. He was emphatically the god of healing, who had revealed medicines to mankind. As god of the great deep, he was often figured as a man with the tail of a fish, and in this form was known to t

derable number of the religious hymns are dedicated to him. He was believed to be continually passing backwards and forwards between the earth and the heaven where Ea dwelt, informing Ea of the sufferings of men, and returning with Ea's directions how to relieve them. One of the bas-reliefs from Nineveh, now in the British Museum, represents him as pursuing with his curved sword or thund

was dedicated 'the temple of the Seven Lights of Heaven and Earth,' at Borsippa, the suburb of Babylon, which is now known to the Arabs as the Birs-i-Nimr?d, and his worship was carried as far as Canaan, as we may gather from such names as the city of Nebo, in Jud?a (Ezra ii. 29), and Mount Nebo, in Moab (Deut. xxxii. 49). In Accadian he had been called Dimsar, 'the

e lightning and the thunderbolt. Sometimes he was dreaded as 'the destroyer of crops,' 'the scatterer of the harvest;' at other times prayers were made to him as 'the lord

mas, however, like Saul or Savul, another deity of whom mention is made in the inscriptions, was really but a form of Merodach, though in historical times the two divinities were separated from one another, and received different cults. Samas, again, was o

rn Arabia. At all events he was one of the deities of Southern Arabia. Sin was the patron-god of the city of Ur, and it was to him that the Assyrian kings traced the formation of their kingdom. One of the

he sky. In either case she was at the outset the goddess of the evening star, and when it was discovered that the evening and morning stars were the same, of the morning star also. As the eveni

at Erech, Nineveh, and Arbela, but altars were erected to her in almost every place, and she was adored under as many forms and titles as she possessed shrines. Her name and worship spread through the Semitic world, in Southern Arabia, in Syria, in Moab, where she was identified with the Sun-god, Chemosh, and in Canaan, where she was called Ashtoreth, the Astartê of the Greeks. But the Greeks also knew her as Aphroditê, the goddess whom they had borrowed from the Ph?nicians of Canaan, and

he left with the warden of each some one of her adornments, until at last she reached the seat of the infernal goddess Allat, stripped and bare. There she remained imprisoned until the gods, wearied of the long absence of the goddess of love, created a hound called 'the renewal of light,' who restored her to the upper world. The myth clearly refers to the waning and w

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r. His name, like those of Anu, Ea, and Istar, was of Accadian origin. Adar, the son of Beltis, was one of those solar deities who were formed by worshipping the Sun-god under some particular attribute. The reading of his name is, unfortunately, not certain, and Adar is only

pire. It was Assur who, according to the Assyrian kings, led them to victory, and the cruelties they practised on the conquered were, they held, judgments exercised against those who would not be

State ritual to be attended to; the unceasing attacks of the demons could be warded off only by magical incantations and the intervention of the sorcerer-priest. But the Assyrians were too much occupied with wars and fighting to give all this heed to the requirements of religion.

s were eventually collected together, and, like the Rig-Veda of India, became a second sacred book. After the Accadians had been supplanted by the Semites, the Accadian language, in which the hymns were originally written, was provided with a Semitic translation; but it was still considered necessary to recite the exact words of the original, since the words themselves were sacred, and any mistake in their pronunciation would invalidate the religious service in which they were employed. Some of the incantations embodied in the collection of exorcisms must have been introduced into it subsequently to the compilat

sence of Bel, and change his dress; must put on a robe in the presence of Bel, and say this prayer: "O my lord who in his strength has no equal, O my lord, blessed sovereign, lord of the world, speeding the peace of the great gods, the lord who in his might destroys the strong, lord of kings, light of mankind, establisher of trust, O Bel, thy sceptre is Babylon, thy crown is Borsippa, the wide heaven is the dwelling-place of thy live

the great gods, a prayer!" After that, let prayer be made to Adar, and thus let it be said: "O Adar, mighty lord of the deep places of the springs, a prayer!" After that let prayer be made to Gula (Beltis), and thus let it be said: "O Gula, mother, begetter of the black-headed race (of Accadians), a prayer!" After that, let prayer be made to Nin-lil, and thus let it be said: "O Nin-lil, gre

winds carry away my groaning. May the worm lay it low, may the bird bear it upwards to heaven. May a shoal of fish carry it away; may the river bear it along. May the creeping thing of the field come unto me; may the waters of the river as they flow cleanse me. Enlighten me like a mask of gold. Food and drink before thee perpetually may I get. Heap up the worm, take away his life. The steps of thy altar, thy many ones, may I ascend. With the worm make me pass, and may I be kept with thee.

tial psalms, which were composed at a very remote period in Southern Baby

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d of the whole psalm is the further rubric: 'For the tearful supplication of the heart let the

e institution of the Sabbath, moreover, was known to the Babylonians and Assyrians, though it was confounded with the feast of the new moon, since it was kept, not every seven days, but on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the lunar month. On these days, we read in a sort of Saints' calendar for the intercalary Elul: 'Flesh cooked on the fire may not be eaten, the clothing of the body may not be changed,

. Similar figures guarded the approach to the royal palace, and possibly to other houses as well. Some of them may now be seen in the British Museum. Within, the temples were filled with images of gods, great and small, which not only represented the deities whose names they bore, but were believed to confer of themselves a special sanctity on the place wherein they were placed. As among the Israelites, offerings were of two kinds, sacrifices and meal offerings. The sacrifice consisted of an animal, more usually a bullock, part of whose flesh was burnt upon the altar, while the rest was handed over to the priests or retained by the offerer. There is no trace of human sacrifices among the Assyrians,

lay beyond Datilla, the river of death, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and it was here that the hero Gisdhubar saw Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, after his translation to the fields of the blessed. In later times, when the horizon of geographical knowledge was widened, the entrance to the gloomy world of Hades, and the earthly paradise that was above it, were alike removed to other and more unknown regions. The conception of the after-life, moreover, was made brighter, at all events, for the favoured few. An Assyrian court-poet prays thus on behalf of his king: 'The land of the silver sky, oil unceasing, the benefits of blessedness may he obtain among the feasts of the gods, and a happy cycle among their light, even life everlasting, and bliss; su

the East,' as it was also termed, which supported the starry vault of heaven. It is to this old Babylonian belief that allusion is made in Isaiah xiv. 13, 14, where the Babylonian monarch is represented as saying in his hear

, too, the Greek story of the theft of fire by Prometheus has its parallel in the Babylonian story of the god Zu, 'the divine storm-bird,' who stole the lightning of Bel, the tablet whereon the knowledge of futurity is written, and who was punished for his c

fled from the lower sky, and the Moon-god would have been blotted out from heaven had not Bel and Ea sent Merodach in his 'glistening armour' to rescue him. The myth is really a primitive

embodied in a poem, the greater part of which has been preserved to us. We are told how Merodach was armed by the gods with bow and scimetar, how alone he faced and fought the dragon Tiamat, driving the winds into her throat when she opened her mouth to swallow him, and how, finally, he cut open her bo

library of Cuthah, it was described as taking place on evolutionary principles, the first created beings being the brood of chaos, men with 'the bodies of birds' and 'the faces of ravens,' who were succeeded by the more perfect forms of the existing world. But the library of Assur-bani-pal also contained an account of the creation

nt is lost, and it is not until we come to the fifth tablet of the series, which describes the appointment of the heavenly bodies, that the narrative is again preserved. Here we are told that the creator, who seems to have been Ea, 'made the stations of the great gods, even the stars, fixing the places of the principal stars like ... He ordered the year, setting over it the decans; yea, he established three stars for each of the twelve months.' It will be remembered that, according to Genesis, the appointment of the heavenly bodies to guide and govern the seasons was the work of the fourth day, and since the work is described in the fifth tablet or book of the Assyria

. Smith. Apart from the profound difference caused by the polytheistic character of the Chaldean account, and the monotheism of the Scriptural narrative, it is only in details that the two accounts vary from one another. Thus, the vessel in which Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, sails, is a ship, guided by a steersman, and not an ark, and others besides his own family are described as being admitted into it. So, too, the period of time during which the flood was at its height is said to have been seven days only, while, beside the raven and the dove, Xisuthros is stated to have sent out a third bird, the swallow, in order to determine how far the waters had subsided. The Chaldean ark rested, moreover, on Rowan

stroyed it in the night, and Anu 'confounded great and small on the mound,' as well as their 'speech,' and 'made strange their counsel.' All this was supposed to have taken place at the time of the autumnal equinox, and it is possible that the name of the rebel leader, which is lost, was Etána. At all events the demi-go

an offered worship also to the heavenly bodies, and to the spirits of rivers and mountains. He even set up stones or 'Beth-els,' so called because they were imagined to be veritable 'houses of god,' wherein the godhead dwelt, and over these he poured out libations of oil and wine. Yet, on the other hand, with all this gross polytheism, there was a strong tendency to monotheism. The supreme god, Assur, is often spoken of in language which at first sight seems monotheistic: to him the Assyrian monarchs ascribe their victor

nd and belief. Baal-worship, which saw the Sun-god everywhere under an infinite variety of manifestations, waged a constant struggle with the conceptions of the borrowed creed, but never overcame them altogether. The gods and spirits of the Accadians remained to the last, although permeated and overlaid with the worship of the Semitic Sun-god. As time went on, new religious elements were introduced, and Assyro-Babylonian religion underwent new phases, while in Assyria itself the deified state in the person of the god Assu