Babylonian

“ Babylonian literature, which had been the parent of Assyrian writing, revived after the fall of Nineveh, and Nebuchadnezzar and his successors made Babylon the seat of a library rivalling that of Assur-bani-pal at Nineveh. Of this later development of Babylonian literature we know very little, explorations being still required to bring to light its texts. A few fragments only, discovered by wandering Arabs or recovered by chance travellers, have as yet turned up, but there is in them evidence enough to promise a rich reward to future excavators. ”

“ A combination of the Babylonian with the Persian religion could only be effected by the degradation of the Babylonian deities into half-divine, half-daemonic beings, infinitely remote from the supreme God of light and of heaven, or even into powers of darkness. ”

“ The Babylonian story, fascinating poetry though it is, has a conception of deity in strong contrast with the dignity of the Biblical monotheism. The Babylonian gods disagree; they blame each other; they crouch with fear like dogs; they come swarming about the sacrifice like hungry flies! Nothing could more strikingly illustrate the inspiration of the Biblical story than to measure it against the background of this Babylonian poem, which is clearly a variant version of it. ”

“ The most enduring influence in Babylonian religion was the early Sumerian; and as Sumerian modes of thought were the outcome of habits of life necessitated by the character of the country, they were bound, sooner or later, to leave a deep impress on the minds of foreign peoples who settled in the Garden of Western Asia. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that imported deities assumed Babylonian characteristics, and were identified or associated with Babylonian gods in the later imperial pantheon. ”

“ The rise of Sumerian culture on the shores of the Persian Gulf is in accordance with Babylonian tradition. Babylonian myths told how Oannes or Ea, the god of culture, had risen each morning out of his palace in “the deep,” bringing with him the elements of civilization which he communicated to mankind. Letters, science and art had all been his gifts. He had instructed the wild tribes of the coast to build houses and erect temples; he had compiled for them the first law-book, and had instructed them in the mysteries of agriculture. Babylonian civilization was sea-born. ”

“ Their own culture was inferior, and Babylonia was their teacher in the arts and comforts of life. The wild Bedâwin, who tended the flocks of their Babylonian masters, the Amorite merchants from Canaan, who formed trading settlements in the Babylonian cities, even the South Arabian princes who headed the national revolt against Elamite supremacy and made Babylon the capital of their kingdom, were all alike absorbed into the Babylonian race. They became the children of Babylonian civilisation, and, along with the culture, they adopted the language of the Babylonian people. ”

“ The Babylonian wife of Vul-lush III., who gave him his title to the regions of the south, and reigned conjointly with him both in Babylonia and Assyria, became first a queen of Babylon, ruling independently and alone, and then an Assyrian empress, the conqueror of Egypt and Ethiopia, the invader of the distant India, the builder of Babylon, and the constructor of all the great works which were anywhere to be found in Western Asia. The grand figure thus produced imposed upon the uncritical ancients, and was accepted even by the moderns for many centuries. ”

“ The writers of Babylon must have been thinkers with distinct views, discussing step by step, and in the minutest details, the opinions of their adversaries. The founders of Babylonian religions must have been philosophers gifted with clear perceptions, amicably opposing each other, and debating one and all, like academical professors. ”

“ The heyday of Babylonian art lay nearly two thousand years before it, in the epoch of Sargon and his son Naram-Sin. It was then that the Babylonian empire was established throughout western Asia as far as the Mediterranean, that a postal [pg xiii] service was organised along the highroads which led from one city of the empire to another, and that Babylonian art reached its climax. It was then, too, that the Babylonian system of writing practically took its final form.
The civilisation of western Asia is, as has been said, immensely old. That is the net result of modern discovery and research. ”

“ To begin with, the character of Babylonian myth was a great deal purer than that of Hellenic or Scandinavian myth. The gods of Babylonia appear to be more dignified than those of the Greeks or Norsemen, for example. They do not descend to the same puerilities, and their record is immeasurably cleaner. ”

“ To him, therefore, we may apply the magnificent description of the death of the last Babylonian monarch on the battle-field, and his descent into the under-world, which we read in Isaiah xiv. Illustrations have been taken by the prophet from Babylonian mythology, in order to heighten the horror of the scene. The king of Babylonia is compared to the morning star, whose movements the Babylonians had been the first of mankind to record. ”

“ Bel was no human king possessed of magical powers, who had once sat on the throne of Babylon; he remained the god who could, it is true, display himself at times to his faithful worshippers, but whose habitation was in the far-off heavens, from which he surveyed and regulated the actions of mankind. The gods of Babylonian mythology still belonged to heaven and not to earth, and its heroes are men and not humanised gods. ”

“ Within recent years a school has arisen in Germany which emphasizes the part played by Babylon in the religious development of Western Asia, and, in a minor degree, of Europe. The evidence on which reliance has been placed to prove the spread of Babylonian thought throughout the ancient world has been furnished mainly by Israel and Greece; and it is claimed that many features both in Hebrew religion and in Greek mythology can only be rightly studied in the light thrown upon them by Babylonian parallels from which they were ultimately derived. ”

“ It may thus appear a paradox to assert that the civilization, with which the name of Babylon is associated, was not Babylonian. But it is a fact that for more than a thousand years before the appearance of that city as a great centre of culture, the civilization it handed on to others had acquired in all essentials its later type. In artistic excellence, indeed, a standard had been already reached, which, so far from being surpassed, was never afterwards attained in Mesopotamia. ”

“ On others of the same age we find the gods represented under various forms, the king and priests worshipping before them, altars and various signs peculiar to the period, and the usual mythic emblems.
The pure Babylonian cylinders are more commonly found in European collections than the Assyrian. They are usually engraved with sacred figures, accompanied by a short inscription in the Babylonian cuneiform character, containing the names of the owner of the seal and of the divinity, under whose particular protection he had probably placed himself. ”

“ We have, indeed, no written records which go back to so distant a past; it belongs, perhaps, to an epoch when the art of writing had not as yet been invented. But there was already civilization in Babylonia, and the elements of its future social life were already in existence. Babylonian culture is immeasurably old. ”

“ But all pioneering work is necessarily imperfect, and for many a day to come the history of Babylonian religion must be left to the pioneer. Year by year, indeed, the materials are increasing, and it may be that a discovery will yet be made, like that of the Pyramid texts in Egypt, which will reveal to us the inner religious thought and belief of Babylonia in those distant ages, when Nippur and Eridu, and not as yet Babylon, were the theological centres of the land. ”

“ We learn, then, from the comparison of the Babylonian religion with that of other ancient races one circumstance of outstanding importance, that is, if the Babylonian gods were so perfunctorily attached to departments expressive of their functions and were so closely bound to the elements that they must have had an elemental origin, that they were indeed originally spirits of the earth, the air, and the water. ”

“ A god of the heavens is an abstract conception, and while it is possible that even in an early age, such a conception may have arisen in some minds, it is not of a character calculated to take a popular hold. As we proceed in our attempt to trace the development of the Babylonian religion, we will find the line of demarcation separating the theological system, as evolved by the schoolmen, from the popular phases of the religion, becoming more marked. In the inscriptions of the old Babylonian rulers, comparatively little of the influence of the Babylonian theologians is to be detected. ”

“ The title of “Shepherd,” moreover, was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic nomad. [89]
To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on Babylonian religion, [90] we must ascribe an important theological conception. In [94] historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men. ”

“ The Babylonian was thus a compound of Sumerian, Semitic, and Kassite elements. They all went to form the culture which we term Babylonian, and which left such enduring traces on Western Asia and the world. Mixed races are invariably the best, and the Babylonians were no exception to the rule. We have only to compare them with their neighbors, the more purely blooded Semitic Assyrians, to assure ourselves of the fact. ”

“ An increasing number of modern scholars regard the Babylonian story as an earlier form of a narrative which the Hebrew writer took and purified. Others hold that it is a somewhat degenerate form of the Biblical narrative. In any event, the Babylonian story proves the Biblical conceptions to be very ancient, and, by its contrasts to that of Genesis, it exhibits the dignity and religious value of the Biblical narrative. In the Babylonian myth, the gods, Ea and Anu, are divided and work at cross purposes ”

“ How like our boys was this boy who wrote the queer-looking characters on this bit of clay which we may hold in our hand!
The Faults of the Babylonian Civilization
With all their gifts and achievements there were certain great evils in Babylonian life. For one thing they were inclined to be greedy and covetous. They lived on a soil almost incredibly rich, and they were constantly increasing their wealth by trade. Babylonian merchants or their agents were to be found in almost every city and town of western Asia and perhaps even as far east as China. ”

“ From the days of Khammurabi onward there was a tendency to exalt Bel-Merodach at the expense of all his brother gods. The development of Babylonian religion, in fact, went hand in hand with that of the Babylonian State. The foundation of an empire had made the Babylonian familiar with the conception of a supreme sovereign, under whom there were vassal kings, and under them again a dependent nobility. ”

“ Perhaps the most serious defect from which Babylonian chronology has suffered hitherto has been the complete absence of any established point of contact between the Babylonian dynasties and those earlier lines of rulers who exercised authority in cities other than Babylon. On the one hand, with the help of the Babylonian List of Kings, we could build up from below a scheme of the rulers of Babylon itself. ”

“ The world, it was believed, originated in a watery chaos, like that in which the first settlers had found the Babylonian plain. The earth not only rested on the waters, but the waters themselves, dark and unregulated, were the beginning of all things. This cosmological conception was carried with the rest of Babylonian culture to the West, and after passing through Canaan found its way into Greek philosophy. ”

“ In their accounts of the Creation and of the early history of the human race the Babylonian divinities figure very prominently, but it is often difficult to identify the deities mentioned by the Greek authors, because the phonetic reading of many of the names of the Babylonian gods is still very obscure, and the classical writers frequently replace them by the deities of their own mythology, whom they imagined to correspond with the Babylonian names. ”

“ The probabilities, however, are in favor of assuming a movement of population, as of culture, from the south to the north. At all events, the history of Babylonia and Assyria begins with the former, and as a consequence we are justified also in beginning with that phase of the religion for which we have the earliest records—the Babylonian. ”

“ Divested of its idealistic side, however, there would seem to be no escape from regarding the Babylonian idea of the origin of things as monistic. [*] This idea has its reflection, though not its reproduction, in the first chapter of Genesis, in which, verses 2, 6, and 7, water is represented as the first thing existing, though not the first abode of life. This divergency from the Babylonian view was inevitable with a monotheistic nation, such as the Jews were, regarding as they did the Deity as the great source of everything existing. ”

“ The King. Around the Babylonian king is hedged a certain amount of mystery, for we see him but dimly. What he did year by year we know, but what his general way of life was the tablets do not reveal to us. He lived in a “great house,” ê-gala in Akkadian, êkallu in Semitic Babylonian, and there is hardly any doubt that the people looked upon him as a great high-priest, and often as being himself divine. Indeed, some, if not many, of the Babylonian kings were regarded as gods, and had their worshippers, apparently whilst they were still inhabitants of this earth. ”