The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria

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ts were brought under the influence of Christianity. The chronological period covered may be roughly estimated at about 5000 years. The belief of the people, at the end of that time, being Babylonian heathenism leavened with Judaism, the country was proba

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ns-who spoke a non-Semitic language largely affected by phonetic decay, and in which the grammatical forms had in certain cases become confused to such an extent that those who study it ask themselves whether the people who spoke it were able to understand each other without recourse to devices such as the "tones" to which the Chinese resort. With few except

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riptions of the building and rebuilding of temples, the making of offerings, the performance of ceremonies, etc. Purely religious inscriptions are found near the end of the third millennium before Christ, and occur in considerable numbers, either in the original Sumerian text, or in translations, or both, until about the third century before Christ. Among the more recent inscriptions-those from the library of the Assyrian king A??ur-bani-apli and the later Babylonian temple archives,-there are many lists of deities, with numerous identifications with each other and with the heavenly bodies, and explanations of their na

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not to be gainsaid, and from that moment, the development of their religion took another turn. In all probably this augmentation of Semitic religious influence was due to the increased numbers of the Semitic population, and at the same period the Sumero-Akkadian language began to give way to the Semitic idiom which they spoke. When at last the Semitic Babylonian language came to be used for official documents, we find that, although the non-Semitic divine names are in the main preserved, a certain number of them have been displaced by the Semitic equivalent names, such as ?ama? for the sun-god, with Kittu

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creed had taken a fresh tendency. It was no longer a series of small, and to a certain extent antagonistic, pantheons composed of the chief god, his consort, attendants, children, and s

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nct national aspirations-for Assyria had no intention whatever of casting in her lot with her southern neighbour. Nevertheless, Assyria possessed, along with the language of Babylonia, all the literature of that country-indeed, it is from the libraries of her kings that we obtain

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ependence. In fact, the city of A??ur, the centre of that worship, continued to exist for a considerable period; but for the history of the religion of Assyria, as preserved ther

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rs, and with whom all the other gods were to all appearance identified. This tendency to monotheism, however, never reached the culminating point-never became absolute-except, naturally, in the minds of those who, dissociating themselves, for philosophical reasons, from the superstitious teaching of the priests

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ed of the people from which the Hebrew nation sprang, and from which, therefore, it had its beginnings, both corporeal and spiritual, it is such as no student of modern religious systems can afford to neglect. Its legends, and therefore its teachings, as will be seen in these pages, ultimately permeated the Semitic West, and may in some cases even