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But thanks to this combination, which is essentially a process of the popular mind, the production that we are about to consider brings us much closer to the popular phases of the Babylonian religion than does the cosmology or the zodiacal system. After all, a nation is much more interested in its heroes and in its own beginnings, than in the beginnings of things in general.
The gods to whom the kings of the ancient Babylonian states would be apt to appeal would be, in the first instance, the local deities, patrons of the city that happened to be the capital of the state; in the second instance, the gods of the vanquished towns; and thirdly, some of the great deities worshipped at the sacred centers of the Euphrates valley, and who constituted, as it were, the common heritage of the past.
Rains in the land. In the month of Nisan, 2d day, Venus appeared at sunrise. There will be distress in the land. Lack of corn and hay in the land. A colophon informs us that the tablet in question embodies a series of observations of the movements of Venus recorded by Babylonian scholars.
Sennacherib must apparently have been so much engaged with his domestic affairs that he could not devote his attention to these Babylonian matters till the second year after his accession. In B.C. 703 he descended on the lower country and engaged the troops of Merodach-Baladan, which consisted in part of native Babylonians, in part of Susianians, sent to his assistance by the king of Elam.
Their hair they allowed to grow long, but confined it by a head-band or a turban; and they always carried a walking-stick with a carving of some kind on the handle. This portraiture, it is probable, applies to the richer inhabitants of the capital, and represents the Babylonian gentleman of the fifth century before our era, as he made his appearance in the streets of the metropolis.
Thus two considerable empires arose at the same time cut of the ashes of Assyria the Babylonian towards the south and the south-west, stretching from Luristan to the borders of Egypt, the Median towards the north, reaching from the salt desert of Iran to Amanus and the Upper Euphrates.
Nebuchadnezzar loved to pull down and destroy nations; but the great wish of Cyrus was to build up and restore. The cuneiform writings of the old Babylonian and Assyrian kings consist mostly of long lists of the nations they led away into slavery and the towns they burnt with fire; but the inscriptions made by Cyrus, the Persian king, speak of the people he sent back to their homes.
At least this appears to be the case in Assyria, and the conclusion may be drawn, from the somewhat vague use of the terms, that the names belong to a very early period of the religion, when the distinction between gods and spirits was not yet clearly marked. However that may be, in Babylonian hymns and incantations the Igigi and Anunnaki play a very prominent part.
It may be recognized in Babylonia in the third millennium B.C., and there is no improbability in the supposition that Babylonian influence was felt in Asia Minor and Eastern Europe; but, in view of the number of possibly independent centers of culture in this region in ancient times and the paucity of data, the question may be left open.
There were other deities in the Assyrian and Babylonian pantheon whom I need not name, since they played a comparatively unimportant part in human affairs, like the inferior deities of the Romans, presiding over dreams, over feasts, over marriage, and the like. The Phoenicians, like the Assyrians, had their goddesses.
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