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It is offered by a Cassite king, and reads as follows: To Bel His lord Kadashman-Turgu For his life Presented. A knob-shaped object of fine limestone contains a dedication in similar phrases to Marduk. It is offered by Bel-epush, who is probably identical with a Babylonian ruler of this name in the seventh century, a contemporary of Sennacherib:
As for Shukamuna, the fact that Agumkakrimi, who places his title, 'king of Cassite land, before that of Akkad and Babylon, opens his inscription with the declaration that he is the glorious offspring of Shukamuna, fixes the character of this god beyond all doubt; and Delitzsch has shown that this god was regarded by the Babylonian schoolmen as the equivalent of their own Nergal.
We may therefore embrace the period of Hammurabi and his successors, down through the rule of the Cassite kings, under one head. It is a period marked by the steady growth of culture, manifesting itself in the erection of temples, in the construction of canals, and in the expansion of commerce. Active relationships were maintained between Babylonia and distant Egypt.
The manner in which Agumkakrimi introduces Anu is no less characteristic for the age of Hammurabi and his successors. At the beginning of his long inscription, he enumerates the chief gods under whose protection he places himself. As a Cassitic ruler, he assigns the first place to the chief Cassite deity, Shukamuna, a god of war whom the Babylonian scholars identified with their own Nergal.
From the inscriptions of his successors we are permitted to add the following: Nin-khar-sag, Nergal, and Lugal-mit-tu, furnished by Samsu-iluna; Shukamuna, by Agumkakrimi; and passing down to the period of the Cassite dynasty, we have in addition Nin-dim-su, Ba-kad, Pap-u, Belit-ekalli, Shumalia.
At that time there was already a sanctuary to Anunit within the precincts of E-Babbara. Members of the Cassite dynasty devote themselves to the restoration of this sanctuary. Through a subsequent invasion of the nomads, the cult was interrupted and the great statue of Shamash destroyed.
During the reign of the Cassite dynasty, however, the worship of Ramman appears to have gained a stronger foothold. Several kings of this dynasty have incorporated the name of this deity into their own names, and in an inscription dealing with events that transpired in the reign of one of these kings, Ramman occupies a prominent place.
This double nature of Ramman as a solar deity representing some particular phase of the sun that escapes us and as a storm-god still peers through the inscription above noted from the Cassite period where Ramman is called 'the lord of justice, an attribute peculiar to the sun-god; but in Assyria his rôle as the thunder-and storm-god overshadows any other attributes that he may have had.
We may divide this long period from Hammurabi down to the time that the governors of Babylonia became mere puppets of the Assyrian rulers into three sections: Hammurabi and his successors, the Cassite dynasty, the restoration of native rulers to the throne.
All these gods and goddesses are found in the texts from the first and third section of the period, and the absence of some of them from texts of the second section is simply due to the smaller amount of material that we have for the history of the Cassite dynasty in Babylonia.
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