The Historians' History of the World 01

Ishtar seems always to have a peculiar and special individuality, notwithstanding that each of the great gods has a spouse who is often invoked with him, and who seems to complete him. The rôle of the great spouses of the great gods is not well understood; with Ishtar we can see Beltis figure, whose name is transformed and often becomes like that of Ishtar, a collective appellation of all female divinities; those whose names seem to have a more permanent character are Zarpanit, the goddess who particularly represents the fertile principle of the universe, and Tasmit, the goddess of wisdom. All female divinities seem to have direct relations with humanity, but they often disappear in the higher and inaccessible world, and then only reveal themselves through secondary influences. Secondary gods, whose number is infinite, are born of these divine couples; a tablet from the Nineveh library gives us the list of twelve sons of Anu with their attributes; of these sons other divinities are born, but their descent we cannot follow. It is so with other great gods.

At Babylon the divinities are the same, but the hierarchy is different; Bel seems to have replaced Ilu (Ana), and Marduk takes the place of Asshur. It is easy to be seen that these theogonies come from a common source, which is every day becoming more accessible to us, but which we have not yet sufficiently explored to know its exact nature.

The artistic development at which the Chaldeans had arrived from the remotest antiquity, allows us easily to suppose that we ought to discover in the pictured monuments that which the texts have not yet revealed to us. Unfortunately we cannot fix upon the meaning of the figures on the engraved stones until we shall have complete enlightenment from the texts. The significance of a symbol cannot be guessed at; also it is the most we can do if from all these representations we are able to recognise the figures of four or five divinities—Ilu, Nabu, Marduk, Ishtar, and Zarpanit. There is, moreover, a special reason why we should be most cautious in our comparisons; we know that when the Assyrians took possession of a hostile town, they carried away the images of strange divinities, and restored them to their possessors, after inscribing on these images the names of Assyrian gods. Therefore we should not trust too much to an Assyrian inscription to fix on the identification of the image of a divinity, as deeds of this nature might have been repeated in every campaign. It is thus, doubtless, that we may explain the fact that, while in the whole of Mesopotamia the abstract idea of the divinity was mentioned by the name Ilu, it appears on the monuments of the Achæmenidæ as Ormuzd.

The Assyrio-Chaldean cult had a very solemn ritual; we already have a great number of hymns addressed to the principal divinities; and as every month and every day of the month was under the protection of a particular divinity, one may understand that the Assyrio-Chaldean ritual must have had a considerable development. There were hymns dedicated to Nabu, Sin, Shamash, Anuit, to Fire, and to the Elements. Here is a hymn which can give an idea of the lyric poetry of which the library of Nineveh included numerous fragments:

“Lord Illuminator of darkness who penetrates obscurity. The Good God, who uplifts those who are in abjection, who sustains the feeble. The great gods turn their eyes towards thy light. The spirits of the abyss eagerly contemplate thy face. The language of praise is addressed to thee as a single word. The … of their heads seeks the light of the Southern sun. Like a betrothed thou restest full of joy and graciousness. In thy splendour thou attainest the limits of Heaven. Thou art the Standard of this wide World. O God, the men who live afar off contemplate thee and rejoice.”

Religious ceremonies bore a relation to external worship; they all ended in invocation or sacrifice. The cylinder-engraved scenes give us an idea of these ceremonies; we usually see the priest in an attitude of adoration or prayer, sometimes alone, but often before an altar, on which reposes the object of adoration, or that which is going to be sacrificed. The most usual victim is a ram or a kid. The Assyrian kings never began an important expedition without having invoked the gods and held religious ceremonies; after a victory they offered a sacrifice on the borders of their newly conquered states. These sacrifices generally took place in the open air; nevertheless, temples were numerous in Assyria and Chaldea; their traditional form is that of a step-pyramid (ziggurat); every town had one or two temples of this kind under the patronage of one of the divinities of the Assyrian pantheon.

A tablet from the library gives us a list of these different sanctuaries, where the gifts of the faithful multiplied and accumulated until the time when war came to disperse them.