The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Lecture X Astro-Theology and the Moral Element in Babylonian Religion

A hundred years ago, writers on the history or philosophy of religion had much to say about what they called Sabaism. The earliest form of idolatry was supposed to have been a worship of the heavenly bodies. A passage in the Book of Job was invoked in support of the fact, and beautifully executed drawings of Babylonian seal-cylinders were made for the sake of the pictures of the sun and moon and stars that were upon them. Sir William Drummond resolved the sons of Jacob into the signs of the Zodiac;386 Dupuis derived Christianity itself from a sort of allegorical astronomy.

“Sabaism” has long since fallen into disrepute. Anthropology has long since taught us that primitive religion is not confined to a worship of the stars. The cult of the heavenly bodies was not the source of polytheism; indeed, there are systems of polytheism in which it has never existed at all. Of late the tendency has been to discount it altogether as a factor in the history of religion.

But the tendency has gone too far. There was one religion, at all events, in which it played an important part. This was the religion of ancient Babylonia and of those other countries which were influenced by Babylonian culture. But even here the decipherment of the inscriptions seemed to show that it belonged to a late age, and was an artificial product which never affected the people as a whole. When I delivered my Hibbert Lectures, I believed that I could dismiss it in a few words as merely a kind of subsidiary chapter added to the religion of the State by pedants and scholars.

Certain it is that the elaborate system of astro-theology which characterised Babylonian religion was an artificial creation. It was the result of a combination of religion with astronomy which was elaborated in the schools. Astronomy, like all other sciences, was under the control of the priests, the observatory rose by the side of the school within the precincts of the temple, and the dependence of the calendar on the observations of the astronomer gave them a religious character. Moreover, the astro-theology of Babylonia did not go back to primeval times. The identification of the official gods with the heavenly bodies belongs to an age when the official religion had already been crystallised into shape, and a map of the heavens had been made. We can almost watch its rise and trace its growth.

Nevertheless the rise and growth are of far earlier date than was formerly imagined. Astro-theology was not a mere learned scheme of allegorised science, the plaything of a school of pedants; it exercised a considerable influence upon the religion of Babylonia and upon the history of its development. It had, moreover, a background in the faith of the people. Like the rivers and streams, the stars also were really worshipped,387 and the symbols drawn on the seal-cylinders show that this worship must go back to the oldest period of Babylonia. Even the ideograph that denotes “a god” represents an eight-rayed star. The fact is significant. At the time when the pictorial hieroglyphics were first being formed out of which the cuneiform characters were to grow, the star was already the symbol and representative of the divine. It was not as yet the more general and abstract “sky,” it was the particular star that was adored as a god. Babylonian religion, as far back as its written history leads us, really begins with Sabaism.

How is this fact to be reconciled with the further fact that the gods of Babylonia were once spirits and ghosts, the zi’s of Eridu and the lil’s of Nippur? To this question no answer at present is possible; at most we can only suggest that the zi, or spirit, was localised in the star. A spirit of the sun was as conceivable as a spirit of Ea, and the son of Ea, it must be remembered, became a sun-god. “The zi of the god” meant originally in the primitive picture-writing “the spirit of the star,” and the literal rendering of the invocation in the early spells would be “the spirit of the star who is lord of Du-azagga,” “the spirit of the star who is mistress of the holy hill.” In the Book of Isaiah the Babylonian king is made to say that he would enthrone himself among the gods on the summit of the Chaldæan Olympos “above the stars of El”; and Nin-ip, the interpreter of En-lil, was at once the sun-god and the moon. Istar, it must not be forgotten, was primarily the evening star; and Istar was not only supreme among the goddesses of Babylonia, she was the type and representative of them all. The signs of the Zodiac had once been the monster allies of the dragon of chaos.

With all this, it may hereafter prove that the conception of the divine as a star was introduced by a different race from that which saw in it a spirit or a ghost. At all events, it was a conception which the inscriptions of Southern Arabia have shown to have prevailed among the Western Semites. Professor Hommel has made it clear388 that the Semitic tribes to which the Arabs of the south, the Aramæans, and the Hebrews alike belonged, worshipped four supreme deities—Athtar, the evening and morning star; the moon-god and its messenger or “Prophet”; and the goddess of the sun. Athtar is the Babylonian Istar, who has become a male god in her passage to the Semites; and, while the people of Hadhramaut borrowed the name of Sin from Babylonia, those of Qatabân borrowed the name of Nebo (Anbây). Samas, the sun, has become a goddess; the moon-god has taken the foremost place in the pantheon, and the sun has accordingly been transformed into his colourless reflection. As in the case of Istar, so too in that of the sun-god, the genderless grammar of Sumerian facilitated the change. Â, the sun-god of Sippara, had become his wife under Semitic influence,389 and from Sippara the conception of a solar goddess passed to the Semites on the western side of the Euphrates.

The supreme Baalim of the South Arabian inscriptions must thus have been of Babylonian origin. Name and character alike were derived from Sumerian Babylonia. And from this the further inference is obvious: Arabian and West Semitic “Sabaism,” with its worship of the heavenly bodies, was not indigenous. It must have been the result of contact with Babylonian civilisation, a contact which gave Ur and Harran a mixed population, and caused them to be the seats and centres of the worship of the moon-god. The primitive Semitic Baal—the “lord” of a specific plot of earth or tribal territory—became a moon-good or an evening star, while his wife was embodied in the sun.

This conclusion is confirmed by a study of the religion of Canaan. Here the place occupied by the moon-god among Arabians and Hebrews is taken by the sun. The supreme Baal is the sun-god, and the female Ashtoreth is identified with the moon. As I endeavoured to show in an earlier lecture, there was a period in the history of Babylonian religion when here also the sun-god was supreme. The gods were resolved into solar deities, or rather were identified with the sun. The solar element in Merodach threatened to absorb his human kingship; it was only his likeness to man that saved him from the fate of the Egyptian gods.

It is just this phase in the history of Babylonian theology that we find reflected in the theology of Canaan. Baal has passed into the sun-god, and his characteristics are those of the sun-gods of Babylonia. The historical monuments have told us how long and deep was the influence of Babylonia upon the culture of Canaan, and it was exercised just at the time when the solar faith had triumphed in the Babylonian plain. It is not without significance that Sargon of Akkad, who first brought the civilisation and arts of Babylonia to the shores of the Mediterranean, should have had his capital in a city which adjoined Sippara, the special seat of solar worship. While Arabia drew its inspiration from Ur, the religion of Canaan was modified by contact with a culture and theology that were more purely Babylonian. Phœnician tradition stoutly maintained that the ancestors of the Canaanitish people had come from the Persian Gulf.

“Sabaism,” therefore, to use the old term, must really have been an early form of Babylonian belief. It was communicated to the Semites west of the Euphrates at different times and in different ways. To the Western Semites of Arabia and Mesopotamia it came through Ur, and consequently set the moon-god at the head of the divine hierarchy. To the Canaanite it was carried more directly, but at a later period, when the solar worship had become dominant in Babylonia. The influence of Nippur had waned before that of Eridu, and out of Eridu had risen a culture-god whose son and vicegerent was the sun.

The moon-god was addressed in Southern Arabia by different titles, one of which was that ‘Ammi or ‘Ammu which forms part of the name of Khammurabi. Professor Hommel hints that even the Hebrew Yahveh may once have been a title of the moon-god among the Western Semites of Babylonia. As I was the first to point out, the name of Yahveh actually occurs in a document of the age of Abraham, where it enters into the composition of the name Yahum-ilu, the Joel of the Old Testament. Professor Hommel has since found other examples of it in tablets of the same period, thus overthrowing the modern theory which derives it from the Kenites.390 It was already known to “Abram the Hebrew” in Ur of the Chaldees.

The hymn to the moon-god of Ur, to which I have referred in an earlier lecture,391 is almost monotheistic in tone. To the writer he “alone is supreme in heaven and earth.” He is the creator of the universe; he is also the universal “Father,” “long-suffering and full of forgiveness, whose hand upholds the life of all mankind.” More than that, he is “the omnipotent one, whose heart is immensity, and there is none that may fathom it.” Among the other gods he has no rival; he causes the herb to grow, and the cattle and flock to bring forth; and he established law and justice among mankind. The angels of heaven and the spirits of the earth alike do homage to him; there is no goddess even who appears at his side. The hymn formed part of the ritual of the great temple at Ur before the birth of Abraham, and the Hebrew patriarch may well have listened to its teaching.

From Ur and its mixed population we can trace the worship of the Babylonian moon-god along the coasts of Southern Arabia as far as Egypt. In Hadhramaut, as I have already said, the very name of Sin was retained, and even in North-western Arabia the name of the sacred mountain of Sinai bears witness to the cult of the Babylonian deity. Early seal-cylinders associate with the moon-god both an ape and a dwarf-like figure, called Nu-gidda, “the dwarf,” in Sumerian, who dances in honour of the god, like the Danga dwarf in Egypt, or the cynocephalous apes of Thoth. In Egypt, however, the dwarf assumes the shape of Bes, who is often represented with an ape on either side; and Bes with his crown of feathers, along with the apes (or monkeys) that accompany him, came from the south of Arabia to the valley of the Nile.

The monotheistic tendency of the hymn to the moon-god stands in marked contrast to the polytheism of the solar hymns. The solar ritual, in fact, was essentially polytheistic. But Nannar or Sin, the moon-god, was “the prince of the gods,” the ruler of the starry hosts of heaven. By the side of him the stars were but as the sheep of a flock in the presence of their shepherd, or as the people of a State in the presence of their deified king. Hence he was lord over his brother gods in a way that the sun-god could never be; they became the hosts that he marshalled in fight against the enemies of light and order, the multitude that obeyed his voice as the sheep follow their shepherd. The moon-god was emphatically “the lord of hosts”!

The title was applied to other gods in later days. Nebuchadrezzar calls Nebo “the marshaller of the hosts of heaven and earth,”392 and Tiglath-pileser i. makes Assur “the director of the hosts of the gods.” The kings transferred the title to themselves, changing only “gods” into “men,” and so becoming “kings of the hosts of mankind.” But the first signification of the term was “the host of heaven,” the stars of El above whom the king of Babylon sought to erect his throne. One of the primeval divinities of the pantheon—a divinity, indeed, who scarcely emerged from his primitive condition of a primordial spirit—was En-me-sarra,393 “the enchanter of the (heavenly and earthly) hosts,” to whom in some of the old Babylonian cities a feast of mourning was celebrated at the time of the winter solstice in the month Tebet. A hymn entitles him “the lord of the earth, the prince of Arallu, lord of the place and the land whence none return, even the mountain of the spirits of earth... without whom Inguriṡa cannot produce prosperity in field or canal, cannot create the crop... he who gives sceptre and reign to Anu and El-lil.”394 He is invoked, like the moon-god, to establish firmly the foundation-stone that it may last for ever. But it is not only over the spirits of the underground world that he holds sway; he reigns also in heaven, in the close vicinity of the ecliptic, and “the seven great gods” who were his sons were stars in the sky. His attributes, therefore, closely resemble those of the moon-god of Ur: like the moon-god, he is at once lord of the sky and of the underworld, a father of the stars of night who makes the green herb grow in the earth below. In En-me-sarra, “the enchanter of the (spirit)-hosts,” the realm of the moon-god was united with that of En-lil; as lord of the night he ruled in Hades, and was supreme even in that “mountain” of the ghost-world from which En-lil derived one of his names.395

But I must leave to others the task of further pursuing the path of exploration which I have thus sketched in outline. That Yahveh was once identified with the moon-god of Babylonia in those distant days, when as yet Abraham had not been born in Ur of Chaldees, explains his title of “Lord of hosts” better than the far-fetched theories which have been invented to account for it. The explanation has at least the merit of being supported by the ancient texts of Babylonia. Adventurous spirits may even be inclined to see in Sinai, the mountain of Sin, a fitting place for the promulgation of the Law of the Lord of hosts; but such speculations lie beyond the reach of the present lecturer, and the lectures he has undertaken to give.

The name of En-me-sarra, “the enchanter of the (spirit)-hosts,” brings us back to that dark background of magic and sorcery which distinguished and disfigured the religion of Babylonia up to the last. The Sumerian element continued to survive in the Babylonian people, and the magic which was its primitive religion survived also. It was never eliminated; behind the priest lurked the sorcerer; the spell and the incantation were but partially hidden beneath the prayer and the penitential psalm. One result of this was the exaggerated importance attached to rites and ceremonies, and the small space occupied by the moral element in the official Babylonian faith. There was doubtless a certain amount of spirituality, more especially of an individualistic sort; the sinner bewails his transgressions, and appeals for help to his deity, but of morality as an integral part of religion there is little evidence. We look in vain for anything analogous to the judgment-hall of Osiris and the negative confession of the Egyptian dead; the Babylonian gods, it is true, preferred that a man should walk uprightly, but his future salvation did not depend on his conduct in this life. He was punished in this world for his sins and shortcomings, but the sins were not confined to sins against morality; they equally included ceremonial transgressions.

At the same time, a sort of catechism which forms part of the ritual of the seers shows that a recognition of the moral element in religion was not altogether wanting. The following is Professor Zimmern’s translation of it: “Has he estranged the father from his son? Has he estranged the son from his father? Has he estranged the mother from her daughter? Has he estranged the daughter from her mother? Has he estranged the mother-in-law from her daughter-in-law? Has he estranged the brother from his brother? Has he estranged the friend from his friend? Has he estranged the companion from his companion? Has he refused to set a captive free, or has he refused to loose one who was bound? Has he excluded the prisoner from the light? Has he said of a captive, ‘Hold him fast,’ or of one who was bound, ‘Strengthen his bonds’? Has he committed sin against a god, or has he committed sin against a goddess? Has he offended a god, or has he held a goddess in light esteem? Is his sin against his own god, or is his sin against his own goddess? Has he done violence to one older than himself, or has he conceived hatred against an elder brother? Has he held his father and mother in contempt, or has he insulted his elder sister? Has he been generous in small things, but avaricious in great matters? Has he said ‘yea’ for ‘nay,’ and ‘nay’ for ‘yea’? Has he spoken of unclean things or [counselled] disobedience? Has he spoken wicked words?... Has he used false scales?... Has he accepted a wrong account, or has he refused a rightful sum? Has he disinherited a legitimate son, or has he recognised an illegitimate son? Has he set up a false landmark, or has he refused to set up a true landmark? Has he removed bound, border, or landmark? Has he broken into his neighbour’s house? Has he drawn near his neighbour’s wife? Has he shed his neighbour’s blood? Has he stolen his neighbour’s garment?”396

The list of questions reminds us of the negative confession of the Osirian creed, but the end and purpose of it is different. They are the questions put to the penitent in order that the priest may discover why the wrath of the gods has fallen upon him. They relate to this life only, not to the next; conformity to the moral code they imply brings with it no assurance of eternal happiness, it is a guarantee only against suffering and misfortune in the present world. The point of view of the Babylonian was that of the friends of Job.

Morality, in fact, was left in large measure to the legislator. An old code, which seems to have been ascribed to the god Ea, asserts explicitly the responsibility of the ruler, and his amenability to divine punishment for unrighteous dealing.

“If the king does not give heed to justice,” it begins, “his people will perish and his land be enfeebled.397

“If he gives no heed to the law of the land, Ea, the king of destinies, will change his destiny, and visit him with misfortune.

“If he gives no heed to his nobles, his days shall [not] be long.

“If he gives no heed to the wise, his land will revolt against him.

“If he gives heed to the (law-)book, the king will behold the strengthening of his land.

“If he gives heed to the writing (sipir) of Ea, the great gods will establish him in counsel and knowledge of justice.

“If he smites a man of Sippara and gives a wrong decision, the sun-god, who judges heaven and earth, will appoint another judge in his land, and a just prince and a just judge instead of unjust ones.

“If the sons of Nippur come to him for judgment, and he accepts bribes and treats them harshly, Bel, the lord of the world, will bring a foreign enemy against him and destroy his army; the prince and his general will be hunted like outcasts through the streets.

“If the sons of Babylon bring silver and offer bribes, and he favours the Babylonians and turns himself to their entreaty, Merodach, the lord of heaven and earth, will set his foes over him, and give his goods and his treasure to his enemy. The sons of Nippur, or Sippar, or Babylon who act thus shall be cast into prison.”398

The dissociation of ethics and religion in Babylonia was due to a considerable extent to the practical character of Babylonian theology and the limitation of the doctrine of rewards and punishments to this life. In contrast to the Egyptian, who may be said to have lived for the next world, the Babylonian lived for this. It was here that he was rewarded for his piety or punished for his sins. The world beyond the grave was a place of unspeakable dreariness. I have already described it in a previous lecture. It was a prison-house of darkness and unsubstantiality; a land where all things were forgotten, and those who inhabited it were themselves forgotten of men. It resembled the Hebrew Sheol; indeed, it is probable that the name of Sheol is borrowed from Babylonia,399 and borrowed names are apt to indicate that the ideas connected with them were borrowed too. In the gloom of that underworld, where the ghosts of the dead fed on dust and refuse, the hideous monsters of chaos still moved and dimly showed themselves, while “the kings of the nations” sat on their shadowy thrones, welcoming the slaughtered king of Babylon with the words: “Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?” The dead man never again saw the light of the sun. There was no Osirian paradise to receive him, with its sunshine and happy meadows; even the brief period of light which the solar creed of Egypt allowed the bark of the sun-god to bring to the denizens of the other world, was denied to the dead Babylonian. Over the gates of the world beyond the grave the words were written: “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” There was no return; none, even with the help of Merodach, could come back to the home he had left on earth; the sevenfold gates of Hades opened only to admit those that entered it. Death meant the extinction of light and hope, even of the capacity for feeling either pleasure or pain.

It was on this life, therefore, that the religious thoughts of the Babylonian were centred. And his view of his relation to the gods was a curious mixture of spirituality and the commercial instinct. On the one hand, it was a question of barter; if the man was generous in his gifts to the gods, if he did what they approved and abstained from what they condemned, above all, if the rites and ceremonies of religion were correctly fulfilled, the gods were bound to grant him all that his heart desired. On the other hand, if misfortune fell upon him, it was a proof that he had sinned against them. And as the centuries passed the consciousness of sin sank more and more deeply into the heart of the Babylonian. At first, indeed, the sins were offences against the ritual rather than against the moral and spiritual code. The ghosts and spirits of the old Sumerian faith were non-moral; if some of them inflicted pain and disease upon man, it was because it was their nature to do so, and the only defence against them was in the charms of the sorcerer. But with the arrival of the Semite, and the consequent transformation of the goblin into a god and of the sorcerer into a priest, a new conception was introduced of the divine nature. The gods became human, and the humanity they put on was that of civilised man. They became moral agents, hating iniquity and loving righteousness, ready to help the creatures they had made, but chastising them for their offences as the father would his son. “Father,” in fact, is one of the commonest titles given to the god in the new age of Babylonian religion. It was only in the conception of Hades that the old ideas still maintained their influence, that the powers who ruled there still continued to be the malignant or non-moral monsters of an earlier belief, and that a common lot was believed to await in it all mankind, whatever might have been their conduct on this side of the grave.

In this world, on the contrary, the conviction that sin brought punishment with it became more and more pronounced. And with the conviction came an increasing belief in the efficacy of prayer and repentance, and the necessity for purity of heart. The words supposed to have been put into the mouth of Merodach after his creation of man, late in date though they may be, testify clearly to the fact. I give them in Mr. King’s translation400—

“Towards thy god shalt thou be pure of heart, for that is the glory of the godhead;
Prayer and supplication and bowing low to the earth, early in the morning shalt thou offer unto him....
The fear of god begets mercy, offerings increase life, and prayer absolves from sin.
He that fears the gods shall not cry aloud [in grief],
he that fears the spirits of earth shall have a long [life].
Against friend and neighbour thou shalt not speak [evil].
Speak not of things that are hidden, [practise] mercy,
When thou makest a promise (to give), give and [hold] not [back].”

Already, in the age of Khammurabi, the author of the story of the Deluge makes it the punishment inflicted on mankind for their misdeeds, and the Chaldæan Noah is rescued from it by Ea on account of his piety. The penitential psalms and ritual texts are full of illustrations of the same fact. It is true that the misdeeds are often merely involuntary violations of the ceremonial law or offences against the ritual, but the sense of guilt attaching to them is already profound. It required centuries before the Babylonian was able to distinguish between moral and ceremonial sin,—if, indeed, he ever succeeded in doing so,—but at an early period a consciousness of the heinousness of sin already lay heavily upon him, as well as of the need of repentance. A profound sense of his transgressions, and of the punishment they deserved, had grown up within him long before he had learnt to confine it to moral guilt. In this respect, again, he differed from the Egyptian: penitence and the consciousness of sin belonged to Babylonia; we look in vain for them in the valley of the Nile. The light-hearted Egyptian was too contented to feel them; the gods he worshipped were, like himself, kindly and easy-going, and the pantheism of the upper classes offered no place to a reproachful conscience.

But the gods of Babylonia, in the days when the Sumerian and the Semite had become one people, were stern judges. The theology of Eridu was coloured and darkened by that of Nippur; Ea might save Xisuthros from the waters of the Flood, but En-lil had doomed all men to destruction. And whether it was the sun-god who was worshipped, or the moon-god of Ur, it was still a judge who beheld and visited all the deeds of living men. In the sun-god the judge predominated, in the moon-god the father, but that was all. The father was also a judge, the judge was also a father, and the same word might be used to denote both.

But it must be remembered that the judgeship of the son-god and the fatherhood of the moon-god were confined to the present world. They were not dead gods like Osiris, whose tribunal was in another world. There was no postponing the evil day, therefore; a man’s sins were visited upon him in this life, just as it was also in this life that his righteousness was rewarded. A death-bed repentance was useless; penitence, to be effective, must be manifested on this side of the grave.

Hence came the penitential ritual which forms so striking a feature in the service-books of Babylonia. It was reduced to a system, like the confessional in later days. The penitent was instructed by the priest what to say, and the priest pronounced his absolution. For the exercise of priestly absolution was another essential feature of Babylonian religion.

Besides the consciousness of sin and the conception of repentance, the idea of mediation must also be traced to Babylonia. On the earliest seals the priest is represented as acting as a mediator between the worshipper and his god. It is only through the priest that the layman can approach the deity and be led into the presence of the god. This idea of mediation has a twofold origin. On the one side, it goes back to the beliefs which saw in the magician—the predecessor of the priest—the possessor of knowledge and powers that were hidden from the rest of mankind; on the other side, it has grown out of the doctrine that the priest was the vicegerent of the god. It was thus the result of the union of two conceptions which I believe to have been respectively Sumerian and Semitic. The deified king or pontiff necessarily took the place of the god on earth; Gudea, for instance, at Lagas was the representative of the god Inguriṡa, and therefore himself divine. The fact that the gods were represented in human forms facilitated this conversion of the minister of the deity into his adopted son and representative; the powers and functions of the god were transferred to him, and, like the vassal-prince in the absence of the supreme king, he acted in the god’s place.

The Semitic Baal was a lord or king of human shape and passions. He thus stood in marked contrast to the Sumerian ghost or spirit; and, as we have seen, the gulf between them is too deep and broad to be spanned by the doctrine of evolution. For the Sumerian the world outside man was peopled with spirits and demons; for the Semite it was a human world, since man was made in the image of the gods. The triumph of the gods of light and order over the monsters of chaos symbolised not only the birth of the present creation, but also the theological victory of the Semite over the Sumerian. And with the victory came a conception of the divine which was modelled on that of the organised State. As the human head of the State was himself a god, delegating his authority from time to time to his human ministers, so too in the world of gods there was a supreme Baal or lord who was surrounded by his court and ministers. Foremost among these were the sukkalli or “angels,” the messengers who conveyed the will of their lord to the dwellers upon earth. Some of them were more than messengers; they were the interpreters and vicegerents of the supreme deity, like Nebo “the prophet” of Borsippa. And as vicegerents they naturally became the sons by adoption of Bel; Asari of Eridu first takes the place of Ea, whose double he originally was, and then in the person of Merodach becomes his son; Nin-ip of Nippur, the messenger of En-lil, is finally transformed into his son, and addressed, like Horus in Egypt, as “the avenger of his father.”401 The hierarchy of the gods is modelled upon that of Babylonia, and the ideas of mediation and vicegerency are transferred to heaven.

Repentance, the consciousness of sin, and mediation are thus conceptions all of which may be traced back to Babylonia. And each of them leads naturally, if not inevitably, to other and cognate conceptions. Mediation, as I have pointed out, is partly dependent on a belief in a doctrine of vicegerency, which, in combination with a profound sense of sin, leads in turn to the doctrine of absolution. And mediation itself is given a wide meaning. The priest mediates between the layman and his deity; the lesser gods between mankind and the supreme Baalim. M. Martin aptly compares the intercession of Abraham for the doomed cities of the plain, and the doctrine of the intercession of the Saints in the Christian Church.402

The consciousness of sin, again, is similarly far-reaching. It extends to sins of ignorance and omission as well as to sins of commission. Time after time the penitential psalms ask forgiveness for sins the very nature of which was unknown to the penitent. “The sin that I have done I know not,” he is made to say, “The transgression that I have committed I know not.”

“An offence I have committed unwillingly against my god.
A sin against my goddess unwillingly have I wrought:
O lord, my transgressions are many, manifold are my sins!”

The disease or misfortune that had overtaken him was a proof of the sin, even though it had been committed involuntarily or in ignorance that it was wrong. “When I was little I sinned,” says another psalm, “yea, I transgressed the commandments of my god.”403

Repentance has its corollary confession, whether public or private. And the ritual texts show that both public and private confession was practised in Babylonia. Indeed, private confession seems to have been the older and more usual method. The penitential psalms are in the first person singular, like the Hebrew psalms; in public confession the Babylonian probably believed that a man was more likely to think about the sins of others than about his own.

Penitence implies a need of absolution. It also implies a belief in the sinfulness of human nature and the purity of the divine. The purity, it is true, may be ceremonial rather than moral, and in the early days of Babylonian religion the ceremonial element almost obscured the moral. But as time went on the moral element grew ever stronger, and the ritual texts began to be superseded by prayers of a more spiritual character. The prayers addressed by Nebuchadrezzar to Merodach rise almost to the height of a passionate faith in the absolute goodness and mercy of the god.

Speaking generally, then, we may say that the religion of Babylonia was essentially anthropomorphic, with all the faults and virtues of an anthropomorphic conception of the divine. But it was grafted on a primeval stock of Sumerian shamanism from the influences of which it never wholly shook itself free. It thus differed from Hebrew anthropomorphism, with which in other respects it had so much in common. Behind the lineaments of Hebrew anthropomorphism ghost or goblin are not to be found.

And yet between the religion of Babylonia and that of Israel there was much that was alike. It was natural, indeed, that it should be so. The Babylonians of history were Semitic, and Abraham the Hebrew had sprung from a Babylonian city. In the last lecture I drew attention to the similarity that existed between the temples of Babylonia and that of Jerusalem, a similarity that extended even to details. There was the same similarity between the Babylonian rituals and the Mosaic Law; the priesthood, moreover, was established on the same lines, and the prophets and seers of Israel have their analogues in those of Chaldæa. The religious law and ritual of the Hebrews looks back like their calendar to the banks of the Euphrates.

The same lesson is taught by the literary traditions of the Hebrew people. The cosmology of Genesis has its roots in the cosmology of Eridu, and the first home of mankind is placed by the Old Testament in Eden, “the plain” of Babylonia, which was watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. The Babylonian story of the Deluge is the parent of that which is recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures, while it was at Babylon that the dispersal of mankind took place. The background of Hebrew history is as purely Babylonian as the background of Hebrew ritual.

And, as Gunkel has shown,404 the old Babylonian traditions embodied in the Book of Genesis must have made their way to the West at the very beginning of Hebrew history. They enter into the web of the earliest Hebrew thought, and are presupposed by Hebrew literature. The cosmology which saw the primordial element in the watery deep, and told of the victory that had been won over Tiamât, the dragon of chaos, must have been already known in Canaan when the language and script of Babylonia were taught in its schools, and Babylonian literature studied in its libraries. Long before the Mosaic age, the literary culture of Babylonia had profoundly affected the peoples of Syria, and had penetrated even to the banks of the Nile. Need we be surprised, then, if we find a “sea” in the temple of Solomon, the symbol of beliefs which had their origin on the shores of the Persian Gulf, or priestly ordinances which recall those of ancient Chaldæa?

The ordinances and temples were but the outward symbols of the ideas that had created them. The anthropomorphism of Semitic Babylonia is reflected in the anthropomorphism of the Israelites. The sense of sin and of the overwhelming power of the deity, the efficacy of penitence and the necessity of a mediator, are common to both Babylonia and Israel. Hence it is that the penitential psalms of the Babylonian ritual bear so striking a resemblance to the psalms of the Old Testament; hence, too, the individual element and deep spirituality that characterise them. Israel was indebted to Babylonia for something more than the seeds of a merely material civilisation.

It is true that there is a gulf, wide and impassable, between the Babylonian religion as we decipher it in the cuneiform tablets, and the religion of Israel as it is presented to us in the Old Testament. On the one side, we have a gross and grotesque polytheism; on the other, an uncompromising monotheism. Babylonian religion made terms with magic and sorcery, and admitted them in a certain degree to its privileges; they were not incompatible with polytheism; but between them and the worship of the one God there could be no reconciliation. It was the same with the sensualities that masqueraded at Erech in the garb of a religious cult; they belonged to a system in which the sun-god was Baal, and a goddess claimed the divided adoration of man. To Israel they were forbidden, like the necromancy and witchcraft with which they were allied.

But deep and impassable as may be the gulf which separated the Mosaic Law from the official religion of Babylonia, different as may have been the development of prophecy in Babylonia and Israel, the primordial ideas from which they started were strangely alike. The same relation that is borne by the religion of ancient Egypt to Christianity is borne by the religion of Babylonia to Judaism. The Babylonian conception of the divine, imperfect though it was, underlay the faith of the Hebrew, and tinctured it up to the end. The Jew never wholly freed himself from the dominion of beliefs which had their first starting-point in the “plain” of Babylonia; his religious horizon remained bounded by death, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued to be the God of the living and not of the dead. It was in this world that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished; the world to come was the dreary shadow-land of Babylonian teaching, a land of darkness where all things are forgotten, but also a land where “the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.”

Footnotes

1 Notes for the Nile, pp. 188, 189.

2 Révillout in the Revue égyptologique, i. 4, ii. 3.

3 For the extraordinary variety of senses in which the verb ye, “to eat,” has come to be used in the African language of Akra, see Pott, Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues von Wilhelm von Humboldt, ii. pp. 495-498 (1876). Thus ye no, “to be master,” is literally “to eat the upper side”; ye gbî, “to live” or “exist,” is literally “to eat a day”; feî ye, “to be cold,” is “to eat cold.”

4 See Schweinfurth, “Ueber den Ursprung der Aegypter,” in the Verhandlungen der Berliner anthropologischen Gesellschaft, June 1897.

5 See W. M. Flinders Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, 1898.

6 “The custom of dismembering the body or stripping it of its flesh is widely spread: the neolithic tombs of Italy contain skulls and bones which have been painted red; Baron de Baye has found in the tombs of Champagne skeletons stripped of their flesh, and the Patagonians and Andamanners as well as the New Zealanders still practise the custom” (De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Egypte, ii. p. 142). Secondary burial is met with in India among the Kullens, the Kâthkaris, and the Agariya, as well as in Motu, Melanesia, Sarawak, the Luchu Islands, Torres Straits, and Ashanti, while “in some of the English long barrows the bones appear to have been flung in pell-mell” (Crooke in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxix. pp. 284-286 (1899)).

7 See Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 372 sqq.

8 See Maspero, Études de Mythologie et l’Archéologie égyptiennes, i. p. 85 sqq.

9 Mariette, Dendérah, Texte, p. 156.

10 In the Pyramid texts the dead are described as being carried across the lake which separates this world from the fields of Alu, on the wings of Thoth.

11 See Sethe in the Zeitschrift für Aegyptischer Sprache, 1897, 1.

12 Similarly the “chief Kher-heb” of the Pharaoh, in the age of the Old Empire, bore the title of “Chief of the city of Nekheb” (Ebers, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 90). The Pyramid texts speak of the White Crown of Southern Egypt as well as of the royal uræus “in the city of Nekheb” (Pepi 167); and the goddess of the city is described as “the cow Samet-urt” who was crowned with the two feathers (Teta 359). Elsewhere mention is made of “the souls of On, Nekhen, and Pe” (Pepi 168, 182; see also Teta 272). By the “souls of On” Ra or rather Tum was meant; Pe and Dep constituted the twin-city of the Delta called Buto by the Greeks, over a part of which (Dep) Uazit the serpent-goddess of the north presided, while the other half (Pe) acknowledged Horus as its chief deity. In Teta 88 “the doubles in Pe” are said to be “the double of Horus.”

13 Wiedemann, in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, iv. p. 332.

14 The title of “good god” went back to a very early date, and stands in contrast to that of nefer mât-kher, “good and true of voice,” applied to the ordinary individual on early seal-cylinders.

15 See the illustration from the temple of Amon-hotep iii. at Luxor, in Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 111.

16 The Westcar Papyrus, which was written in the time of the Middle Empire, already describes the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty as born of Ruddadt (the wife of a priest of the sun-god) and the god Ra of Sakhab (Erman, “Die Märchen des Papyrus Westcar,” i. p. 55, in the Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen zu Berlin, 1890).

17 Callaway, Unkulunkulu; or, the Tradition of the Creation as existing among the Amazulu and other Tribes of South Africa, pt. i. pp. 2, 7, 8.

18 Professor Maspero, to whom, along with Sir P. Le Page Renouf, we owe the explanation of what the Egyptians meant by the Ka, first pointed out the meaning of the portrait statues which were buried in the tomb (Recueil de Travaux, i. pp. 152-160).

19 Renouf, TSBA. vi. p. 504 sqq.; Lepsius, Denkmäler, iii. 194. 13; Dümichen, Tempelinschriften, i. pl. 29.

20 A Season in Egypt, 1887, pp. 21, 22.

21 Cf. the illustrations in Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 259; and Lepsius, Denkmäler, iii. 87. In Bonomi and Arundale, Gallery of Antiquities, pt. i. pi. 31, is a picture of Thothmes ii. with his Ka standing behind him.

22 Baring Could, Curiosities of Olden Times, 2nd ed., p. 57 sqq.

23 It is noticeable that while the Tel el-Amarna letters show that the actual pronunciation of the word Ka was Ku, Ha-ka-Ptah, the sacred name of Memphis, being written Khi-ku-Ptakh (Aiguptos), ku was “food” in the Sumerian of primitive Babylonia.

24 In his Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, i. p. 61, Professor Maspero gives “cake” as the original sense of Ka, which, however, he explains as “a cake of earth,” and hence “substance.”

25 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 114. The Ka, however, is here identified with the Khu, and it is questionable whether the passages referred to in the Pyramid texts really embody old ideas which are to be interpreted literally, or whether they are not rather to be taken metaphorically.

26 Maspero, Comptes rendus du Congrés provincial des Orientalistes à Lyon, 1878, pp. 235-263; Renouf, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology (1879), vi. pp. 494-508.

27 This particular bird was chosen because its name was similar in sound to that of the Khu. For the same reason the plover (ba) denoted the Ba or soul. On objects found by de Morgan in the tomb of Menes at Negada, the “soul” is represented by an ostrich.

28 See Chassinat, Recueil, xix. p. 23 sqq.

29 From the fifteenth to the eleventh century b.c., it was fashionable to substitute for the bird a beetle with a ram’s head, the phonetic value of the hieroglyph of ram being ba, and that of the beetle kheper, “to become.”

30 Hermes Trismeg., Pœmandres, ed. Parthey, chs. i. and x.

31 Études de Mythologie, i. p. 166.

32 De Abst. iv. 10.

33 Cf. also Plutarch, De Esu carnium Or. ii. p. 996, and Sept. Sapient. Conviv. p. 159 B.

34 The four vases were dedicated to the man-headed Amset (or Smet), the jackal-headed Dua-mut-ef, the ape-headed Hâpi, and the hawk-headed Qebḥ-sonu-f, who are identified with the planets in the Pyramid texts (Maspero, “Pyramide du roi Ounas” in the Recueil de Travaux, iii. p. 205).

35 See the Book of the Dead, chs. xxvi. and sqq.

36 It is still a moot question whether any scarabs go back to the age of the Old Empire. Personally, I am inclined to agree with Prof. Flinders Petrie in thinking that they do so.

37 Or, according to Renouf’s translation: “Pleasant unto us, pleasant unto the listener, is the joy of the weighing of the words.”

38 Three grains of the natron of the city of Nekheb had to be used, while only two grains of that of the north were required (Maspero, “Pyramide du roi Ounas” in the Recueil de Travaux, iii. p. 182). The Horus of Nekhen, opposite El-Kab, was represented by a mummified hawk (akhem).

39 De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, ii. pl. iii. line 2.

40 Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache, xxxvi. pls. xii. and xiii.; Quibell, Hierakonpolis, pt. i. pl. xxix.

41 Professor Maspero, however, proposes to see in them a symbol of the king of Upper Egypt destroying a hostile city.

42 Recueil de Travaux, xxi. pp. 116, 117. Dr. Naville points out that on the Palermo Stela the festival of the Shesh-Hor, with the determinative of a sacred bark, occurs repeatedly in that part of the inscription which relates to the festivals of the kings of the first two dynasties. Professor Petrie has found the same festival mentioned on two ivory tablets from the tomb of a king of the First Dynasty at Abydos (Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty, pt, i. pl. xvii.); and it may be added that in the Pyramid texts (Pepi 670; Recueil de Travaux, viii. p. 105) the Mât or Mâdit bark of the sun-god is identified with the bark of the Shesh-Hor, while the Semkett or bark in which the sun-god voyages at night becomes a bark in which the place of the hawk is taken by a picture of the ben or tomb of Osiris—here identified with that of Akhem the mummified hawk, which forms part of the symbol for the Thinite nome. Elsewhere it is the Semkett or day-bark of the sun which is identified with the festival of the Shesh-Hor (Recueil de Travaux, iii. p. 205).

43 On the mesnitiu or “blacksmiths” of Horus, see Maspero, Études de Mythologie, ii. p. 313 and sqq. The Mesnit or “Forge” was the name given to the passage opening into the shrine of the temple of Edfu.

44 Quibell, Hierakonpolis, pt. i. pl. ii.

45 See de Rougé, Recherches sur les Monuments qu’on peut attribuer aux six premières dynasties, pp. 44, 45.

46 Mr. Quibell found a large bronze hawk with a head of solid gold and eyes of obsidian along with two bronze figures of Pepi, in the foundation of the temple of Nekhen (Kom el-Aḥmar); see Quibell, Hierakonpolis, pt. i. pl. xlii. Hor-nubi, “the golden Horus,” was the god of the Antæopolite nome.

47 The 1st (Ombite) and 2nd (Apollinopolite) nomes, the 3rd nome (originally) with its capital Nekhen, the nomes of the “Eastern and Western Horus” (Tuphium and Asphynis), Qus “the city of Horus the elder,” the 5th (Coptite) nome, the 6th nome of Dendera in so far as Hathor was daughter and husband of Horus, the 10th (Antæopolite) and 12th (Hierakopolite) nomes, and finally the 15th, 18th, and 20th (Herakleopolite) nomes. In the Delta also Horus was god of the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 11th, 19th, 25th, 27th, and 30th nomes, of which the 7th and 8th were close to the Asiatic frontier.

48 When this emblem was first invented we do not know; it probably goes back to the præ-Menic period, like the composite animals on the early monuments of Nekhen and Abydos. Its first dateable occurrence is on a boulder of granite in the island of Elephantinê above the name and figure of Unas of the Fifth Dynasty. It is also engraved above the double figure of an Old Empire king on a great isolated rock near El-Kab, which is probably of the same date. The tablet on which it is engraved faces south-east.

49 Hor-merti, “Horus of the two eyes,” was worshipped at Shedennu in the Pharbæthite nome of the Delta. Grébaut’s view, that the two eyes originally represented the light, seems to me too abstract a conception for an early period (Recueil de Travaux, pp. 72-87, 112-131). In the Pyramid texts (Rec. iv. p. 42), mention is made of Horus with “the blue eyes.”

50 Cf. Sayce, TSBA., Nov. 1898. In one case the name of the god is written Kha-ar. In WAI. ii. 55. 36, Khur-galzu, “Horus, thou art great!” is given as the name of a Sumerian goddess.

51 Nin-ip was identified with the planet Saturn, like “Horus the bull.”

52 It was then that the two obelisks were erected in front of the temple by Usertesen i., which caused it to be known as Hât-Benbeni, “the house of the two obelisks.”

53 The members of the Ennead of Heliopolis or On are named in the Pyramid texts (Pepi ii. 666) Tum, Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nebhât.

54 See his Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 337 sqq.

55 Similarly, on early Babylonian seal-cylinders the leaves of the folding doors through which the sun-god comes forth at daybreak are surmounted by lions. See the illustration in King, Babylonian Religion and Mythologie, p. 32. (The genuineness of this cylinder has been questioned without good reason.)

56 The wife occasionally provided for Asshur by the scribes was a mere grammatical abstraction, like Tumt, the feminine of Tum, whose name is now and then met with in late Egyptian texts.

57 One of the old formulæ embedded in the Pyramid texts (Teta 86) reads like a passage from a Sumerian hymn: “Hail to thee, great deep (ageb), moulder of the gods, creator of men.” It belongs to Babylonia rather than to Egypt, where the “great deep” could have been a matter only of tradition.

58 See Petrie, Medum, p. 30.

59 The existence of other cities of the name in Upper Egypt, “On of the south,” now Erment, and On, now Dendera, shows that it must go back to the earliest epoch of Pharaonic Egypt. I believe that it is the Sumerian unu, “city,” and that the column which represented it hieroglyphically denoted “a foundation” or “settlement.”

60 It will be shown in a future lecture that Osiris was the mummified Anher. One is tempted to ask whether Ptaḥ is not similarly the mummified Tum?

61 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 270 sqq.

62 This has been proved by a stela of Antef iv. of the Eleventh Dynasty, discovered by M. Legrain in 1900, in the temple of Ptaḥ. Khonsu was a mere epithet of the moon-god, meaning “wanderer.” In a later age Khonsu was himself superseded by Mentu.

63 For the architectural plan of the temple, see Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 287.

64 Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 262.

65 Another strophe of the Hymn to Aten, as translated by Professor Breasted (De Hymnis in Solem sub rege Amenophide iv. conceptis, p. 47), is equally explicit: “Thou hast created the earth according to thy pleasure, when thou wast alone, both all men and the cattle great and small; all who walk upon the earth, those on high who fly with wings; the foreign lands of Syria (Khar) and Cush as well as the land of Egypt; each in its place thou appointest, thou providest them with all that they need; each has his granary, his stores of grain are counted. Diverse are the languages of men, more different than their shape is the colour of their skin, (for) thou hast distinguished the nations of the world (one from the other).” In the succeeding strophe the monotheism of the worshipper of Aten, in whose eyes even the sacred Nile was the creature of the one true God, appears in striking contrast to the ordinary polytheism of Egypt (Breasted, l.c. p. 53): “Thou createst the Nile in the other world, thou bringest it at thy pleasure to give life to mankind; for thou hast made them for thyself, O lord of them all who art ever with them, O lord of all the earth who risest for them, O sun of day (the mighty one in?) the remotest lands, thou givest them their life, thou sendest forth the Nile in heaven, that it may descend for them; it raises its waves mountain high like the sea, it waters the fields of their cities. How glorious are thy counsels! O lord of eternity, thou art a Nile in heaven for foreign men and cattle throughout all the earth! They walk on their feet, (and) the Nile cometh to Egypt from the other world.”

66 Diod. Sic. i. 83.

67 Except in the case of Osiris at Abydos; Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty, pt. i. pl. xv. 16; comp. also at Kom el-Aḥmar, Hierakonpolis, pt. i. pl. xxvi. B, though here it seems to be the Pharaoh who is represented.

68 Quibell in the Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache, xxxvi. pls. xii., xiii.; Hierakonpolis, pt. i. pl. xxix.

69 On a stela in the Wadi Maghara, in the Sinaitic Peninsula, Sahu-Ra of the Fifth Dynasty, divided into two figures, one with the crown of Lower Egypt the other with that of Upper Egypt, is standing before a standard on which are the two emblems of Southern and Northern Egypt, Set and Horus. Set is represented by his usual animal, but Horus by an uræus serpent and the same symbol as that on the plaque (de Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, i. p. 233). As we learn from the legend of Seb recounted at At-Nebes (Saft el-Henna), the two relics preserved there were the uræus and lock of hair of Ra. The lock of hair has practically the same form as the symbol we are considering here, and long before the legend had been concocted, Ra and Horus had been identified together (see Griffith, Antiquities of Tell el-Yahudiyeh, Seventh Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund, pl. xxiii.).

70 De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, ii. pls. ii. and iii.; Sayce in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, Feb. 1898. It will be noticed that Thoth is represented by the ibis and not by the ape.

71 De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, p. 93.

72 For late examples of the worship of animals like the cat, ram, swallow, or goose, as animals and not as incarnations of an official god, see Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 395 sqq. The rarity of them is due to their representing private and domestic cults not recognised by the religion of the State. “The worship of the swallow, cat, and goose, which had commenced as the pure and simple adoration of these creatures in themselves, always remained so for the multitude. We must not forget that Orientals regard beasts somewhat differently from ourselves. They ascribe to them a language, a knowledge of the future, an extreme acuteness of the senses which allows them to perceive objects and beings invisible to man. It was not, indeed, all Egypt that worshipped in the beast the beast itself; but a considerable part of it which belonged almost entirely to the same social condition, and represented pretty much the same moral and intellectual ideas.”

73 See Wiedemann, Die Religion der alten Aegypten, pp. 108, 109.

74 Late inscriptions call Bakh or Bakis “the living soul of Ra,” but this was when Mentu and Ra had been identified together. Stelæ of the Roman period, however, from Erment represent the sacred bull without any solar emblem, while by the side of it stands a hawk-headed crocodile crowned with the orb of the sun. It is possible that the latter may be connected with the hawk-headed crocodile, with the orb of the sun on its head and an uræus serpent at the end of its tail, which in Greek graffiti at Philæ is called Ptiris.

75 Nicolaus Damascen., Fr. 128, ed. Müller.

76 De Rougé, Monnaies de nomes, p. 46.

77 Griffith (Proc. of Society of Biblical Archæology, xxi. p. 278) has recently proposed to see in Deḥuti a derivative from the name of the nome Deḥut, like Anzti, the title of Osiris at Busiris, from the name of the nome Anzet. But this is “putting the cart before the horse.” It was not the nomes that were birds or men, but the deities worshipped in them. Anz (perhaps from the Semitic ‘az, “the strong one”) meant “king,” and represented the human Osiris.

78 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, ed. Leemans, lxxii. p. 126.

79 Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache (1880) p. 50.

80 Rev. Archéologique, xxxiv. p. 291. On the seal-cylinder they are accompanied by the lion-headed eagle of primitive Babylonian art. The Egyptian figures are given in the Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache, xxxvi. pl. xii.

81 Ep. ad Cor. 25.

82 See also Herodotos, ii. 73; Pliny, N. H. x. 2; Tertullian, De Resurr. 13.

83 De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, ii. p. 165.

84 Sayce, Proc. SBA., Feb. 1898, No. 8. On a monument discovered at Sân (Petrie, Tanis, pt. ii. pl. x. 170), we read of “Horus in the bennu as a black bull,” “Horus in the bennu as a horned bull.” The cemetery of Tanis was called “the city of the phœnix” (bennu). At Edfu it is said that the phœnix (bennu) “comes forth from the holy heart” of Osiris.

85 On a stela in the Louvre a certain Psamtik, son of Uza-Hor, calls himself prophet of Khufu, Khaf-Ra, and Dadef-Ra, as well as of Tanen, Isis, and Harmakhis.

86 The versification is Canon Rawnsley’s, Notes for the Nile, pp. 188, 189. Professor Erman’s literal translation is as follows (Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., pp. 386, 387)—

“I heard the words of Imhotep and Har-dad-ef,
Who both speak thus in their sayings:
‘Behold the dwellings of those men, their walls fall down,
Their place is no more,
They are as though they had never existed.’
No one comes from thence to tell us what is become of them,
Who tells us how it goes with them, who nerves our hearts,
Until you yourselves approach the place whither they are gone.
With joyful heart forget not to glorify thyself
And follow thy heart’s desire, so long as thou livest.
Put myrrh on thy head, clothe thyself in fine linen,
Anointing thyself with the marvellous things of God.
Adorn thyself as beautifully as thou canst,
And let not thy heart be discouraged.
Follow thy heart’s desire and thy pleasures
As long as thou livest on earth.
Follow thy heart’s desire and thy pleasures
Till there comes to thee the day of mourning.
Yet he, whose heart is at rest, hears not their complaint,
And he who lies in the tomb understands not their mourning.
With beaming face keep holiday to-day,
And rest not therein.
For none carries his goods away with him,
Yea, none returns again, who has journeyed thither.”

87 Brugsch’s translation (Die Aegyptologie, i. p. 163).

88 Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt (1879), pp. 93-100.

89 Brugsch, Die Aegyptologie, p. 167.

90 See Beni-Hasan, pt. iii. (Archæological Survey of Egypt), pl. v. fig. 75.

91 The double-headed axe is carved repeatedly on the walls of the “palace of Minos,” discovered by Dr. A. J. Evans at Knossos, and seems to have been the divine symbol which was believed to protect the building from injury. On the coins of Tarsus the sun-god Sandan carries an axe.

92 See above, p. 83.

93 De Isid. 12.

94 As Thoth writes the name of the king upon the sacred sycamore in order to ensure him everlasting life, so the name of Ea is written upon the core of the sacred cedar-tree (WAI. iv. 15, Rev. 10-13); Sayce, Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, p. 240.

95 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. pp. 381-385.

96 This is Brugsch’s translation (Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, p. 123 sqq.); but the meaning of the last name is doubtful, and the first is rather “time” than “eternity.”

97 See Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, ii. pp. 257 sqq. and 375 sqq. In an inscription discovered by Professor Petrie in the tombs of the first two dynasties at Abydos, Thoth is represented as a seated ape (The Royal Tombs of Abydos, pt. i. pl. xvii. 26). On the other hand, on the broken Abydos slate figured in de Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, pl. ii., which is probably prehistoric, Thoth appears as an ibis.

98 Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, p. 65.

99 Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, p. 429 sqq.

100 The same cap is worn by the god who sits behind a scorpion-man on a stone containing a grant of land by the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar i. (b.c. 1100). The stone was found at Abu-Habba, and is now in the British Museum (WAI. v. 57).

101 Maspero (Dawn of Civilisation, p. 157) reproduces a picture in the temple of Luxor representing Khnum moulding Amon-hotep iii. and his Ka on a potter’s table.

102 See Scheil, Recueil de Travaux, xx. p. 124 sqq.

103 The khnum or “pot” is often used to express the name of Khnum in the hieroglyphics. It reminds us of the vase on early Babylonian seal-cylinders from the two sides of which flow the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and which is often held in the hands of the water-god Ea. The design is reproduced with modifications on early Syrian cylinders, and the name of the zodiacal sign Aquarius shows to what an antiquity it must reach back. The primitive Egyptians believed that the Nile issued from a grotto to which the qerti or “two gulfs” of the Cataract gave access (Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, pp. 19, 38, 39), and Khnum was the god of the Cataract. Perhaps the classical representation of the Tiber and other rivers holding urns from which a stream of water flows is derived from Egypt.

104 Men-nofer (Memphis), “the good place,” is the equivalent of the name of the ancient seaport of Babylonia, Eridu, the Sumerian Eri-duga or “good city.” Ea, the culture-god and creator, was the god of Eridu. In the Deluge tablet (l. 9) Ea says that he had not “opened (patû) the oracle of the great gods.” It is hardly worth while to mention that the antiquity of Memphis has been disputed by some philologists.

105 Ptaḥ is stated in the Book of the Dead to have been the original author of the ceremony which he first performed on the dead gods.

106 This is Maspero’s view (Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, ii. pp. 21, 22). Wiedemann (Religion der alten Aegypter, p. 75) makes Sokaris a sun-god; but his solar attributes belong to the time when he was identified with Ra of Heliopolis.

107 It was only when the sun-god had absorbed the other deities that they became the children of Ra.

108 Recueil de Travaux, xix. pp. 50, 54.

109 To “come in peace” is still a common expression in Egyptian Arabic, and means “to return safely.” The name seems to be taken from the office of Im-hotep, which was to conduct the dead safely back to a second life.

110 Nofer-Tum and Im-hotep had human forms like their father. The first is a man with a lotus flower on the head, the second a youth with a papyrus roll on the knee.

111 There was a difference only in the vowel of the first syllable.

112 The Nile-gods, representing the Nile and the canals, are depicted as stout men with large breasts, crowned with flowers, and wearing only the narrow girdle of prehistoric Egypt. The human form agrees well with the fact that the Nile was first engineered, and so made a source of life for Egypt, by the Pharaonic Egyptians. Babylonia was the country, it must be remembered, where river engineering and irrigation were originally developed.

113 “Hymn to the Nile,” translated by P. Guieysse, Records of the Past, new series, iii. p. 46 sqq. The hymn was composed by Anna or Annana in the time of Meneptah ii.

114 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie, pp. 3, 248, 348.

115 Her name is already mentioned in the Pyramid texts, and in Pepi ii. 131 she is described as the eye of Horus and “the opener of the paths,” the ordinary title of Anubis as god of the dead.

116 In the Speos Artermidos near Beni-Hassan, where a large cemetery of mummified cats has been found, she is called Pakht, an older form of Bast.

117 On a slab discovered by Professor Petrie at Koptos, Usertesen i. of the Twelfth Dynasty already appears standing before a cat-headed goddess who is called “Bast, the lady of Shel.” Shel is perhaps Ashel at Karnak, where the temple of Mut stood, in which so many figures of Bast or Sekhet have been found (Petrie, Koptos, pl. x. 2). The name of Bast also occurs in the Pyramid texts (Pepi 290); but here it is an epithet of Uazit, the goddess of Dep or Buto, once the capital of the kingdom of Northern Egypt, who is contrasted with the goddess of Nekheb.

118 Naville, Bubastis (Egypt Exploration Fund), i. pp. 44, 47, 48.

119 Horus Ahi. The meaning of Ahi, the local title assigned to Horus the younger, is doubtful.

120 Thus at Dendera we read: “Ancestral mother of the gods, thou unitest thyself with thy father Ra in thy festal chamber.”

121 The so-called Hathor head with the horns of a cow is already found on the slate plaque of Kom el-Aḥmar, which is either of the time of the First Dynasty or pre-Menic (Zeits. f. Aegypt. Spr. xxxvi. pl. xii.). A head of similar type is engraved under the name of Pepi ii., discovered at Koptos (Petrie, Koptos, pl. v. 7).

122 Horus and Hathor, that is to say, Baal and Ashtoreth, were, according to the Egyptians, the deities of Mafket, the Sinaitic Peninsula.

123 It must be remembered that in Egypt the place occupied by the morning star in the astronomy and myths of other peoples was taken by Sirius on account of its importance for the rising of the Nile. And Sirius was identified with Isis.

124 Recueil de Travaux, xx. p. 62. Dr. Scheil further points out that the sacred bark of Bau, with whom Istar is identified, was called “the ship of the holy cow.” At Dendera also, Isis, in her bark as goddess of the star Sirius, becomes Hathor under the form of a cow.

125 Professor Wiedemann has suggested that the name of Men-tu or Mon-tu is connected with that of A-mon. It is, however, more reasonable to associate it with that of the Mentiu or Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula.

126 Hence the ram-headed sphinxes that lined the roads leading to the temple of Karnak. The flesh of the ram was tabooed at Thebes, an indication that the animal was originally a totem (cf. Herod. ii. 42).

127 A stela of Antef iv., found by M. Legrain in 1900, shows that Khonsu was preceded by Ptaḥ as the third member of the trinity. See above, p. 90.

128 So Lauth, Aus Aegypten’s Vorzeit, p. 61; Brugsch, Dictionnaire géographique, pp. 61, 62; Maspero, The Dawn of Civilisation, p. 180. The evidence, however, is not quite clear.

129 The bronze figures of the ibis found at Tel el-Baqlîya, on the east bank of the Damietta branch of the Nile, opposite Abusir or Busiris, have shown that it is the site of the capital of the Hermopolite nome.

130 At Beḥbêt near Mansûra.

131 This, at least, is how the name is usually written. But on an early seal-cylinder which I have published in the Proc. SBA., Feb. 1898, No. 2, where we read, “The city of the ram, the city which is called Dad,” the name is written D-d, and on a libation-table of the Sixth Dynasty from El-Kab we find Dad-d-u (Quibell, El-Kab, pl. iv. 1). The earlier pronunciation of the name as found in the Pyramid texts is Zaddu or Zadu.

132 As early as the age of the Pyramid texts the column Dad had come to be explained as a picture of the spine, or rather spinal column (zad), of Osiris, which was supposed to be preserved at Daddu or Pi-Asar-neb-Daddu or Abusir. See Unas 7.

133 Not unfrequently a rich Egyptian who was buried at Saqqâra had a cenotaph at Abydos. I believe that the fashion had been set by the founder of the united monarchy himself, and that besides the tomb of Menes at Negada there was also a cenotaph of the king at Abydos. At all events clay impressions of his Ka-name Aḥa have been found there in the Omm el-Ga’ab.

134 The title borne by Osiris at Abydos was Khent-amentit, “the ruler of the west.” There is no need of turning the title into a separate god who was afterwards identified with Osiris: he was as much Osiris as was Neb-Daddu, “the lord of Daddu.” Professor Maspero says with truth that “Khent-amentit was the dead Anher, a sun which had set in the west” (Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 24)—or rather, perhaps, a sun that was setting in the west, as his domain was the necropolis of Omm el-Ga’ab, immediately eastward of the western boundary of hills. When “Osiris of Daddu” is distinguished from “Khent-Amentit of Abydos,” as on a stela of the Eleventh Dynasty (Daressy in the Recueil de Travaux, xiv. p. 23), this is only in accordance with the Egyptian habit of transforming a divine epithet into a separate deity.

135 Already in the Pyramid texts Horus is said to have assisted in the burial of Osiris, who goes to the plains of Alu with “the great gods that proceed from On” (Pepi ii. 864-872); and we have perhaps a reminiscence of the spread of the Osirian cult to the south and the identification of Osiris with Akhem, the mummified Horus of Nekhen, in Pepi ii. 849, where we read: “Seb installs by his rites Osiris as god, to whom the watchers in Pe make offering, and the watchers in Nekhen venerate him” (Maspero in the Recueil de Travaux, xii. p. 168). Pe and Nekhen were the capitals of the two pre-Menic kingdoms of Northern and Southern Egypt, and on a stela from Nekhen (Kom el-Aḥmar) in the Cairo Museum, “Horus of Nekhen” is identified with Osiris (Recueil de Travaux, xiv. p. 22, No. xx.). In the inscriptions of the Pyramid of Pepi II., lines 864-5, it is said that Isis and Nebhât wept for Osiris at Pe along with “the souls of Pe.” Pe with its temple of the younger Horus, and Dep with its temple of Uazit the goddess of the north, together formed the city called Buto by the Greeks.

136 So in the Pyramid texts (e.g. Teta 171, 172).

137 The origin of the name of Set had already been forgotten in the age of the Pyramid texts, where it is explained by the determinative set, “a stone.”

138 When the hieroglyphic name of the Busirite nome was first invented, Osiris was still the living “lord of Daddu” rather than the mummified patron of its necropolis, since it represents him as a living Pharaoh with the title of ânz or “chieftain.”

139 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xii. 8, pp. 401-402.

140 The origin of the name of Osiris had been forgotten by the Egyptians long before the age of the Pyramid texts, where we find (Unas 229) the grammatical goddess User-t invented to explain Osiris, as if the latter were the adjective user, “strong”! M. Grébaut long ago expressed his belief that Osiris was of foreign origin (Recueil de Travaux, i. p. 120).

141 Nebo or Nabium (Nabu), “the prophet,” was the interpreter of the will of Merodach, just as Merodach was the interpreter of the will of Ea.

142 The constellation of Osiris was called “the soul of Osiris,” and Professor Maspero notes that the Pyramid texts place his kingdom near the Great Bear (Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, ii. p. 20). Isis became Sirius, and Horus the morning star.

143 The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Immortality, p. 48.

144 Renouf’s translation of the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani) is as follows:—“I am not a doer of what is wrong. I am not a plunderer. I am not a robber. I am not a slayer of men. I do not stint the measure of corn. I am not a niggard. I do not desire the property of the gods. I am not a teller of lies. I am not a monopoliser of food. I am no extortioner. I am not unchaste. I am not the cause of others’ tears. I am not a dissembler. I am not a doer of violence. I am not a domineering character. I do not pillage cultivated land. I am not an eavesdropper. I am not a chatterer. I do not dismiss a case through self-interest. I am not unchaste with women or men. I am not obscene. I am not an exciter of alarms. I am not hot in speech. I do not turn a deaf ear to the words of righteousness. I am not foul-mouthed. I am not a striker. I am not a quarreller. I do not revoke my words. I do not multiply clamour in reply to words. I am not evil-minded or a doer of evil. I am not a reviler of the king. I put no obstruction on (the use of the Nile) water. I am not a bawler. I am not a reviler of the god. I am not fraudulent. I am not sparing in offerings to the gods. I do not deprive the dead of the funeral cakes. I take not away the cakes of the child, or profane the god of my locality. I do not kill sacred animals.”

145 Wiedemann, Die Religion der alten Aegypter, pp. 132, 133; and Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, pp. 188-190.

146 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 190.

147 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 191.

148 So on a stela translated by Professor Maspero (Recueil de Travaux, iv. p. 128) the deceased says: “Never has one said of me, What is that he hath done? I have not injured, I have not committed evil; none has suffered through my fault, the lie has never entered into me since I was born, but I have always done that which was true in the sight of the lord of the two worlds. I have been united in heart to the god; I have walked in the good paths of justice, love, and all the virtues. Ah, let my soul live... for behold I am come to this land, O souls, to be with you in the tomb, I am become one of you who detest sin.”

149 Clem. Alex. Strom. vi. p. 260, ed. Sylb. See Lepsius, Einleitung zur Chronologie der Aegypter, pp. 45, 46. The remains ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos, including the Dialogue called Pœmandres, have been translated into English by J. D. Chambers (1882). The Dialogue is already quoted by Justin Martyr (Exhort. ad Græcos, xxxviii.).

150 The extraordinary care with which the sacred texts were handed down through long periods of time is illustrated by certain of the Pyramid texts, which are reproduced word for word down to the close of the Egyptian monarchy. Thus passages at the beginning of the inscriptions in the Pyramid of Unas are repeated in the Ritual of Abydos, and another portion of the same text is found on a stela of the Thirteenth Dynasty, as well as in one of the courts of the temple of queen Hatshepsu at Dêr el-Bâhari, where, as Professor Maspero remarks, “we have three identical versions of different epochs and localities.” The invocations against serpents (Unas 300-339) recur in the tomb of Bak-n-ren-ef of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, iii. pp. 182, 195, 220. The fact gives us confidence in the statements of the Egyptian scribes, that such and such chapters of the Book of the Dead had been “found” or written in the reigns of certain early kings.

151 There is much to be said for the view of Professor Piehl, that we have in it an amalgamation of the rituals and formulæ of the various chief sanctuaries of Egypt, which have been thrown side by side without any attempt at arrangement or harmony. One of such rituals would be that mentioned on the sarcophagus of Nes-Shu-Tefnut, where we read of “the sacred writings of Horus in the city of Huren” in the Busirite nome (Recueil de Travaux, vi. p. 134). On the sarcophagus of Beb, discovered by Professor Petrie at Dendera, and belonging to the period between the Sixth and the Eleventh Dynasties, we have not only “early versions” of parts of the Book of the Dead, but also chapters which do not occur in the standard text (Petrie, Dendereh, 1898, pp. 56-58).

152 We even read in them of Ra being “purified in the fields of Alu” (Unas 411).

153 Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, pp. 367-370.

154 Various interpretations have been given of the phrase per m hru. I have adopted that which seems to me most consonant with both grammar and logical probability.

155 The inscribed scarab does not seem to be older than the age of the Eleventh Dynasty, when it began to take the place of the cylinder as a seal. At all events there is no authentic record of the discovery of one in any tomb of an earlier date, and the scarabs with the names of Neb-ka-ra, Khufu, and other early kings, were for the most part made in the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. It is possible, however, that some at least of the scarabs which bear the name of Ra-n-ka of the Eighth Dynasty are contemporaneous with the Pharaoh whose name is written upon them. If so, they are the oldest inscribed scarabs with which we are acquainted. Uninscribed scarabs, however, go back to the prehistoric age. The use of the scarab as an amulet is already referred to in the Pyramid texts. And Dr. Reisner has discovered green porcelain beetles in the prehistoric graves of Negadiyâ, along with other green porcelain amulets, such as turtles, etc.

156 As is also the case in the Pyramid texts.

157 Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, p. 369.

158 Maspero, “La Pyramide de Pepi 1er” in Recueil de Travaux, vii. pp. 161, 162. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgames the place of Nu-Urru is taken by Ur-Ninnu.

159 The Book of the Dead has been analysed by Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, i. pp. 325-387.

160 Translated by P. J. de Horrack.

161 For a translation and analysis of the Book of Am Duat, see Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes ii. pp. 1-163.

162 Revue égyptologique, i. 4, ii. 3 (1880, 1881), where an account of the demotic story is given by E. Révillout.

163 Scheil, “Tombeaux thébains” in Mémoires de la Mission archéologique française du Caire, v. 4, pl. 4.

164 So in the Pyramid texts (Unas 170) reference is made to “the baqt,” or “ben-nut tree which is in On.” The tree is the Moringa aptera Gærtner, from the fruit of which the myrobalanum oil was extracted (Joret, Les Plantes dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age, i. pp. 133, 134).

165 Ancient Egyptians, iii. p. 349. The bennu is described as “the soul of Osiris.”

166 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, ii. p. 395 sqq.

167 The influence of the State religion is visible in the picture, as the cow has the solar disc between its horns, and the cobra is crowned not only with horns, but also with the solar disc. Behind the cobra is the leafy branch of a tree. There is no reason for supposing with Wiedemann (Muséon, 1884) that the monument is Ethiopian: what is decipherable in the inscription is purely Egyptian. Professor Wiedemann calls the animal on the left a ram, but my drawing made it a cow. At the feet of the cow, which has a garland round the neck, are two vases.

168 See the very interesting study of Maspero on “La Déesse Miritskro et ses guérisons miraculeuses” in Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie, ii. pp. 402-419; Recueil de Travaux, ii. p. 109 sqq.

169 The Belmore collection of Egyptian antiquities contains several stelæ which commemorate the popular worship of the serpent; see Belmore Collection, pls. 7, 8, and 12. In one of them the uræus has the human head of the official deity; in another it stands on the top of a shrine; but on one (given in pl. 7) the worshipper is kneeling before a coluber of great length, which has none of the attributes of the State gods, and whose numerous coils remind us of Apophis.

170 Herodotos, i. 78.

171 Sayce, “Serpent Worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt,” in the Contemporary Review, Oct. 1893.

172 Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas, fait en mdccxiv etc., par Ordre de Louis XIV., ii. pp. 83-86.

173 Voyage d’Égypte et de Nubie, nouv. édit. par L. Langlés, ii. pp. 64-69.

174 See my article on “Serpent Worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt,” in the Contemporary Review, Oct. 1893. On a rock called Hagar el-Ghorâb, a few miles north of Assuan, I have found graffiti of the age of the Twelfth Dynasty, which show that a chapel of “the living serpent” stood on the spot; and a native informed me that the rock is still haunted by a monstrous serpent, “as long as an oar and as thick as a man,” which appears at night and destroys, with the fire that blazes from its eyes, whoever is unfortunate enough to fall in its way. See Recueil de Travaux, xvi. p. 174.

175 In the Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1889, No. 7.

176 The legend was first published by Pleyte and Rossi, “Les Papyrus hiératiques de Turin,” pls. 31, 77, 131-8. It was translated by Lefébure in the Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache, 1883, pp. 27-33.

177 The shrine of Horus, whom the legend here identifies with the son of Osiris, was called Mesen at Edfu. The winged solar disc, which seems to have originated there, is called sometimes “the lord of the city of Beḥudet,” sometimes “the lord of the city of Mesen.” Beḥudet was formerly read Hud, and it is possible that this was really the pronunciation of the name in later days. At all events it seems to be the origin of the modern Edfu, which, of course, has nothing to do with the verb deb, “to pierce.”

178 “The City of the Twins” seems to be the same as Ḥa-Zaui, “the House of the Twins,” which Dümichen identifies with the Greek Khnubis, close to Esna. An inscription at Esna says that it was also termed Pa-Saḥura, “the House of Saḥura” (of the Fifth Dynasty), a name which Dümichen finds in that of the modern village of Sahera, south of Esna. On a prehistoric slate found at Abydos the name of the city appears to be indicated by the figures of two twins inside the cartouche of a town (de Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, i. pl. iii., first register).

179 Naville, Mythe d’Horus, pls. 12-18; Brugsch, Abhandlungen der Götting. gelehrt. Akademie, xiv.

180 Griffith, “Minor Explorations,” in the Seventh Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1890), pp. 71-73; Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, pp. 169-171.

181 Cf. the 155th chapter of the Book of the Dead: “These words must be spoken over a gilded dad, which is made from the heart of a sycamore and hung round the neck of the dead. Then shall he pass through the gates of the other world.” When this chapter was written, however, the real origin of the dad—a row of four columns—had been forgotten, and it was imagined to represent the backbone of Osiris. We are transported by it into the full bloom of religious symbolism.

182 Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 273.

183 See Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, i. pp. 82-89.

184 See above, p. 90.

185 Records of the Past, first series, ii.

186 See Cudworth’s translation of Iamblichus.

187 Maspero, “La Pyramide du Roi Ounas,” in the Recueil de Travaux, iv. pp. 59-61.

188 Elsewhere in the Pyramid texts the Akhimu-seku or planets of the northern hemisphere are identified with the gods (Unas 218-220); Unas himself rises as a star (Unas 391); Sirius is the sister of Pepi (Pepi 172); while the Khû or luminous spirits are identified with the planets (Teta 289). We hear of the “fields of the stars” (Unas 419), of the morning star in the fields of Alu (Pepi 80), and of Akhimt, the grammatically-formed wife of Akhim “planet,” who is associated with “Babî, the lord of night” (Unas 645, 646). One of the constellations frequently mentioned in the Pyramid texts is “the Bull of heaven,” which was also an important constellation in early Babylonian astronomy, where the name formed part of an astronomical system; in Unas 421 the “Bull of heaven” is called the An or “column” of Heliopolis. We hear also of “the fresh water of the stars” (Unas 210). With the latter may be compared the goddess Qebḥu, or “Fresh Water,” the daughter of Anubis, the primitive god of the dead, who poured forth the liquid from four vases (Pepi 393). With the name of the goddess the symbol of the Antæopolite nome of Upper Egypt is associated.

189 In the Proc. SBA. xv. p. 233.

190 Or rather, perhaps, was the Osiris of primeval Egypt.

191 Lepsius, Chronologie der Aegypter, pp. 78, 79. See Brugsch, Die Aegyptologie, ii. pp. 339-342.

192 Hommel, Ausland, 1892, p. 102; Ginzel, Beiträge zur alten Geschichte, i. pp. 12-15. Diodorus (ii. 30) states that the “councillor gods” were only thirty in number; but the list of planetary stations discovered by Hommel in WAI. v. 46, shows that the text must be corrected into thirty-six. Indeed, Diodorus himself adds that every ten days there was a change of constellation, so that in a year of 360 days there must have been thirty-six constellations in all.

193 The Egyptian za is the Semitic ẓi, “ship,” from which it seems to have been borrowed.

194 Maspero, “La Pyramide du Roi Pepi 1er” in Recueil de Travaux, viii. p. 103.

195 For instance, in the Rhind Papyrus: Wiedemann, “Ein altägyptischer Weltschöpfungsmythus,” in the Urquell, new ser., ii. p. 64, “Heaven was not, earth was not, the good and evil serpents did not exist.”

196 See above, p. 86.

197 The serpent with the seven necks (Unas 630, Teta 305) is the Babylonian “serpent with the seven heads,” and points to Babylonia, where alone seven was a sacred number. Other coincidences between Egyptian and Babylonian mythology that may be noted are “the tree of life” (khet n ânkh) which grew in Alu, and was given by the stars to the dead that they might live for ever (Pepi 431); and the “great house,” the Babylonian ê-gal, which is several times referred to in the Pyramid texts.

198 Thus in the Pyramid texts (Unas 518) Unas is described as “eating” the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.

199 Études de Mythologie et d’Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. pp. 446, 447.

200 Golénischeff, in the Recueil de Travaux, xv. pp. 88, 89. The passage is found in Papyrus 1116 of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. The words “son of man” are a literal translation of the original si-n-sa.

201 For the scenes accompanying the text, see Gayet, “Le Temple de Louxor,” in the Mémoires de la Mission archéologique française au Caire, xv. 1, pl. lxxi., where, however, the copy of the inscriptions is very incorrect. My translation is made from a copy of my own. The whole inscription is as follows: “Said by Amon-Ra, etc.: He (the god) has incarnated himself in the royal person of this husband, Thothmes iv., etc.; he found her lying in her beauty; he stood beside her as a god. She has fed upon sweet odours emanating from his majesty. He has gone to her that he may be a father through her. He caused her to behold him in his divine form when he had gone upon her that she might bear a child at the sight of his beauty. His lovableness penetrated her flesh, filling it with the odour of all his perfumes of Punt.

“Said by Mut-em-ua before the majesty of this august god Amon, etc., the twofold divinity: How great is thy twofold will, how [glorious thy] designs in making thy heart repose upon me! Thy dew is upon all my flesh in... This royal god has done all that is pleasing to him with her.

“Said by Amon before her majesty: Amon-hotep is the name of the son which is in thy womb. This child shall grow up according to the words which proceed out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and righteousness in this land unto its very end. My soul is in him: he shall wear the twofold crown of royalty, ruling the two lands like the sun for ever.”

202 Also written Telloḥ, on the assumption that the second syllable represents loḥ, “a tablet.” But the native pronunciation is Tello.

203 The palace is represented by the mound called El-Qasr, the temple by that called Tell ‘Amrân ibn ‘Ali.

204 The name of Khammu-rabi or Ammu-rabi is written Ammu-rapi in Harper, Letters, iii. p. 257, No. 255 (K 552), as was first noticed by Dr. Pinches (see the Proc. of the Society of Biblical Archæology, May 1901, p. 191); Dr. Lindl suggests that the final -l of the Hebrew form is derived from the title ilu, “god,” so often given to the king. Professor Hommel further points out that the character be with which the final syllable of the royal name is sometimes written also had the value of pil.

205 Eridû is a Semitised abbreviation of the Sumerian Eri-dugga, “good city.”

206 Years ago I pointed out that uru was one of the words which (along with what it signified) was borrowed by the Semites from their Sumerian neighbours or predecessors (Transactions of Society of Biblical Archæology, i. 2, pp. 304, 305).

207 Literally, “the lord of the ghost(s),” “the ghost-lord.” The name has been so misunderstood and misinterpreted, that it is necessary to enter into some details in regard to it, though the facts ought to be known even to the beginner in Assyriology. The Sumerian lilla or lil meant a “ghost,” “spirit,” or “spook,” and was borrowed by the Semites under the form of lilû, from which the feminine lilîtu was formed in order to represent the female lil whom the Sumerians called kiel lilla, “handmaid of (the male) lil.” Lilîtu is the Hebrew Lîlîth (Isa. xxxiv. 14). In the lexical tablets the lil is explained as “a breath of wind” (saru), or more exactly as a zaqiqu, or “dust-cloud” (not, of course, “a fog,” as it has sometimes been translated, in defiance alike of common sense and of modern Arab beliefs). When the spirit of Ea-bani rose from the ground, it naturally took the form of a “dust-cloud”; at other times, when the spirits appeared in the air, they revealed their presence by a draught of cold “wind.”

208 See Pinches, “Certain Inscriptions and Records referring to Babylonia and Elam,” in the Journal of the Victoria Institute, xxix. p. 44: “between the mouths of the rivers on both sides.”

209 It is significant that although the antediluvian kings enumerated by Berossos must have belonged to Eridu, as is shown by their connection with the Oannes-gods who rose from the Persian Gulf, they are not kings of Eridu, but of Pantibibla and Larankha (which seems to have been the Surippak of the cuneiform texts).

210 Thureau-Dangin, in the Revue Sémitique.

211 Heuzey, “Sceaux inédits des rois d’Agadé,” in the Revue d’Assyriologie, iv. 1, pp. 1-12.

212 It is to this adoption by the god that the phrase met with in early Sumerian texts—“the king (or the man) the son of his god”—probably refers, though it may possibly have eventually come to be synonymous with “pious man.” Professor Hommel compares Hebrew names like Ben-Ammi, “the son of (the god) Ammi.”

213 A. H. 83-1-18, 1866, Rev. v., published by Pinches in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xviii. 8 (1896), and explained by him, p. 255. I should myself prefer to render Par-Eṡu “the land of the offspring of the god Eṡu” (or Esau).

214 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 107, note.

215 This at least was the ease in the time of Gudea, to whom we owe all the more important theological references found in the Tello texts.

216 Thus we have the phrase “to swear by the Zi of the king” (see Delitzsch, Assyrisches Handwörterbuch, s.v. nisu). The Zi included the ekim or specific ghost, whose prominence belongs rather to post-Sumerian days than to the early ages of Babylonian history.

217 King, Babylonian Religion, p. 46.

218 WAI. ii. 36. 54, 56. 33-38.

219 See my Hibbert Lectures on Babylonian Religion, p. 375. A common phrase is “the Zi (Assyr. nis) of the great gods” (Delitzsch, Assyrisches Handwörterbuch, s.v. nisu). In the incantation text, WAI. iv. 1, 2, the gods of later times are still Zis. A translation of part of the text will be given in a future chapter. For the possibility that the Zi and the Lil originally had much the same meaning, the one being used at Eridu and the other at Nippur, see the next lecture.

220 Scheil in Recueil de Travaux, xxii. p. 38.

221 See Sm. 1981. 3, where the edinna or “desert” is called the home of the lilla.

222 Uda-kára.

223 By assimilation En-lil became El-lil. The name is literally “ghost-lord,” where the singular lil represents a class. Hence En-lil is “lord of the ghosts” in general, conceived of as “the devil” is often conceived of in Christian literature, or as Hades sometimes meant all the denizens of the underworld in Greek. Dialectic forms of the name are Mul-lil and U-lil.

224 Under Semitic influence these “tablets of destiny” lost their primitive signification, and became, like the Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, simply a means of predicting the future.

225 At Eridu the Zi seems to have taken the place occupied by the Lil at Nippur; at all events, just as En-lil was the chief Lil or Lilla at Nippur, so Ea seems to have been the chief Zi at Eridu. On this see the next lecture.

226 Zaqiqu is of course a “cloud of dust,” not “a wind,” as some scholars have translated it. A wind does not rise up out of the earth, but comes from the air or sky. In WAI. v. 6, vi. 64, the meaning of zaqiqi can be “dust” and nothing else: ilâni-su istarâti-su amnâ ana zakiki, “its gods and goddesses I reduced to dust.”

227 WAI. v. 61, vi. 54, 55, where we must read kibira.

228 Professor Hommel has shown that among the Arabian and Western Semites (the Canaanites excepted) the original Baal was rather the moon-god than the sun-god. The supremacy of the sun-god belongs to Semitic Babylonia (Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, ii. pp. 149-165).

229 With this phrase, which is so frequent in the Babylonian texts, Hommel compares names like Ben-Ammi, “the son of (the god) Ammi.”

230 Thureau-Dangin in the Recueil de Travaux, xix. p. 186.

231 Quoted by King, Babylonian Religion, p. 49.

232 By assimilation En-lil became El-lil (and Ul-lil) in one of the Sumerian dialects (WAI. v. 37. 21). Hence the Illinos (for which Illillos must be read) of Damascius.

233 Aṡari-galu-dugga. We owe the interpretation of the name to the insight and learning of Fr. Lenormant, from whose untimely death the investigation of Babylonian religion has suffered grievously.

234 Is it possible that the original difference between the Zi and the Lil was that the one term was used at Eridu the other at Nippur, the meaning being pretty much the same in both cases? Unfortunately we have no materials at present for answering the question.

235 WAI. ii. 55. 43, 58. 57; iii. 67. 156.

236 Her assignment as a wife to the sun-god of Kis or to Nin-ip of Nippur belongs to a later period; see my Hibbert Lectures, p. 263.

237 Originally, however, she had been merely a spirit in the form of a heifer; WAI. ii. 62. 45, where “the ship of Bau” is called “the ship of the holy cow.” The name is doubtless Sumerian, and it seems to be the origin of the Baau of Phœnician cosmology, which asserted that the first men, Æôn and Protogonos, were born of “the wind Kolpia and his wife Baau, which is interpreted Night” (Eusebius, Prœpar. Evang. i. 10). Baau is probably the Hebrew Bohu.

238 See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 262, 374, 375. Ê-kur, “the house of the earth,” was the name of the temple of En-lil at Nippur. It was the abode of the “lord of the spirits” of the earth and the underworld.

239 She is called “the handmaid of the spirit of E-kura” (WAI. ii. 54. 18). The “spirit of E-kura” is En-lil, whose temple E-kura was, and consequently the title identifies her with the kiel lilla or “handmaid of the Lil,” who eventually became the Lilith of Jewish folk-lore.

240 Hence in the hymn which describes the oraculur tree of Eridu (WAI. v. 15) the “couch” of Ea is called “the bed of Zi-Kum” in “the central place of the earth.”

241 See my Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, pp. 374, 375.

242 Similarly, as I first indicated in my Hibbert Lectures (p. 132), the first two antediluvian kings of Babylonia given by Berossos do not belong to the original list, but have been prefixed to it when Babylon became the leading city of the country, and it was accordingly necessary to make it the capital of the kingdom from the very beginning of time. It is worth notice that, just as the first two antediluvian Babylonian kings are a later addition to the original list, so the first two antediluvian patriarchs in the Book of Genesis seem to have been added to the original eight. Adam and Enos are synonyms like Cainan and Cain, for whom Seth, the Sutu or Bedâwin (Num. xxiv. 17), was substituted. In the Babylonian list, Amelon or Amilu, “man,” corresponds with Enos, just as Ammenon (Ummanu, “the craftsman”) corresponds with Cainan or Cain, “the smith.” For both the Babylonian and the Hebrew, man in the abstract was followed immediately by civilised man.

243 The Igigi are represented ideographically by v+ii (the ideograph of plurality). Perhaps, therefore, they were originally the spirits of the five planets duplicated according to their appearance in the evening and morning. If the opinion of Pognon (L’Inscription de Bavian, i. p. 25) could be sustained that the original ideograph was really vii and not v+ii, we should have a better explanation of them as the seven planets which, in Chaldæan astronomy, included the sun and moon. The meaning of the name is unknown. Guyard’s supposition, that it is derived from the Assyrian agâgu, “to be angry” (not “to be strong,” as he imagined), is devoid of probability. In K 2100, col. iv., it is also written Igâgâ, and explained by isartum, “justice,” or “straight direction.” In WAI. ii. 35. 37, the Nun-gal (pronounced Kisagal) is called the Rîbu which Jensen would connect with the Hebrew Rahab.

244 The divine “lord” of a place or territory, such as is met with in a South Arabian or Phœnician inscription, is totally different from the lord of the ghost-world at Nippur. The one was master of a definite territory on the surface of the earth, the other was a spirit ruling over other spirits in an underground world. The two conceptions have nothing in common with one another.

245 The evidence that has since come to light shows that I was wrong in my Hibbert Lectures (pp. 110, 193) in supposing that the origin of the triad was purely Sumerian. It was really due to the fusion of the Sumerian and Semitic elements in the official Babylonian religion. Possibly the astronomical triad of the sun, moon, and evening star may have suggested the artificial grouping of the gods of the three great seats of religious culture, but that was all. The origin of the triad must be sought in geography, or rather in the fact that Ana, En-lil, and Ea represented the three chief sanctuaries and centres of religious influence in Babylonia. I have already pointed out (Hibbert Lectures, p. 192) that from the fact that Ana is the first of the triad we may infer that the whole doctrine originated in the theological school of Erech. Erech, in fact, was the meeting-place of the Semite and Sumerian, where the Semitic influence first found itself supreme. The Baal of historical Semitic religion was a sky-god, despite Robertson Smith’s ingenious philological attempts to find a terrestrial source for him.

246 Cf. Hommel, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, ii. pp. 149-165. Hommel has proved, with the help of the Minæan inscriptions, that primitive Semitic religion consisted of moon and star worship, the moon-god Athtar and an “angel” god standing at the head of the pantheon, while the sun-goddess was attached to them as daughter or wife. The supreme Baal of the Western Semites was thus originally the moon-god, a fact that throws light on his cult at Ur and Harran, which lay outside Babylonia proper, and were inhabited by a large West Semitic population.

247 Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 74.

248 The name of the Edomite king Â-rammu in the time of Sennacherib shows that the name and worship of  had been carried to the West. Compare also the name of Ehud (Judg. iii. 15).  seems to have been a title signifying “the father,” the actual Sumerian name of the deity being Sirrigam (see my Hibbert Lectures, p. 178).

249 For the absorption by Hadad of the Sumerian god of the air, Meri or Mermer, the divine patron of the city of Muru, my Hibbert Lectures, p. 202 sqq., may be consulted. Gubára, “the lady of the plain,” was apparently originally the wife of Meri; when Meri passed into Hadad, Gubára necessarily became the wife of the latter, “the lord of the mountain,” as he was called. As Hadad was already provided with a wife, Sala, the next step was to identify Sala and Gubára. Properly speaking, Gubára represented the Canaanitish goddess Ashêrah, Asirtum in Babylonian: see Reisner, “Sumerisch-babylonische Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit,” in the Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen zu Berlin, x. p. 139, where the Sumerian Martue mulu kharsagga-ga Gubarra gasan gu-edin is translated Amurru bel sadî Asratum belit tseri, “the Amorite god (Hadad), the lord of the mountain; Asratum (Ashêrah), the lady of the plain.”

250 The triad of Athtar, the moon-god and the “angel-messenger,” which Hommel has shown to be presupposed in the South Arabian inscriptions, was due to the influence of Babylonian culture. This is made clear by the Babylonian name of the moon-god, Sin, in the inscriptions of Hadhramaut, and of Aubây, i.e. Nebo, in those of Katabân. On the other hand, the addition of the sun-goddess to the triad is purely Semitic.

251 East India House Inscription, i. 52-ii. 5.

252 East India House Inscription, ix. 45-x. 5.

253 The solar character of Merodach was first pointed out by myself (Trans. SBA. (1873) ii. p. 246), and the proofs of it were given in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 100 sqq. The Sumerian poem in which the creation is ascribed to Ea makes Ê-Saggil originally the name of the temple of Ea at Eridu, from whence it must have been transferred to Babylon when Ea was supplanted by Merodach. From the list of Babylonian kings in which their names are explained, we may perhaps infer that the proper title of the temple at Babylon was E(s)-Guzi. Guzi had the same meaning in Sumerian as Ê-Saggil, “the house of the high head” (WAI. ii. 30. 4, 26. 58).

254 Compare Ati, “prince,” the title of Osiris.

255 This was first pointed out by Ball, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xii. 8, pp. 401, 402.

256 We may compare the statement in a hymn (WAI. v. 50. i. 5) that the sun-god “rises from the Du-azagga, the place of destinies,” where the Assyrian translation has “mountain of destinies.” The Du-azagga was on the horizon of Ea’s domain, the deep.

257 More commonly written Ṡumu.

258 Abil-Sin, “the son of the moon-god,” the god of the city of Ur, to which the preceding dynasty had belonged.

259 Though Zi is used here in its Semitic sense of “life” in the abstract, the position given to it as the first of the divine names and qualities bestowed on Merodach is significant. Before he can be identified with any of the gods of the official pantheon, he must become a Zi or “spirit,” or more strictly “the spirit” of heaven. Similarly the divine essence of Ea is still called his Zi or “spirit,” a survival from a time when Ea was not yet a god.

260 It is probable that the word “wind” here, though its original sense was obscured or forgotten, goes back to an age when it signified the lil of which in the lexical tablets it is given as an equivalent.

261 It must also be remembered that the attentions lavished by Nabonidos upon the older sanctuaries of Babylonia outside the walls of Babylon belonged to the earlier part of his reign.

262 WAI. ii. 54, No. 4; iii. 69, No. 1. In ii. 54, No. 3, the cosmic deities are made “the mother(s) and father(s) of Anu” instead of being identified with him. But the identification is doubtless really due to the fact that ana meant “god” as well as “Anu.”

263 Journal of the Victoria Institute, xxviii. 8-10.

264 Thus the god Tispak (the Susinak of Susa, K 92691, Rev. ii. 35) is identified with Istar in WAI. 35. 18, comp. ii. 57. 35; and Iskhara, another name of Istar, is called a male deity with a wife, Almanâti (Strassmaier, 3901). Professor Barton notices (Journal of American Oriental Society, 21, pp. 186-188) that an inscription of Lugal-khaṡṡi, an early king of Kis, is dedicated to “the king Nana and the lady Nana.”

265 WAI. iii. 53. 30-9.

266 I can suggest no better etymology for the word Anunna than that proposed in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 182. It is supported by K 2100, col. iv., where the Sumerian pronunciation of Anunna-ki is given as Enu-kki, “the lord of the earth.” When the “spirits of the earth” came to be distinguished from “the angels” or “spirits” of the air, the form Anunna-ki or Anunna-ge, “the spirit of the earth” or “lower world,” became more usual than the simple Anunna. The latter is used of the Igigi or “angels” in K 4629, Rev., and of the Anunna-ki in WAI. iv. 1, 2, col. iv. 3.

267 Hoffmann remarks in regard to the Aramaic inscriptions of Zenjirli (Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, xi. p. 253): “The most interesting fact is that even the theological Hadad-stela makes no mention of a female goddess.”

268 The origin and nature of Tammuz have been investigated in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 220-245, and need not be repeated here. He was primarily a Zi or spirit worshipped at Eridu, where he was known as “the Son of the Spirit of the Deep,” i.e. Ea. He was, in fact, the primitive sun-god of Eridu, though his character underwent strange transformations in the course of his identification with Nin-girṡu (Inguriṡa) and other gods. But Tammuz was a sun-god who spent half his annual life in the underworld, or, according to another view, as fellow-warder with Nin-gis-zida of the gates of heaven. Hence he pastures his cattle in the fields beyond the river Khubur, the ocean-stream that encircles the earth, on the road to the land of the dead (Craig, Religious Texts, i. p. 17). On the other hand, he was also said to dwell in the midst of the cosmic temple of Ea at Eridu, between the Tigris and Euphrates (WAI. iv. 15. 58-59). It is possible, though not yet proved, that in Tammuz two deities have been combined together, the sun-god and the vegetation of the spring which the young sun of the year brings into existence. However this may be, in Tammuz and Nin-gis-zida I see the Babylonian prototypes of the two pillars Jachin and Boaz erected by Solomon in front of the temple (1 Kings vii. 21). Nin-gis-zida means “the lord of the upright post” (bil itsi kêni in Semitic Babylonian), and thus corresponds with Jachin.

269 Thureau-Dangin in the Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes, xix. pp. 185-187.

270 Published and translated by me in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, v. (1877) p. 441, where I pointed out for the first time that the early Babylonian kings were deified.

271 Scheil in the Recueil de Travaux, xviii. p. 71, xxi. p. 27.

272 See Brünnow, Classified List, No. 8883.

273 WAI. ii. 55. 27, iv. 25. 40. Dara, Semitic turakhu, is shown to be “an antelope” by the figure of an antelope, ending in a fish, which is stated to represent Ea on a boundary-stone from Susa published in de Morgan’s Délégation en Perse, vol. i., and explained by Scheil in the Recueil de Travaux, xxiii. pp. 96, 97. The figure is accompanied by the symbol of Ea, a weapon which terminates in the head of a ram.

274 WAI. iii. 68. 12-14. See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 286. For “the cow” Bau, see above, p. 148. Nergal or Allamu was originally the gazelle (Brünnow, Classified List, Nos. 1906, 1907).

275 WAI. ii. 18. 57, 55. 69, iv. 3. 25.

276 Thus the monkey is associated with Nu-gidda, “the dwarf,” who in his turn accompanies the moon-god.

277 The last line of this hymn (WAI. iv. 15. 52 sqq.), of which I have given a translation in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 238, has been discovered by Dr. Pinches, and published by him in the Journal of Transactions of the Victoria Institute, xxix. p. 44.

278 In Reisner, “Sumerisch-babylonische Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit,” in the Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen, x. p. 135, 25-32, and p. 139, 151-158, we read, “the great gods are 50; the gods of destiny are 7; the Anunnaki of heaven are 300; the Anunnaki of earth are 600.”

279 Hence he is called by Nebuchadrezzar pakid kissat samê u irtsitim, “marshaller of the hosts of heaven and earth” (WAI. i. 51. 13).

280 For the Anunna-ki and Igigi, see above, p. 344.

281 The solar character of Nin-ip was first pointed out by myself in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, ii. (1873) p. 246, and again in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 152, 153. He was probably called Bêr in Assyrian, but the Cilician Nineps shows that he was also known by his Sumerian title of Nin-ip. See my paper in the Proc. SBA. xx. 7, pp. 261, 262.

282 The ideograph denotes the keffîya, corresponding both to the veil and to the turban. In its earliest pictorial form it represents a veil covering both the head and face, and leaving only the hair at the back of the head visible. It was usually termed uras, a word borrowed by Semitic Babylonian under the form of urasu, which in its turn created the verb arâsu, “to veil,” and the word aristu, “a cloak.” The keffîya was also known in Sumerian as mutra, Semitic mutru, from which the Greek μίτρα was borrowed. The mitra properly signified the Oriental turban; but as no such head-dress was worn by the Greeks, it is already used by Homer for the girdle of the waist. Besides the value of uras, the ideograph also had the value of dara (in Assyrian nibittu and iṡkhu, “a veil”). It is possible that the actual pronunciation of the name Nin-ip was In-dar.

283 WAI. ii. 57. 39.

284 Gwydion induced Pryderi by stratagem to give some of them to him, and so carried them from Dyved to North Wales; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom, pp. 242-244.

285 Cf. WAI. ii. 19. 49b, “the spirits of the earth I made grope like swine in the hollows.”

286 See, for example, WAI. ii. 54. 3 Obv. 4-14, 4. 37-45.

287 There is no reason for holding that the temple of Ê-Zida rebuilt by Khammurabi at Borsippa, was any other than the old Ê-Zida which was dedicated to Nebo.

288 For names like Sippar-sadî, Sippar-saduni, Upê-semi, and Upê-natsir, see Pinches, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, xliii. p. 277.

289 Support may be found for this etymology in the common title of Assur as “the good god,” which is written ideographically an-dugga. But even if the Assyrians believed that this was the proper signification of the name of their god, it does not follow that they were right; and since the characters representing the title could be read An-sar, it is possibly only a play on the supposed connection of the name with the Sumerian Ansar. The latter appears as Assoros in Damascius. Perhaps Assur (originally Asur) is merely asurru, “a wall.”

290 Glaser, Skizze der Geschichte Arabiens (1889), pp. 64-74.

291 Du-azagga. As the “holy mound” was the home of Ea, it follows that it was originally part of the Persian Gulf; on the other hand, the name given to it implies that it resembled a mountain lifting itself up into the sky. The sun rose from it (WAI. v. 50. 5a); hence it must have been the eastern horizon, which, to an inhabitant of Eridu, would have been the horizon of the sea, that ascended towards the heavens like a great mound. A model was made of it, which became the parakku or mercy-seat of Ea in his temple at Eridu. When Eridu and its god were supplanted by Babylon and Bel-Merodach, the Du-azagga was transferred to the latter city and became “the seat of the oracles” in the shrine of Bel-Merodach, “whereon,” according to Nebuchadrezzar, “at the festival of Zagmuku, at the beginning of the year, on the 8th and 11th days, the king of the gods of heaven and earth, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads.” When Nebo became the minister of Merodach, he too was addressed as “the god of the holy mound” (WAI. ii. 54. 71), and one of “the three great names of Anu” was said to be “the king who comes forth from the holy mound,” another of the names being “the creator of the heavenly hosts” (WAI. iii. 68. 19, 20). Even Istar, or rather Iskhara, is called “the goddess of the holy mound” (WAI. iii. 68. 27). It may be added that a lexical tablet makes the “holy mound” a synonym of the deep (WAI. v. 41, No. 1).

292 WAI. ii. 58. 57. His Sumerian title as the divine potter was Nunurra, which is explained as “god of the pot,” or more literally “lord of the pot” (Brünnow, Classified List, 5895). See Scheil, Recueil de Travaux, xx. p. 125.

293 El-lil, it should be noted, was called “the great mountain” (Kur-gal, Sadu-rabu in Semitic), and the name of his temple was Ê-kur, “the house of the mountain.” It is probable that the belief in the Kharsag-kurkurra, or “mountain of the world,” on which the gods lived, originated at Nippur. From Isa. xiv. 13 we gather that it was placed in the north. Nin-lil, the wife of En-lil, is called Nin-kharsag, “the lady of the mountain,” by Samsu-iluna, who describes her as “the mother who created me” (Brit. Mus., pl. 199, 1. 41).

294 These are the creatures described by Berossos as sprung from the bosom of Tiamât—winged men, with four or two faces, or with the feet of horses and goats; human-headed bulls; dog-headed horses, and the like—which were depicted on the walls of the temple of Bel-Merodach, the successor of Bel of Nippur (Syncell. p. 29; Euseb. Chron. Armen. p. 10, ed. Mai).

295 A variant fragment of the legend, as was first recognised by myself in the Proc. SBA. xx. pp. 187-189, was published by Dr. Scheil from an early Babylonian tablet in the Recueil de Travaux, xx. pp. 66, 67.

296 An indication may, however, be found in the statement that the Lillum or “Lil” was the “mother-father” of En-lil (WAI. iv. 27. 5), and the further reference to the Zi or “spirit” who was the “mother-father” of En-lil and Nin-lil (WAI. iv. 1. Col. ii. 25-28). The genderless Sumerian knew of no distinction of sex; the creative principle was at once female and male. It will be noticed that the female element takes precedence of the male in contradistinction to Semitic ideas.

297 These two lines are an interpolation.

298 These three lines have been interpolated.

299 The name of Merodach has been substituted for that of Ea.

300 A play on the name of Eri-dugga, “the good city.”

301 Probably an interpolation.

302 Originally Ea.

303 These two lines do not belong to the original poem.

304 For Tammuz and Nin-gis-zida, see above, p. 350, note. It may be added that in the Maqlû collection of incantation texts, Nin-gis-zida seems to be regarded as a goddess and the consort of Nusku, the fire-god. Nin, in Sumerian, more often signified “lady” than “lord.” It is possible that at Eridu she was held to be the wife of Tammuz.

305 Perhaps Hommel is right in translating “palm.”

306 Cp. Gen. iii. 8.

307 Zikum or Nammu, the abyss, who is called the mother of Ea. Nammu is given as the Sumerian name or title of Zikum in Cuneiform Texts, xii. p. 26, 1. 20.

308 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 238, and Pinches, Journal of the Victoria Institute, xxix. p. 44.

309 WAI. iv. 15, Col. ii. 5, 6.

310 So in WAI. iv. 25. 49, an-sar ki-sar is translated “the hosts of heaven and earth.” In WAI. v. 43. 27, the Sumerian “the divine scribe, the creator of the hosts of earth,” is paraphrased by the Semitic translator Nabû pakid kissat samê u irtsiti, “Nebo, the captain of the hosts of heaven and earth.” For the Semite, the god he worshipped was lord of the hosts of heaven as well as of the spirits of the earth.

311 It is possible that the Hebrew Urim and Thummim were really connected with the Babylonian “tablets of destiny.” The latter were fastened “on the breast,” according to the Epic of the Creation, like the Urim and Thummim of the Israelitish high priest. In WAI. iv. 18, No. 3, Ea describes a sort of magical breastplate, made of gold, which was to be set with precious stones and fastened to the breast. Nine stones are named, which seem to have been carved into figures of the gods, like Egyptian amulets, since they are said to be “the flesh of the gods.” Professor Zimmern even suggests (Beiträge zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion, p. 91) that Urim is to be identified with the Assyrian urtu, a synonym of tertu (tôrâh), “instruction” or “law.”

312 Compare the “ladder” of Jacob (Gen. xxviii. 12). A similar staircase or ladder is represented on the conical or egg-shaped stone which symbolised the moon-god of Harran (e.g. Lajard, Culte de Mithra, 54, 4).

313 En-me, literally, “lord of the voice,” appears to have been pronounced ên in Sumerian, since the Semitic ênu was borrowed from it. The word has the same root as ên, “an incantation,” and the ênu denoted the priest who “recited” the incantatory ritual. He may thus be compared with the Egyptian kher-heb. There was an ênu or “chanter of Istar,” whose technical name was ukurrim, and another of Ea, “the holy father,” who was called the sennu. The incantatory formulæ, it must be remembered, relate for the most part to Ea and Istar. Another class of the ênu was called sailu, “the magian,” in Assyrian (literally, “the questioner” of the spirits who may have practised ventriloquism); in Sumerian the name may be read ên-lil, “the chanter of the lil.”

314 I can still see no better etymology for dimmer, dingir, “god,” than the one I proposed in my Hibbert Lectures (p. 143), viz. dim, “to create” or “make.” From the same root we have dim or dimma, “offspring” (WAI. v. 29. 71), which illustrates the antithesis between the Sumerian who regarded generation as an act of creation, and the Semite who regarded creation as an act of generation. In WAI. ii. 47. 29, dim takes the place of dumu, “son.” Dimme and dimmea show that in dimmer the final consonant is a suffix.

315 WAI. ii. 55. 27, iv. 25. 40. I have retained here the ordinary rendering of “gazelle” for the Assyrian ditanu, though it is more probable that its Sumerian equivalent elim (perhaps the Heb. âyîl) means “ram.” At all events elim is given as kuṡarikku or “ram” in Sc. 315. But there is a difficulty about the god to whom the name was originally applied. In WAI. ii. 55. 31-33, “the princely elim,” “the mighty elim,” and “the earth-creating elim” are given as names of Ea; whereas in WAI. v. 21. 11, elim is a synonym of the god Aṡari, and in Sc. 312 it is the equivalent of El-lil. As “the ship” or ark of Ea was “the ship of the antelope of the deep,” Ea must have been the antelope (turakhu) rather than the ram or gazelle; and I believe, therefore, that the transference of what was properly the name of El-lil to Asari and Ea was due to the confusion that grew up between El-lil after his transformation into the Semitic Bel and Asari after his transformation into the Semitic Bel-Merodach. The ideograph which denotes elim represents a quadruped, sometimes with an eye, sometimes with the ideograph of sheep, attached to it.

316 WAI. v. 52, Col. iv. 8.

317 Perhaps, however, the “divine seven” was descended from the seven gods who were sons of En-me-sarra, according to WAI. iv. 23, No. 1. En-me-sarra means “the incantation-priest of the (heavenly) hosts” (ênu sa kissati), and his “sons” therefore remind us of Job xxxviii. 7. It will not be forgotten that Philo Byblius made “the seven sons of Sydyk, the Kabeiri, with their eighth brother Asklêpios (Ashmûn),” the first writers of history (Euseb. Prœp. evang. i. 10).

318 It has been edited and translated by Tallqvist, Die Assyrische Beschwörungsserie Maqlû (1894), who calculates that it contained 1550 lines, or more than 9000 words.

319 The whole work is in the metrical form characteristic of Semitic Babylonian. It has been edited by Zimmern, Beiträge zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion; Die Beschwörungstafeln Shurpu (1896).

320 Isa. viii. 19. The beginning, for instance, of the second book of the Maqlû collection had to be recited in a whisper before a wax image.

321 As the title of the latter work is sometimes written Ud-ma an en-lil as well as Ud an en-lil, the real translation may be “when (enu-ma) Bel,” rather than “Illumination (namaru) of Bel,” these having been the opening words of the first tablet. Since, however, it was translated into Greek by Berossos as a work of “Bel” (Seneca, Quæst. Nat. iii. 29), the name assigned to it in the text is on the whole to be preferred.

322 WAI. iv. 19, No. 2.

323 WAI. iv. 28, No. 1.

324 Literally, “the prophetdom” or “college of prophets” (isipputi).

325 WAI. v. 4. 86-91.

326 Terêti, the Heb. thôrâh. The laws which the gods have to obey are meant.

327 Gilgames seems to mean “great father,” from gilga, “father,” and mes, i.e. mas, “great.”

328 Hist. Anim. xii. 21. Sokkaros, king of Babylonia, fearing that his daughter’s son would dethrone and slay him, imprisoned her in a tower. Gilgamos, however, was born to her. By his grandfather’s orders he was thrown from the tower, but saved by an eagle, which caught him upon its wings. Philologically it is possible to identify Sokkaros and Akris-ios.

329 Hilprecht, The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, i. 15. 26; Hommel in the Proc. SBA. xvi. pp. 13-15. The inscription is as follows: “The deified Abil-ili(?), father of the army of Erech, the son of Bel-semea, has restored the walls of Erech, which were built in old times by the deified Gilgames.”

330 Professor Haupt, however, to whom we owe the “editio princeps” of the Epic of Gilgames, believes that the description of the siege of Erech does not belong to the Epic at all. He finds the beginning of it in the fragment K 2756 c, generally assigned to the third book of the poem. See his article on “The Beginning of the Babylonian Nimrod Epic” in the “Johns Hopkins Semitic Papers” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, xxii. 1 (1901)).

331 As Berossos has told us what was the pronunciation of the name of the hero of the Chaldean Deluge, the disputes of modern Assyriologists as to whether it was Pir-napistim or the like are but labour lost. The true analysis of the name Xisuthros is still unknown, though it is possible, but not probable, that George Smith was right in seeing in it a metathesis of the title Adra-khasis applied to several of the early Babylonian heroes. Adra-khasis means “the very clever,” reminding us of “Mohammed the clever” in modern Egyptian folk-lore.

332 ´Samtu, Heb. shohem (Gen. ii. 12).

333 So Hommel, who is probably right in seeing in the word the name of Saba in Southern Arabia.

334 Zimmern, indeed, has suggested that this latter text belongs to the legend of Atarpi, which, however, has unfortunately come down to us in so mutilated a condition that no certain interpretation of it is possible. The discoverer of the tablet is more probably right in connecting it with the story of the Flood.

335 Who here takes the place of Aruru.

336 The words “I will no longer dwell in your city, and turn my face toward the ground of En-lil,” imply that Surippak was not far from Nippur.

337 The mountain of Nizir was in the country called Lulubi or Luluwi by the Assyrians, Lulu in the Vannic inscriptions. In the bilingual inscription of Topzawa, Lulu is made the equivalent of the Assyrian Urardhu, the Hebrew Ararat.

338 See my Early History of the Hebrews, p. 122 sqq.

339 Loc. cit., p. 126.

340 Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895).

341 It should be noticed that, as the voyage of Xisuthros lasted for a Babylonian week of seven nights, so the voyage of Deukalion lasted for a Greek week of nine days. Ogyges is but a local variant of Deukalion.

342 See Meissner, Alexander und Gilgamos (1894).

343 See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 360-363, where the various passages relating to the Babylonian Olympos are quoted.

344 The land of Arallu or Hades.

345 This, however, is rather the “holy mound” of waters, in which Ea had his home, than the inland mountain of En-lil.

346 Ur is the Sumerian word for “zone.” It is translated by arâru, “to bind”; etsêdu, “to bind the sheaves” for harvest; and khamâmu, “to bind” or “fix” laws.

347 From Mr. Smith’s words it is difficult to determine whether the gates were in the first or second court, or whether (as seems the more probable) the tablet intended us to understand that the gates belonged to both courts.

348 The first stage was 300 feet square and 110 feet high, while the topmost was 80 feet long by 70 broad and 50 high.

349 For the shewbread, see Zimmern, Beiträge zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion, pp. 94, 95; and Haupt, “Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual,” p. 59 (Journal of Biblical Literature, 1900). Sometimes six dozen cakes were laid before the god, sometimes three dozen, more often only one dozen, as among the Israelites. The shewbread is called akal pani, which is the exact equivalent of the Hebrew lekhem happânîm; and Professor Haupt has pointed out that it was required to be unleavened (mutqu).

350 Cp. Gen. xi. 5.

351 The Sumerian du has, of course, nothing to do with the Semitic Babylonian dû, “a chapel” (unless, indeed, the latter is borrowed from the Sumerian word). It is properly the equivalent of tilu, “a mound” or “hill”; but as the tilu or tel was generally inhabited, it came further to acquire the signification of subtu, “a dwelling-place.”

352 WAI. v. 50. i. 5; 41. 1, Rev. 18.

353 See above, p. 374, note 1.

354 Samassumukin, ii. pp. 47-51. Nebuchadrezzar calls the Du-azagga, “the place of the oracles of the Ubsu-ginna, the mercy-seat of destinies, which on the festival of the New Year (Zag-muku), on the eighth and eleventh days,” Bel announces before the assembled gods. Jensen (Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 239-242) first pointed out that the Ubsu-ginna was “the assembly-place” of the gods, which was located in or upon Ê-kur, “the Mountain of the World” (WAI. iv. 63. 17.). It thus corresponds with “the mount of the Assembly” of Isa. xiv. 13, and illustrates the combination of the theology of Eridu with that of Nippur.

355 WAI. iv. 23, No. 1, translated in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 495.

356 De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pp. 216, 217.

357 The sangu was called êbar in Sumerian, with which the name of Eber in Gen. xi. 15 may possibly be compared.

358 Not “astrologers,” as has sometimes been supposed. Kalû is borrowed from the Sumerian kal, as makhkhû is from makh. At their head was the abba-kalla, aba-kul, or ab-gal, a word which under the first form is used as a proper name in early Babylonian texts. Assyrian colonists carried it to Kappadokia, and Strabo accordingly tells us that the high priest of Komana was called Abaklês. A Hellenised form of the title, Bakêlos, is given by Hesychius, who renders it by “the grandee” and “the gallos-priest” (see my note in the Proc. SBA. xxiii. p. 106). Abgal is stated to be the equivalent not only of the borrowed Assyrian abkallu, but also of bil terti, “master of the law”; khassu and imqu, “the learned one” (like the Arabic ‘alim); and mar ummani, “the craftsman” or “professional” (WAI. v. 13. 37-42). The relation of kalû to gallu (Sumerian kal and galla), “a servant,” is not yet clear, though it must be remembered that the gallos was the “servant” of Kybelê. On the use of kal, “servant” in the Sumerian texts, see Reisner, Tempelurkunden aus Telloh, pp. 20, 21.

359 So in a text quoted in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 81, “like Bel on the mercy-seat of the destinies the prophecy shall be uttered, this shall be said: ‘Bel has come forth, the king has looked after me.’” A special class of “prophets” bore the name of masmas (whence masmasu in Assyrian), which is translated mullilu, “the praiser” of the gods (Heb. hillêl).

360 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 79.

361 Ê-kua and Mâ-Kua, bit-assaputi and elip-assaputi in Semitic. Jastrow mistranslates “dwelling-house” instead of “oracle” or “prophecy”; the true meaning of the word was already discovered by Oppert in the early days of cuneiform decipherment.

362 The sabrû was distinct from the barû, whose name seems to have a more general signification, and Professor Haupt is probably right in regarding it as the shaphel form of the latter. He gives barû, however, too wide a meaning when he makes it denote a “diviner” of every kind and sort. It is true that magic was taken under the ægis of Babylonian theology, and that just as the asipi or “prophets” might be made to include the “enchanters” and “pronouncers” of spells, so the bari might include those who sought to divine the future by examining the entrails of victims or by means of a cup (cp. Gen. xliv. 5). But, properly speaking, the barû, like the sabrû, “revealed” the future by means of dreams. Haupt’s correction of baddîm into bârîm, “diviners,” in Isa. xliv. 25 and Jer. l. 36, is brilliant (Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual, p. 57). The Sumerian equivalent of barû is Khal (or more correctly âkhal); that of sabrû, Pa-al, where Pa means “the official.”

363 Thureau-Dangin, “Tablettes chaldéennes inédites,” in the Revue d’Assyriologie, iv. 3, pl. xiii. 40, Obv.

364 So too was a person of illegitimate birth, as has been pointed out by Haupt (Journal of Biblical Literature (1900), p. 57).

365 J. D. Price in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, xxi. 2, pp. 1-22. In the hemerology published in WAI. iv. 32, the animal mentioned in col. 1, line 3, is not a gazelle, as I have supposed in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 70, but a “goat” (Sumerian sikku, Assyrian sapparu).

366 There is no question here of a scape-goat or anything similar. The word “offspring” is uritsu, which is the regular equivalent of Bir “suboles.” The addition of the words sa amiluti, “of mankind,” confines it in this case to man. Already, in 1875, in my Elementary Assyrian Grammar (p. 123), I pointed out that it was connected with the Arabic warats, which I see (like many other things of the same sort) has recently been announced as a new discovery. The verb ittadin, by the way, is an Iphteal, not a Niphal, and therefore cannot be translated as a passive.

367 De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, iv. 1, pl. 4 bis. This was in the time of king E-anna-du. A bas-relief of the time of Entemena on the same plate, 5 bis (3b), represents what may also be a human sacrifice, one naked captive lying on the ground already slain, while another is being led to execution.

368 References are given in Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 666.

369 The tithe was paid on the 5th of Ab; on the 16th of Tammuz, nineteen days earlier, Gobryas had entered Babylon with the soldiers of Cyrus.

370 A more comprehensive term was ginû, “the fixed offering,” which included not only the daily sacrifices, but all other stated sacrifices as well.

371 See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 72, note 2.

372 WAI. i. 65, ii. 19-21; 54. iii. 48-50. See Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, pp. 110, 116.

373 Cp. Lev. v. 7, 11.

374 Haupt, Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual, pp. 60, 61.

375 Zimmern, Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Babylonischen Religion, p. 127.

376 L.c., p. 88, note 2.

377 On the early Babylonian calendar, see Radau, Early Babylonian History, pp. 287-307.

378 The real reading of the god’s name is unknown. He was identified with Nin-ip (WAI. ii. 57. 68), the sun of the south (WAI. ii. 57. 51), and therefore the midday sun—not the morning sun, as has recently been maintained. Nin-ip was the messenger or “angel” of El-lil of Nippur, and consequently Bil-‘si is further identified with “the moon of Nippur” (WAI. 57. 56), the angel of the lord of the ghost-world being more properly the moon than the sun. When Bel-Merodach of Babylon usurped the functions of El-lil, Bel-‘si naturally became Nebo, “the power of strength” (WAI. v. 43. 37), who stood in the same relation to Merodach that Nin-ip did to El-lil. Bil-‘si was also the seventh of the tikpi-stars (WAI. ii. 49. 10-13, iii. 50-52).

379 Amiaud’s translation in Records of the Past, new ser., ii. pp. 83, 84.

380 Athenæus, Deipnosophist, 14.

381 The most obvious derivation of the Hebrew Purim is that which I have proposed in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xix. 7, pp. 280, 281, little as it may suit certain fashionable hypotheses. On the Black Obelisk (175), Shalmaneser says: “For the second time the Pûr-festival of Assur and Hadad I celebrated”; and a deed of sale (Rm. 2. 19) is dated in the eponymy of Bel-danan, b.c. 734, “in the year of his Pûr-office” (ina sanê puri-su). Pur, which is interpreted “a lot,” has naturally no connection with the Assyrian bur, which is stated to mean “a stone.” That we must read bur and not pur, is shown by the variant spelling ba-ar (Sa 5. iv. 10).

382 WAI. ii. 32. 16. The reading of Delitzsch and myself has been called in question, the tablet having apparently been damaged since we examined it, but all doubts have now been set at rest by K 93037, Obv. 24 (published in Cuneiform Texts, xii. 6), where sabattum is the equivalent of a Sumerian “the day” par excellence. Babylonia was the home of astronomy and of the sacredness of the number seven, due to the fact that there were seven planets, so that a seventh-day Sabbath was natural there.

383 Compare the Rabbinical phrase, “soiling the hands,” applied to the inspired books of Scripture.

384 A translation of the whole text is given in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 70-76. With the last prohibition, compare Isa. lviii. 13, “not speaking thine own words” on the Sabbath-day.

385 Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 322, 323.

386 Ædipus Judaicus (London, 1811).

387 So in the second book of the Surpu series (WAI. iv. 59, Col. ii. 106, Col. iv. 7-9, translated in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 508, 509); WAI. iii. 66. a 9, 13.

388 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, ii. pp. 149-165.

389 See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 177, 178.

390 Expository Times, ix. (1898) p. 522; March 1900, p. 270.

391 P. 316.

392 WAI. i. 51. 1, 13.

393 Pronounced Ên-sarra, Ênu-sa-kissati in Semitic.

394 See the translation of the hymn in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 301. The text has been commented on by Fr. Martin, Textes réligieux assyriens et babyloniens, pp. 77-80.

395 The god of the “great mountain,” see above, pp. 376, 452.

396 Zimmern, Die Beschwörungstafeln Shurpu, p. 3 sqq.

397 We may notice that it is the people, and not the king, who will suffer for the misdeeds of the latter; cp. 2 Sam. xxiv. 17, and Horace, Ep. i. 12, 20: “quicquid delirant reges, plec tuntur Achivi.”

398 WAI. iv. 55. The inscription was first translated by George Smith, Assyrian Discoveries (1875), pp. 409-411, and by myself in the Records of the Past, first ser., vii. (1876), pp. 119-122. Mr. King has recently given the first part of the text in his Babylonian Religion, pp. 217, 218.

399 Hommel suggests that silân, “the hollow place underneath the earth,” is derived from sa’ûlânu, “sheol” (Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, iii. p. 347).

400 Babylonian Religion and Mythology, p. 83. See George Smith, Chaldæan Account of Genesis, pp. 78-80 (II. 10-13, 16-23).

401 K 255, Obv. i. 19, Ablu dannu mutir gimilli Bili abi-su, “the mighty son, the avenger of Bel his father.”

402 Textes religieux assyriens et babyloniens, p. xvi.

403 Martin, l.c., p. 14.

404 H. Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895).