472, and Baudissin, ib. IX. 40-45.

CONTENTS.

I. Introduction
II. The Land and the People
III. General Traits of the Old Babylonian Pantheon
IV. Babylonian Gods Prior to the Days of Hammurabi
V. The Consorts of the Gods
VI. Gudea's Pantheon
VII. Summary
VIII. The Pantheon in the Days of Hammurabi
IX. The Gods in the Temple Lists and in the Legal and Commercial Documents
X. The Minor Gods in the Period of Hammurabi
XI. Survivals of Animism in the Babylonian Religion
XII. The Assyrian Pantheon
XIII. The Triad and the Combined Invocation of Deities
XIV. The Neo-babylonian Period
XV. The Religious Literature of Babylonia
XVI. The Magical Texts
XVII. The Prayers and Hymns
XVIII. Penitential Psalms
XIX. Oracles and Omens
XX. Various Classes of Omens
XXI. The Cosmology of the Babylonians
XXII. The Zodiacal System of the Babylonians
XXIII. The Gilgamesh Epic
XXIV. Myths and Legends
XXV. The Views of Life After Death
XXVI. The Temples and the Cult
XXVII. Conclusion

(From a drawing by Mr. J. HORACE FRANK.)]

THE RELIGION OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA.

CHAPTER I.—INTRODUCTION.

SOURCES AND METHODS OF STUDY.

I.

Until about the middle of the 19th century, our knowledge of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians was exceedingly scant. No records existed that were contemporaneous with the period covered by Babylonian-Assyrian history; no monuments of the past were preserved that might, in default of records, throw light upon the religious ideas and customs that once prevailed in Mesopotamia. The only sources at command were the incidental notices—insufficient and fragmentary in character—that occurred in the Old Testament, in Herodotus, in Eusebius, Syncellus, and Diodorus. Of these, again, only the two first-named, the Old Testament and Herodotus, can be termed direct sources; the rest simply reproduce extracts from other works, notably from Ctesias, the contemporary of Xenophon, from Berosus, a priest of the temple of Bel in Babylonia, who lived about the time of Alexander the Great, or shortly after, and from Apollodorus, Abydenus, Alexander Polyhistor, and Nicolas of Damascus, all of whom being subsequent to Berosus, either quote the latter or are dependent upon him.

Of all these sources it may be said, that what information they furnish of Babylonia and Assyria bears largely upon the political history, and only to a very small degree upon the religion. In the Old Testament, the two empires appear only as they enter into relations with the Hebrews, and since