Note 199.1 — Chapter XI · The Religious Temperament of the Eastern and Western Peoples.

As regards Mesopotamia, in his History of Ancient Religions Tiele finds in Assyrian history the same traces of murderous fanaticism as in Israelitish.199.1 So far as I have been able as yet to collect the evidence, this statement appears to contain some exaggeration. For I have not found any record of a war that an Assyrian or Babylonian ruler undertakes at the command of a “jealous god” against a people whose only offence is an alien worship. The motives for a war appear to be of the ordinary human and secular kind; Palestine, for instance, is attacked, not because Marduk or Asshur personally hates Jahwé, but because the country holds the key of the route to Egypt. Such Biblical narratives as the destruction of Jericho, Ai, and the Amalekites find no real parallel in Mesopotamian chronicles. Yet in these also the temper of homicidal religion is strong enough to be dangerous. Neither in the Babylonian nor in the Assyrian divinities is there any spirit of mercy to the conquered. On that early relief of Annabanini of the third millennium B.C., the goddess leads to the king the captives by a hook in their noses to work his will upon them.199.2 And in the later records of the great Assyrian Empire, the deities appear prominently as motive forces, and the most cruel treatment of captives is regarded as acceptable to them. The worst example that Tiele quotes is the great inscription of Assurbanipal, who, after speaking of himself as “the Compassionate, the King who cherishes no grudge,”199.3 naïvely proceeds to narrate how he tore out the tongues of the rebels of Babylon, hewed their flesh into small pieces, and flung it to the dogs, swine, and vultures; and “after I had performed these acts, I softened the hearts of the Great Gods, my Lords.” But the lines that follow suggest that what “softened their hearts” was not so much the tortures and massacres, which they might approve of without directly commanding, but the religious measures that Assurbanipal immediately undertook for the purification of Babylon, whose temples had been polluted with corpses. Again, Tiglath-Pileser III. speaks of himself as the Mighty One “who in the service of Asshur broke in pieces like a potter’s vessel all those who were not submissive to the will of his god”;200.1 and a little later, Sargon recounts how “Merodach-Baladin, King of the Chaldaeans,… who did not fear the name of the Lord of Lords… broke the statues of the great gods and refused his present to me.”200.2 Yet it would be a misunderstanding to speak of these, as Tiele does, as if they were wars of religion, like the Crusades or the war against the Albigenses. Asshur sends the king to the war invariably, but rather for the sake of the king’s profit and glory than for the propagation of Asshur’s religion; for his enemies are very frequently of the same religion as himself. The above phrases must be understood probably in a political sense rather than a religious; the god and the king are so intimately associated that whoever insults or injures one, insults or injures the other. We may suspect that Merodach-Baladin’s breach of the divine statutes consisted in his omitting to send his usual tribute to Sargon. When two men had spoken scornfully of the gods of Assurbanipal, both the king and the gods would wish to avenge the insult:200.3 it was natural, therefore, for Assurbanipal to torture and flay them. In warring against an alien people, the king is warring against alien gods; therefore if he sacks the alien city he may capture and take away, or—more rarely—destroy, the city’s gods. Thus Asarhaddon had taken away the idols of Hazailu, King of Arabia, and of Laili, King of Iadi; but when these kings had made submission and won his favour he returned to them the holy images, having first inscribed them with his own ideogram and a mark of the might of Asshur:201.1 thus the gods, having the brandmark of the great king and the imperial deity, become tributary divinities. Or if he wished to wipe a people out, the Assyrian conqueror might break their idols to dust. Thus Assurbanipal broke in pieces the gods of the Elamites—the most deadly foes of Babylon—and thereby “eased the heart of the Lord of Lords.”201.2 But many of the Elamite deities he led away; and of one of them he speaks in terms of reverence, Sašinak, the god of destiny, “who dwells in hidden places, whose working no one sees.”201.3 It is more difficult to understand why Sanherib should boast to have destroyed the deities of Babylon after his capture of the city; for the leading Babylonian divinities certainly belonged to the Assyrian Pantheon.