Note 42.1 — Chapter II · Statement of the Problem and the Evidence.

It is more to the purpose of our present comparison to employ as one of our test-standards the degree of personality in the cult-objects of the different races. Is the popular imagination still on the level of animism which engenders mere vaguely conceived daimones, shadowy agents, working perhaps in amorphous groups, without fixed names or local habitations or special individuality? Or has it reached that stage of religious perception at which personal deities emerge, concrete individualities clothed with special attributes, physical, moral, spiritual? The most superficial study of the cuneiform texts and the religious monuments of the Sumerian-Babylonian society does not leave us in doubt how we should answer these questions in behalf of the peoples in the Mesopotamian valley. When the Semitic tribes first pushed their way into these regions, swarming probably, as usual, from Arabia, at some remotely early date, they found there the non-Semitic Sumerian people possessed of a highly complex religious pantheon. Bringing with them their own Shamash the sun-god, Adad the storm-god, and the great goddess Ishtar, and perhaps other divinities, they nevertheless took over the whole Sumerian pantheon, with its elaborate liturgy of hymns and incantations; and for the record of this great and fascinating hieratic literature the Sumerian language—with interlinear Babylonian-Assyrian paraphrase—was preserved down to the beginning of our era. This religious system of dateless antiquity suffered little change “from the drums and tramplings” of all the conquerors from the time of Sargon 1st and the kings before Hammurabi to the day of the Macedonian Seleukos. And in a sketch of this system as it prevailed in the second millennium B.C. it is quite useless for our purpose to try to distinguish between Sumerian and Semitic elements. It is more valuable to formulate this obvious fact, that a widespread belief in personal concrete divinities, upon which an advanced polytheism was based, was an immemorial phenomenon in this region. Tiele’s hypothesis42.1 that the earliest Sumerian system was not so much a polytheism as a polydaimonism, out of which certain definite gods gradually emerged some time before the Semitic period, is merely a priori theorising. The earliest texts and monuments reveal as vigorous a faith in real divine personalities as the latest: witness42.2 that interesting relief recently found on a slab in the caravan route near Zohab, on which the goddess In-Hinni is bringing captives to the King Annubanini: the evidence of the text accompanying it points to a period earlier than that of King Hammurabi. We may compare with this the impressive relief which shows us the stately form of Hammurabi receiving his code of laws from the sun-god Shamash seated on his throne43.1; and of a later date, the alabaster relief from Khorsabad showing a sacrifice to Marduk, a speaking witness to the stern solemnity of the Babylonian worship and to the strength of the faith in personal divinity.43.2 That this faith was as real in the polytheistic Babylonian as in the monotheistic Israelite is evinced not merely by the monuments, but still more clearly and impressively by the Sumerian hymns and liturgies.