Note 127.1 — Chapter VII · The Deities as Social-Powers.

Returning to the Mesopotamian societies, we find much other evidence of the dependence of State-institutions upon cult and religious ideas. Justice and the integrity of the Law were virtues consecrated by old Babylonian religion. One of the most striking of the Shamash hymns exhibits the sun-god as the guardian of right judgment—“the wicked judge thou makest to behold bondage—him who receives not a bribe, who has regard to the weak, shall be well-pleasing to Shamash, he shall prolong his life”: “Shamash hates those who falsify boundaries and weights.”127.1 The respect for the rights of property to which the latter phrase alludes, was maintained by the force of religious sanctions. The King Asurbanipal declares that he has restored to the Babylonians their fields that had been wrongfully taken away, “for fear of Bel and Nebo.”127.2 A number of inscribed Babylonian boundary-stones have been found with symbols of the various high gods carved upon them, with invocations in their name to deter trespassers, or those who would remove their neighbour’s landmark.127.3 One of these is marked with a curse as follows:127.4 “May Ninib, the Lord of Boundaries, deprive him of his son the water-pourer”—meaning that the man who violates the boundaries shall leave no son behind him to perform the funeral rites. Probably other examples of this practice are to be found in non-Hellenic Asia Minor; at present I can only quote one, a late Phrygian inscription, which, however, may testify to an early Phrygian religious function, on a slab with the divine name Ὁροφύλαξ, “Boundary-guardian,” inscribed beneath a carved relief-figure of the god Men bearing a club.128.1 In Greece, as is well known, religion contributed the same aid to the evolution of the law of private property in land; the boundary is put under the protection of Zeus Ὅριος, a power similar to the Latin Jupiter Terminus, or of Hermes Ἑπιτέρμαιος.128.2 In this function they are regarded as nether-deities, whose divinity is latent in the soil. But though Hellas may have borrowed from Babylon its system of land-measurement, it did not need to borrow this religious idea and practice. For these are widespread over the world: in the Teutonic north the rights of the owner were sanctified by carrying holy fire from the hearth round the boundary; and in savage modern societies by the use of the terrible weapon of the tabu and by the erection of fetiches on the boundary mark which serve as ἀποτρόπαια.128.3 We have here a salient example of religion as a constructive force in framing a great social institution, while the motive desire is secular and purely human.