Note 119.1 — Chapter VII · The Deities as Social-Powers.

But though it is not permissible to dogmatise about the origin of the great cities in the valley of the Euphrates, we have ample material supplied by Babylonian-Assyrian monuments and texts of the close interdependence of Church and State, to illustrate what I remarked upon in my inaugural lecture, the political character of the pantheon. This emerges most clearly when we consider the relations of the monarch to the deity. Of all Oriental autocracies, it may be said with truth that the instinctive bias of the people to an autocratic system is a religious instinct: the kingship is of the divine type of which Dr. Frazer has collected the amplest evidence. And this was certainly the type of the most ancient kingship that we can discover in the Mesopotamian region. The ancient kings of the Isin dynasty dared to speak of themselves as “the beloved consort of Nana.”119.1 But more usually the king was regarded as the son or fosterling of the divinity, though this dogma need not have been given a literal interpretation, nor did it clash with the well-established proof of a secular paternity. An interesting example is the inscription of Samsuilina, the son of Hammurabi, who was reigning perhaps as early as the latter part of the third millennium:119.2 the king proclaims, “I built the wall in Nippur in honour of the goddess Nin, the walls of Padda to Adad my helper, the wall of Lagab to Sin the god, my begetter.” The tie of the foster-child was as close as that of actual sonship; and Assurbanipal is regarded as the foster-child of the goddess of Nineveh. Nebo himself says to him in that remarkable conversation between the god and the king that an inscription has preserved,119.3 “weak wast thou, O Assurbanipal, when thou sattest on the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh, and didst drink from her four breasts.” Similarly, the early King Lugalzaggisi declares that he was nourished by the milk of the goddess Ninharsag, and King Gudea mentions Nina as his mother.119.4 In an oracle of encouragement given by the goddess Belit to Assurbanipal, she speaks to him thus, “Thou whom Belit has borne, do not fear.”120.1