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 {201} 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. The evidence here quoted justifies us in attributing fanaticism to the religious temper of Babylonia and Assyria; not because the wars were evangelising, undertaken in the service of religion, but because the savage cruelty that accompanied them is deemed, as it is in the early Hebraic view, acceptable to the national gods. The idea of divine mercy is potent in the liturgies; but neither morality nor religion would appear to have inculcated any mercy towards the alien foe; and this lack {202} of moral sympathy may be termed a passive fanaticism. The same fanatic temper might be traced in the savagery of the punishments for offences against the State-religion, and was reflected also at times in the legal code.[202.1]