The evidence of Anatolia is late, but it tells the same story: Sir
William Ramsay has emphasised the {118} importance for early political
history of such names as Hieroupolis, the City of the Temple,
developing into Hierapolis, the Holy City.[118.1] In Hellas the
evidence is fuller and older of the religious origin of some, at
least, of the πόλεις, for some of the old names reveal the personal
name or the appellative of the divinity. Such are Athenai (the
settlements of Athena); Potniai, “the place of the revered ones”;
Alalkomenai, “the places of Athena Alalkomene”; Nemea, “the sacred
groves of Zeus”; Megara, probably “the shrines of the goddess of the
lower world”; Diades, Olympia and others. The reason of such
development is not hard to seek: the temple would be the meeting-place
of many consanguineous tribes, and its sanctuary would safeguard
intertribal markets, and at the same time demand fortification and
attract a settlement. Mecca, the holy city of Arabia in days long
before and after Islam, had doubtless this origin.[118.2] We have
traces of the same phenomenon in our English names: Preston, for
instance, showing the growth of a city out of a monastery. In the
later history of Hellenism the religious origin of the πόλεις is still
more frequently revealed by its name: the god who leads the colonists
to their new home gives his name to the settlement; hence the very
numerous “Apolloniai.”
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 {119} 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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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