The one outstanding feature of the Babylonian religion of Khammurabi’s time was the unique position assigned to Marduk in the Babylonian pantheon. Marduk owed his exaltation to what we may without undue levity call local interest. The dynasty of which Khammurabi was so illustrious a monarch was the first dynasty of the city of Babylon itself; and Marduk the local god of Babylon naturally shared in the good fortune and prosperity of the people over whose welfare he presided. To Marduk belonged the real credit, honour and glory of his people’s success, what wonder then that he should be accorded the post of honour in the hierarchy of heaven! Other gods indeed existed, and received such attention as befitted their inferior position, but their light was as that of a planet compared with the dazzling radiance of the midday sun, while a monotheistic tendency sprang up, fostered by a desire to attribute to Marduk such marvellous performances as the creation of the world, performances which had hitherto been ascribed to the older gods of Southern Mesopotamia. But reverence and respect for the traditions of a heroic past precluded the possibility of dishonouring the gods who had made that past so glorious, and the only way to satisfy the religious aspirations of Marduk’s devotees on the one hand, and maintain the loyalty due to the time-honoured gods of Babylonian infancy on the other, was to identify the latter with Marduk; had this process of identification been carried to its logical conclusion it would have resulted in the evolution of a monotheism as exclusive and as simple as the most dogmatic Unitarianism of to-day. Fortunately or unfortunately such was not the case; the practical sequence of the tendency was realized in the identification of Marduk with the ancient god of Nippur, but apart from that, the tendency remained a tendency and nothing more. Notwithstanding this fact however, Marduk’s supremacy was so firmly established, and his position so impregnably secured, that the passing changes and chances of some two thousand years were unable to oust him from his high estate, and it is to Marduk that Cyrus, the vanquisher of Babylon’s last native king, and the fated heir to her evanescent empire, ascribes the triumphant victory which attended his arms. He recorded the acknowledgment of his obligations to the lord of E-sagil on a clay cylinder now preserved in the British Museum.