And now, in Babylonia, we find that almost exactly the same thing happened. Shamash was their name for the sun-god, the Egyptians' Ra. Then there was a {58} god whom they called Merodach, or Marduk: he was the god of Babylon. But Babylon was not always a great city. The earliest capital city was south of Babylon. So Marduk was only as one god among many. But then, as Babylon grew and became the great centre, Marduk came to be regarded as the great god of all the country, exactly as had happened with Osiris in Egypt. And then, again just as in Egypt, they began to look on Shamash and on Marduk as two forms of one and the same great deity. Thus, it is wonderful how like each other were the guesses at truth in the two empires. Bel-Merodach, as he was sometimes called (Bel or Baal means Lord), became of such immense importance that the king was never considered to be properly appointed as ruler until he had been received by Merodach at Babylon, in the god's great temple there. The Assyrian kings, whose capital was Nineveh, in the north of Babylonia, when they had conquered their former masters of Babylon, still came to Babylon and paid their homage to the Babylonian god. But, again as in Egypt, there were a number of other gods besides Marduk, in other places, whose authority was considered very powerful just in these places; and there were other heavenly bodies besides Shamash, the sun, that had worship. There was Sin, the moon, and especially there was Ishtar, the planet Venus, the Ashtaroth that you read of in the Bible. Ishtar was goddess of the spring and of all the life-giving forces in Nature. And in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were immense numbers of priests, and their power was great. They were occupied in the ceremonies to the gods, and in care of the temples, and a great part of their time was {59} taken up in watching the stars and planets. They saw that many of the happenings on earth depended on the heavenly bodies--the sun made the seed grow in the damp warm earth; perhaps they knew that the moon affected the tides. At all events they saw that certain events on earth happened at the same time as certain other events in the heavens; so they grew to think that the earthly happenings were caused by the changes of the planets in the sky far more than they are. [Sidenote: Astronomy] But this mistaken idea about the influence of the stars on the earth had the excellent effect that it made these old Babylonian priests to be great star-gazers. They were great astronomers, and in spite of their errors made great steps in knowledge. And because you can go very little way in astronomy without mathematics, they became mathematicians too. We owe a great deal to what these wise men of the East, watching the stars so long ago, found out for us.