Comparing both the fuller and the restricted list with the Babylonian pantheon during the two periods treated of in the preceding chapters, we are struck by three facts: (1) the smaller compass of the Assyrian pantheon; (2) the more restricted introduction of what, for want of a better term, we may call minor deities; and (3) the small number of new deities met with. To take up the latter point, the only gods in the above list that are not found in Babylonian inscriptions are Ashur, Gibil, Gamlat, Dibbarra, Kadi, Nusku, Shala, Shanitka. Of these it is purely accidental that Gibil, Dibbarra, Nusku, and Shala are not mentioned, for, except those that are foreign importations, they belong to Babylonia as much as to Assyria and fall within the periods of the Babylonian religion that have been treated of. Kadi is a foreign deity.[226] Shanitka(?) may only be a title of some goddess, and Shalman (or Shalmannu) occurs only in proper names, and may likewise be only a title of some god.[227] There remains, as the only god peculiar to Assyria, the god Ashur. But for this god, the Babylonian and the Assyrian pantheon are identical. When we come, however, to the position held by the gods in the pantheon, their relationship to one another, and the traits which secured for them popular and royal favor, the differences between the Babylonian and the Assyrian phases of the religion will be found to be more accentuated. As for the smaller compass of the Assyrian pantheon, we may recognize in this a further advance of the tendency already noted in the second period of the Babylonian religion. There, too, we found the minor local cults yielding to the growing influence and favor of certain gods associated with the great centers of Babylonian life, or possessing attributes that accorded more with the new political order and the general advance of culture. One of the chief factors in this tendency towards centralization was, as we saw, the supremacy accorded to Marduk in the new empire as the patron god of the capital, and that not only led to his absorbing the role of other deities,[228] but resulted also in strengthening the belief that there were only a limited number of deities upon whose power and willingness to aid dependence could be placed. This tendency was in a measure offset by the pride that the rulers of the second Babylonian period still took in parading at times, as large a number as possible of deities under whose protection they claimed to stand. As we pass from one age to the other, the number of minor deities thus invoked also tends to diminish, and the occasions likewise when they are invoked become limited to the more solemn invocations at the beginning and the close of inscriptions. Now, in Assyria we have much the same political conditions as in Babylonia, only intensified. Here, too, we have one god towering above the others, only to a still greater degree even than Marduk in Babylonia. Marduk, while