The religions of ancient Egypt and BabyloniaSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Religion
The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Assyro-Babylonian religion; Egypt -- Religion
Both at Larsa and at Sippara the temple of the sun-god was called
Ê-Babbara,—Bit-Uri in Semitic,—“the house of light.” At Sippara it had
been founded or restored by Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon of Akkad, in the
early days of Semitic supremacy. The Sumerian Utu had already become the
Semitic Samas, and clothed himself in the attributes of a Semitic Bel. And
therewith he had necessarily taken to himself a wife. This was Â, who, in
becoming the consort of a Semitic Baal, was compelled to change her sex.
For the Sumerian  was a male god, a local sun-god, in fact, whom
Professor Jastrow suggests may originally have been the sun-god of one of
the separate villages out of the amalgamation of which the city of Sippara
arose.(247) Sumerian grammar, however, did not recognise gender; so far as
outward form was concerned, the same word, as in English, might be
indifferently masculine or feminine, and there was therefore nothing in
the name of  itself which would forbid the foreigner from dealing with it
as he would. Samas of Sippara needed a wife, and Â, despite her male
origin, was accordingly given to him. But the gift was fatal to  herself.
She lost her individuality, and became the mere double of her husband.
Samas absorbed her attributes and worship, and gradually she sinks out of
sight, or survives only in the works of theological antiquarians or in the
literature of the past.(248)
Hadad, the third in the second triad of the Babylonian State religion, had
no city which he could peculiarly call his own. He had developed out of
the Sumerian spirits of the storm, who revealed themselves in the raging
wind or the tempest of rain. More than one elemental spirit or demon had
gone to his making and there was consequently no single sanctuary in which
his cult had been handed down from the beginning of time. Wherever the
storm raged or the deluge descended, Hadad was to be found, like the
spirits from whom he had descended.
Under the influence of Semitic ideas he gradually became the god of the
air. His old character, indeed never deserted him; up to the last he
remained the divine power, who not only gave the fertilising rain in the
thunder, and he carried the forked lightning in his hand. God of the air
though he was, he continued to be the storm-god as well.
The god of the storm was naturally the god of the mountains. When the
armies of Babylonia first made their way to the West, they found
themselves in a land of mountains, where the storm burst suddenly upon
them, and the streams flowed swollen with rain into the sea. Here,
therefore, in the land of the Amorites the Babylonian seemed to have
discovered the true home of the god he worshipped. Hadad was an Amorite
rather than a Babylonian, and the title, accordingly, by which he was most
frequently addressed in early days was that of “the Amorite god.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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