ving become a nation of traders and seafarers, naturally
adopted the nocturnal heaven and guiding stars as their chief object of
worship. It does not seem improbable that it was to the less degrading
association of the female principle with the nocturnal heaven(99) that
woman owed, in lapse of time, the higher position she was accorded in the
countries directly influenced by the Phoenician civilization, and notably
in Greece and Rome.

In Phoenicia, Astarte-Ishtar became the goddess of love and marriage. In
Babylonia-Assyria the high-priestess, the living representative of the
goddess, who, like the planet-goddess, periodically retired into darkness
and seclusion and led a shadowy existence, appears to have originally
shared equal honors with the "lord of earth" and to have delivered
oracular utterances in subterraneous chambers. Throughout Babylonia, New
Year's Day, which coincided with the beginning of the rainy season, was
the occasion of "the marriage of the god and the goddess" _par
excellence_, a rite which symbolized the "meeting of Heaven and Earth."
Circumstantial evidence seems to prove, moreover, that, as in Peru, the
annual consecrated union of the male and female personification of heaven
and earth was followed by the marriage of young persons throughout the
land, a custom which furnishes another indication of the original
existence of an annual mating season for the human race. As it was at this
period also that the priesthood approached the papakhu, the inner
sanctuary, also termed the "assembly-room," "chamber of the oracle" and
"of fates," and transmitted to the people the irrevocable decrees of
Marduk, it seems as though these ancient rulers practised a similar
"abundance of lying and deceit for the advantage of the governed" as that
advocated by Plato in his Republic;(100) exerted a stern control over the
alliances formed and the number of marriages celebrated and endeavored to
make these, as far as possible, sacred. The mere record that the Assyrian
king Ashurbanipal claims to be the offspring of a pair of divinities
personifying heaven and earth, appears to show that he was the offspring
of the sacred divine union of the high priest and priestess, _i. e._ of
divine birth. It is interesting to collate a few disconnected facts which
appear to illustrate the natural and inevitable result of the institution
of two cults ruled by separate representatives.

Sin-Gashid, of the dynasty of Uruk, mentions a t