ss, 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
absorbing the role of the old Bel, is still bound to acknowledge the
fathership of Ea. For a time he has to fear the rivalry of Nabu, and we
have seen that during the Cassitic rule, the glory of Marduk is somewhat
dimmed. The god who comes to stand at the head of the Assyrian
pantheon--Ashur--suffers from none of these restrictions. He is
independent of other gods and is under no obligatio