ur, they contain no name which does not also belong to
Chaldaea. Nothing could be more natural. Chaldaea was the mother-country of
the Assyrians, and the intimate relations between the two never ceased for
a day. Even when their enmity was most embittered they could not dispense
the one with the other. Babylon was always a kind of holy city for the
kings of Assyria; those among them who chastised the rebellious Chaldaeans
with the greatest severity, made it a point of honour to sacrifice to their
gods and to keep their temples in repair. It was in Babylon, at Borsippa,
and in the old cities near the coast, that the priests chiefly dwelt by
whom the early myths had been preserved and the doctrines elaborated to
which the inhabitants of Mesopotamia owed the superiority of their
civilization. The Assyrians invented nothing. Assur himself seems only to
have been a secondary form of some Chaldaean divinity, a parvenu carried to
the highest place by the energy and good fortune of the warlike people
whose patron he was, and maintained there until the final destruction of
their capital city. When Nineveh fell, Assur fell with her, while those
gods who were worshipped in common by the people of the north and those of
the south long preserved their names, their fame, and the sanctity of
their altars.

The religion of Nineveh differed from that of Babylon, however, in minor
particulars, to which attention has already been called.[115] A single
system of theology is differently understood by men whose manner and
intellectual bent are distinct. Rites seem to have been more voluptuous and
sensual at Babylon than at Nineveh; it was at the former city that
Herodotus saw those religious prostitutions that astonished him by their
immorality.[116] The Assyrian tendency to monotheism provoked a kind of
fanaticism of which no trace is to be found in Chaldaea. The Ninevite
conquerors set themselves to extend the worship of their great national
god; they sacrificed by hecatombs the presumptuous enemies who blasphemed
the name of Assur. The sacrifice of chastity was in favour at Babylon, that
of life seemed to the Assyrians a more effectual offering. A soldier
people, they were hardened by the strife of centuries, by the perpetual
hardships of the battlefield, by the never-ending conflicts in which they
took delight. Their religious conceptions were, therefore, narrower and
more stern, their rites more cruel than those of their southern neighbou