of
Nippur; and the "spirit" of the deep into Ea of Eridu. The change was
hastened by contact with the Semite. The Semite brought with him a new
religious conception. He believed in a god who revealed himself in the
sun, and whom he addressed as Baal or "Lord." By the side of Baal stood
his colourless reflection, the goddess Baalath, who owed her existence
partly to the feminine gender possessed by the Semitic languages, partly
to the analogy of the human family. But the Baalim were as multitudinous
as their worshippers and the high-places whereon they were adored; there
was little difficulty, therefore, in identifying the gods and "spirits"
of Sumer with the local Baals of the Semitic creed.

El-lil became Bel of Nippur, Asari or Merodach Bel of Babylon. But in
taking a Semitic form, the Sumerian divinities did not lose their old
attributes. Bel of Nippur remained the lord of the ghost-world,
Bel-Merodach the god who "raises the dead to life" and "does good to
man." Moreover, in one important point the Semite borrowed from the
Sumerian. The goddess Istar retained her independent position among the
crowd of colourless female deities. Originally the "spirit" of the
evening-star, she had become a goddess, and in the Sumerian world the
goddess was the equal of the god. It is a proof of the influence of the
Sumerian element in the Babylonian population, that this conception of
the goddess was never forgotten in Babylonia; it was only when
Babylonian culture was handed on to the Semitic nations of the west that
Istar became either the male Atthar of southern Arabia and Moab, or the
emasculated Ashtoreth of Canaan.

The official religion of Babylonia was thus the Baal-worship of the
Semites engrafted on the animism of the Sumerians. It was further
modified by the introduction of star-worship. How far this went back to
a belief in the "spirits" of the stars, or whether it had a Semitic
origin, we do not know; but it is significant that the cuneiform
character which denotes "a god" is a picture of a star, and that the
Babylonians were from the first a nation of star-gazers. In the
astro-theology of a later date the gods of the pantheon were identified
with the chief stars of the firmament, but the system was purely
artificial, and must have been the invention of the priests.

The religion and deities of Babylonia were adopted by the Assyrians. But
in Assyria they were always somewhat of an exotic, and even the learned
class i