ness") his
attendants; Nabu ("the teacher" = Nebo) with his consort Tasmetu ("the
hearer"); Addu, Adad, or Dadu, and Rammanu, Ramimu, or Ragimu = Hadad
or Rimmon ("the thunderer"); Bel and Beltu (Beltis = "the lord" and
"the lady" /par excellence/), with some others of inferior rank. In
place of the chief divinity of each state at the head of each separate
pantheon, the tendency was to make Merodach, the god of the capital
city Babylon, the head of the pantheon, and he seems to have been
universally accepted in Babylonia, like Assur in Assyria, about 2000
B.C. or earlier.

The uniting of two pantheons.

We thus find two pantheons, the Sumero-Akkadian with its many gods,
and the Semitic Babylonian with its comparatively few, united, and
forming one apparently homogeneous whole. But the creed had taken a
fresh tendency. It was no longer a series of small, and to a certain
extent antagonistic, pantheons composed of the chief god, his consort,
attendants, children, and servants, but a pantheon of considerable
extent, containing all the elements of the primitive but smaller
pantheons, with a number of great gods who had raised Merodach to be
their king.

In Assyria.

Whilst accepting the religion of Babylonia, Assyria nevertheless kept
herself distinct from her southern neighbour by a very simple device,
by placing at the head of the pantheon the god Assur, who became for
her the chief of the gods, and at the same time the emblem of her
distinct national aspirations--for Assyria had no intention whatever
of casting in her lot with her southern neighbour. Nevertheless,
Assyria possessed, along with the language of Babylonia, all the
literature of that country--indeed, it is from the libraries of her
kings that we obtain the best copies of the Babylonian religious
texts, treasured and preserved by her with all the veneration of which
her religious mind was capable,--and the religious fervour of the
Oriental in most cases leaves that of the European, or at least of the
ordinary Briton, far behind.

The later period in Assyria.

Assyria went to her downfall at the end of the seventh century before
Christ worshipping her national god Assur, whose cult did not cease
with the destruction of her national independence. In fact, the city
of Assur, the centre of that worship, continued to exist for a
considerable period; but for the history of the relig