velopment
of new architectural styles; but the Assyrians, so dependent in
everything pertaining to culture upon the south, could not cut
themselves loose from ancient traditions, and continued to erect huge
piles of brick, as the homage most pleasing in the eyes of their gods.
The Book of Genesis characterized the central idea of the Babylonian and
Assyrian temples when it represented the people gathered in the valley
of Shinar--that is, Babylonia--as saying: 'Come, let us build a city and
a tower that shall reach up to heaven.'[1312] The Babylonian and
Assyrian kings pride themselves upon the height of their temples.
Employing, indeed, almost the very same phrase that we find in the Old
Testament, they boast of having made the tops of their sacred edifices
as high as 'heaven.'[1313] The temple was to be in the literal sense of
the word a 'high place.' But, apart from the factor of natural growth,
there was a special reason why the Babylonians aimed to make their
sacred edifices high. The oldest temple of Babylonia at the present time
known to us, the temple of Bel at Nippur, bears the characteristic name
of E-Kur, 'mountain house.' The name is more than a metaphor. The sacred
edifices of Babylonia were intended as a matter of fact to be imitations
of mountains. It is Jensen's merit to have suggested the explanation for
this rather surprising ideal of the Babylonian temple.[1314] According
to Babylonian notions, it will be recalled, the earth is pictured as a
huge mountain. Among other names, the earth is called E-Kur, 'mountain
house.' The popular and early theology conceived the gods as sprung from
the earth. They are born in Kharsag-kurkura,[1315] 'the mountain of all
lands,' which is again naught but a designation for the earth, though at
a later period some particular part of the earth, some mountain peak,
may have been pictured as the birthplace of the gods, much as among the
Indians, Persians, and Greeks we find a particular mountain singled out
as the one on which the gods dwell. The transfer of the gods or of some
of them to places in the heavens was, as we saw,[1316] a scholastic
theory, and not a popular belief. It was a natural association of ideas,
accordingly, that led the Babylonians to give to their temples the form
of the dwelling which they ascribed to their gods. The temple, in so far
as it was erected to serve as a habitation for the god and an homage to
him, was to be the reproduction of the cosmic E-