st, his worship suffers no
interruption. Shamash, moreover, maintains his original character with
scarcely any modification throughout this long period. For all that, he
bears a name which signifies 'attendant' or 'servitor,' and which
sufficiently shows the subsidiary position that he occupied in the
Babylonian pantheon. One of the rulers belonging to the dynasty of Isin
calls the sun-god, the offspring of Nannar,--one of the names of the
moon-god,--and the last king of Babylonia, Nabonnedos, does the same. In
combination with the moon-god, the latter takes precedence of
Shamash,[52] and in the enumeration of the complete pantheon, in the
inscriptions of both Assyrian and Babylonian kings, the same order is
preserved. Other evidence that points to the superior rank accorded to
Sin, the moon-god over the sun deity in Babylonia, is the reckoning of
time by the moon phases. The day begins with the evening, and not with
sunrise. The moon, as the chief of the starry firmament, and controlling
the fate of mankind, was the main factor in giving to the orb of night,
this peculiar prominence. The 'service,' accordingly implied in the name
of Shamash appears to have been such as was demanded by his subsidiary
position to the moon-god. Beyond the general recognition, however, of
this relationship between the two, it does not appear that the worship
paid to Shamash, was at all affected by the secondary place, that he
continued to hold in the theoretically constructed pantheon. Less than
is the case with the other gods, is he identified with any particular
city, and we therefore find in the most ancient period, two centers of
Southern Babylonia claiming Shamash as their patron saint,--Larsa,
represented by the mound of Senkereh, and Sippar, occupying the site of
the modern Abu-Habba. It is difficult to say which of the two was the
older; the latter, in the course of time, overshadowed the fame of the
former, and its history can be traced back considerably beyond the
sun-worship at Larsa, the first mention of which occurs in the
inscriptions of rulers of the second dynasty of Ur (_c._ 2900 B.C.).
Since Ur, as we shall see, was sacred to the moon-god, it is hardly
likely that the Shamash cult was introduced at Larsa by the rulers of
Ur. The kings of Ur would not have forfeited the protection of Sin, by
any manifestation of preference for Shamash. When Ur-Gur, therefore,
tells us that he 'built' a temple to Shamash at Larsa, he must mea