ies were personifications of natural phenomena, whose worship
through various circumstances became associated with particular
localities, there was an additional reason for the survival, and,
indeed, growing importance of such local cults, quite independent of the
political fortunes that befell the cities in which the gods were
supposed to dwell.

As a consequence, there are a considerable number of deities who are met
with both at the beginning and at the end of the first period of
Babylonian history--a period, be it remembered, that, so far as known,
already covers a distance of 2,000 years. These are of two classes,
(_a_) deities of purely local origin, surviving through the historical
significance of the places where they were worshipped, and (_b_)
deities, at once local in so far as they are associated with a fixed
spot, but at the same time having a far more general character by virtue
of being personifications of the powers of nature. The jurisdiction of
both classes of deities might, through political vicissitudes, be
extended over a larger district than the one to which they were
originally confined, and in so far their local character would tend to
be obscured. It would depend, however, upon other factors, besides the
merely political ones, whether these cults would take a sufficiently
deep hold upon the people to lead to the evolution of deities, entirely
dissociated from fixed seats, who might be worshipped anywhere, and
whose attributes would tend to become more and more abstract in
character. Such a process, however, could not be completed by the silent
working of what, for want of a better name, we call the genius of the
people. It requires the assistance, conscious and in a measure pedantic,
of the thinkers and spiritual guides of a people. In other words, the
advance in religious conceptions from the point at which we find them
when the union of the Babylonian states takes place, is conditioned upon
the infusion of the theological spirit into the mass of beliefs that
constituted the ancient heritage of the people.

On the other hand, various circumstances have already been suggested
that cooeperated, already prior to the days of Hammurabi, in weeding out
the superfluity of deities, at least so far as recognition of them in
the official inscriptions of the rulers were concerned. Deities,
attached to places of small and ever-diminishing importance would, after
being at first adopted into the pantheon by