in Babylon and performed the
time-honoured ceremony of "taking the hand of Bel" as a symbol of his
homage to the ancient head of the Babylonian pantheon.

But for the substitution of Assur for Marduk, the Assyrian pantheon was the
same as that set up in the south, though some of the gods were endowed with
attributes which differ slightly from those which mark the same gods in the
south. The warlike nature of the Assyrians was reflected in their
conceptions of the gods, who thus became little Assurs by the side of the
great protector of arms, the big Assur. The cult and ritual in the north
likewise followed the models set up in the south. The hymns composed for
the temples of Babylonia were transferred to Assur, Calah, Harran, Arbela
and Nineveh in the north; and the myths and legends also wandered to
Assyria, where, to be sure, they underwent certain modifications. To all
practical purposes, however, the religion of Assyria was identical with
that practised in the south.

We thus obtain four periods in the development of the Babylonian-Assyrian
religion: (1) the oldest period from [v.03 p.0114] _c._ 3500 B.C. to the
time of Khammurabi (_c._ 2250 B.C.); (2) the post-Khammurabic period in
Babylonia; (3) the Assyrian period (_c._ 2000 B.C.) to the destruction of
Nineveh in 606 B.C.; (4) the neo-Babylonian period beginning with
Nabopolassar (625-604 B.C.), the first independent ruler under whom
Babylonia inaugurates a new though short-lived era of power and prosperity,
which ends with Cyrus's conquest of Babylon and Babylonia in 539 B.C.,
though since the religion proceeds on its undisturbed course for several
centuries after the end of the political independence, we might
legitimately carry this period to the Greek conquest of the Euphrates
valley (331 B.C.), when new influences began to make themselves felt which
gradually led to the extinction of the old cults.

In this long period of _c._ 3500 to _c._ 300 B.C., the changes introduced
after the adjustment to the new conditions produced by Khammurabi's union
of the Euphratean states are of a minor character. As already indicated,
the local cults in the important centres of the south and north maintained
themselves despite the tendency towards centralization, and while the cults
themselves varied according to the character of the gods worshipped in each
centre, the general principles were the same and the rites differed in
minor details rather than in essential variation