Lecture I. Introductory. 247
of religion, but of culture as well, and this culture was essentially
religious. For unnumbered centuries the gods of Nippur and
Eridu were acknowledged as supreme by all the inhabitants of
the country, whatever might be their race or the particular local
divinities they adored, and the religious teaching of the priests
of Nippur and Eridu was accepted as the inspired utterances [269]
of heaven. When Babylon became at length the capital of a
united monarchy under an Arabian dynasty, the ancient gods of
Nippur and Eridu yielded to itsparvenudeity only under protest;
despite the fact that the city of Merodach had been the leader
in the national war of independence, Merodach himself had to
be identified with the son of Ea of Eridu, and the title of Bel
which he wrested from El-lil of Nippur was never acknowledged
at Nippur itself. There at least the old“Lord of the ghost-world”
still remained for his worshippers the“Lord”of all the gods.
The title had been given him by the Semites, though the
sanctuary in which he was worshipped was of Sumerian or
non-Semitic foundation. The fact introduces us to the last
point on which I wish to touch in the present lecture. The
population of Babylonia was not homogeneous. The Chaldæan
historian Berossos tells us how, at the beginning of the world,
races of various origin were gathered together in it; and the
statement has been fully confirmed by the monuments. Two
main races were represented in the country. One of these,
usually termed Sumerian, spoke an agglutinative language, and
came, perhaps, from the mountainous regions of Elam; the other
were the Semites, whose first home was, I believe, in Arabia.
The Sumerians were the first in the land. To them were due
the elements of Babylonian civilisation; they were the first to
drain the marshes and cultivate the soil, to build the temples
and cities, and to invent—or at all events to develop—that
system of pictorial writing out of which the cuneiform characters
gradually arose. They were, too, the first to carry the culture
they had created among the neighbouring populations of Western