Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar. 307
as seemed to him good. Originally the first among his peers,
he ended—at least in the belief of the native of Babylon—in
becoming supreme over them, and absorbing into himself all the
attributes and prerogatives of divinity.
It was not, however, till the closing days of Babylonian
independence that an attempt was made to give outward and
visible expression to the fact. Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon
and the nominee of its priesthood, took the images of the gods
from their ancient shrines and carried them to Babylon. There, in
the temple of Merodach, they formed as it were his court, bowing
in reverence before him, when, on the festival of the New Year,
he announced the destinies of the future. It was an effort to
centralise the religion of the country, and give public proof of the
supremacy of the god of Babylon. Like the parallel endeavour of
Hezekiah in Judah, the attempt of Nabonidos naturally aroused
the hostility of the local priesthoods; and, when Cyrus invaded
the country, there was already a party in it ready to welcome him
as a deliverer, and to maintain that Merodach himself had been
angered by the sacrilegious king. The attempt, indeed, came too
late, and Nabonidos was too superstitious and full of respect for
the older sanctuaries and gods of Babylonia to carry it out in
other than a half-hearted way. But it indicated the tendency of
religious thought, and the direction in which the official worship [335]
of Merodach was irresistibly bearing its adherents. Merodach,
like his city, was supreme, and the older gods were surely passing
away.
The tendency was checked, however, by the long continuity
of Babylonian history. Babylonian records went back far beyond
the days when Babylon had become the capital of the kingdom.
It was remembered that there had been other centres of power,
in ages when as yet Babylon was but an obscure village. It was
never forgotten that the god of Nippur had once made and unmade
kings, that Akkad had been the seat of an empire, or that Ur had
preceded Babylon as the capital of the ruling dynasty. Babylonian