Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar. 311
wife of the sun-god was the goddess Â. But  had once been the
sun-god himself, and texts exist in which he is still regarded as a
god. Sumerian grammar was genderless; there was no distinction
in it between masculine and feminine, and the divine names of
the Sumerian pantheon could consequently be classified by the
Semite as he would. He had only to apply a feminine epithet
to one of them, and it forthwith became the name of a goddess.
Sippara already had its sun-god Samas: there was no room for
another, and  accordingly became his wife. But in becoming
his wife she lost her individuality; her attributes and powers were
absorbed by Samas, and in the later Semitic theology she serves [339]
only to complete the divine family or triad.
Istar succeeded in escaping any such effacement or
degradation. Her worship was too deeply rooted in Babylonia,
and too intimately associated with the religious traditions of the
past. The same historical reasons which prevented monotheism
from developing out of Babylonian polytheism prevented Istar
from degenerating into an Ashtoreth. At times she came
perilously near to such a fate: in the penitential psalms we
find the beginnings of it; and, when Babylon became the head
of the kingdom, the supremacy of Merodach threatened the
independence and authority of Istar even more than it threatened
those of the other“great gods.”But the cult of Istar had been
fixed and established long before Merodach was more than a
petty provincial god; she was the goddess and patroness of
Erech, and Erech had once been the capital of a Babylonian
empire. It was needful that that fact should be forgotten before
Istar could be dethroned from the position she held in the religion
of Babylonia, whether official or popular.
All attempts to find a Semitic etymology for the name of Istar
have been a failure. We must be content to leave it unexplained,
and to recognise the foreign character both of the name and
of the goddess whom it represented. In Babylonia the name
was never Semitised; the character of the goddess, on the other