Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar. 315
religion, she was also the Istar of the popular creed, of the creed
of that part of the population, in fact, which was least intermixed
with Semitic elements and least influenced by Semitic beliefs.
It was amongst this portion of the nation that the old Sumerian
animism lingered longest and resisted the purer teaching of the
educated class. The Semitic conceptions which underlay the
worship of Istar at Erech were never thoroughly assimilated by
it; all that it could do was to create a parody and caricature of the
official cult, adapting it to those older beliefs and ideas which
bad found their centre in the temple of En-lil. The black Istar
was a Sumerian ghost masquerading in Semitic garb.
As Bel attracted to himself the other gods, appropriating their
names and therewith their essence and attributes, so Istar attracted
the unsubstantial goddesses of the Babylonian pantheon. They
became mere epithets of the one female divinity who maintained
her independent existence by the side of the male gods. One by
one they were identified with her person, and passed into the
Istarât, or Istars, of the later creed. Like the Baalim, the Istarât
owed what separate individuality they possessed to geography.
On the theological side the Istar of Nineveh was identical with
the Istar of Arbela; what distinguished them was the local sphere
over which they held jurisdiction. The difference between them
was purely geographical: the one was attached to a particular [344]
area over which her power extended, and where she was adored,
while the other was the goddess of another city—that was all.
It was the same goddess, but a different local cult. The deity
remained the same, but her relations, both to her worshippers
and to the other gods, were changed. There is no transmutation
of form as in Egypt, but a change of relations, which have their
origin in geographical variety.
In Babylonia, however, Istar was not so completely without
a rival as she was in Assyria. There was another city of ancient
fame which, like Erech, was under the protection of a goddess
rather than of a god. This was one of the two Sipparas on the