Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple. 415
drawn and stereotyped in writing must, it would seem, have
been a mountainous one, like the land in which the subterranean
realm of En-lil was regarded as a lofty hill. In other words,
the Sumerians must have been the inhabitants of a mountainous
country before they settled in the plain of Babylonia and laid the
foundations of the temple of Nippur.
And this mountainous country lay to the north or east, where
the mountains of Elam and Kurdistan border the Babylonian
plain. In the story of the Deluge the ark is made to rest on
the summit of the mountain of Nizir, which is probably the
modern Rowandiz, to the north-east of Assyria; and the gods
were believed to have been born in“the mountain of the world,”
in the land of Arallu.^343 Here, too, they held their court;“I will
ascend into heaven,”the Babylonian monarch is made to say [452]
in the 14th chapter of Isaiah,“I will exalt my throne above the
stars of El; I will sit also upon the mount of the assembly (of the
gods), in the extremities of the north;^344 I will ascend above the
heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.”More than
one temple in both Babylonia and Assyria took its name from
this“mountain of the world”; thezigguratat Kis was known as
“the house of the mountain of mankind,”while a temple at Ur
was entitled“the house of the mountain,”and the shrine of Gula
at Babylon was“the house of the holy hill.”^345
All over Babylonia, accordingly, the mountain is brought into
close connection with the religious cult. Not at Nippur only, but
in other cities as well, the home of the gods is on the summit
of an Olympos, within whose subterranean recesses they were
born when as yet the primitive ghost or spirit had not become a
god. Sumerian religion must have grown up rather among the
(^343) See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 360-363, where the various passages relating
to the Babylonian Olympos are quoted.
(^344) The land of Arallu or Hades.
(^345) This, however, is rather the“holy mound”of waters, in which Ea had his
home, than the inland mountain of En-lil.