The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

416 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

mountains than in the plain, and the memory of its birthplace
was preserved by religious conservatism. Thezigguratof the
temple goes back to the days when the gods were still gods of the
mountain, and the builders of the temple sought to force a way
into the heavenly Olympos by raising artificially an imitation
of the mountain on the alluvial plain. The tower was a mimic
representation of the Ê-kur, or mountain of the earth itself, where
En-lil,“the god of the great mountain”(sadu rabu), had his seat.
And the earth could have been figured as a mountain only by the
inhabitants of a mountainous land.
But this conception of the world of gods and men stands in
[453] glaring contrast to the cosmology of Eridu. There the primeval
earth was not a mountain peak, but the flat lands reclaimed from
the sea. The gods and spirits had their home in the abysses of
the ocean, not in the dark recesses of a mountain of the north;
the centre of the world was the palace of Ea beneath the waves,
not“the mountain-house”of En-lil, or the dark caverns of“the
mountain of Arallu.”Once more we are confronted by a twofold
element in Babylonian thought and religion, and a proof of its
compound nature. Like the contradictory elements in Egyptian
religion, which can best be explained by the composite character
of the people, the contradictory elements in Babylonian religion
imply that mixture of races which is described in the fragments
of Berossos.
In the tower orziggurat, accordingly, we must see a reflection
of the belief that this nether earth is a mountain whose highest
peak supports the vault of the sky. Around it float the stars
and clouds, concealing the heaven of the gods from the eyes of
man. But this Olympian heaven was really an afterthought. It
was not until the ghosts of the lower world had developed into
gods, and been transferred from the heart of the mountain to its
summit, that it had any existence at all. It belongs to the age
of astro-theology, to the time when the moon and sun and host
of heaven became divine, and received the homage of mankind.