Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple. 431
require that the worshipper should enter their presence naked and
defenceless. But they retained all their other kingly rights. A tithe
of all that the land produced was theirs, and it was rigorously
exacted, for the support of the temples and priests. Babylonia, in
short, was the inventor of tithe.
Why it should have been a tenth we cannot say. The numerical
system of the Babylonians was sexagesimal and duodecimal, not
decimal, and the year consisted of twelve months, not of ten.
Perhaps the institution went back to a period when the year of
twelve months had not yet been fixed, and, like the lunar year
of the modern Mohammedan, it still possessed but ten months.
However this may be, the tithe became a marked characteristic
of Babylonian religious life. It was paid by all classes; even
the king and his heir were not exempt from it. One of the
last acts of the crown prince Belshazzar was to pay the tithe,
forty-seven shekels in amount, due from his sister to the temple
of the sun-god at Sippara, at the very moment when Cyrus was [470]
knocking at the gates of Babylon.^369 It is probable that the daily
sacrifices were provided for in great measure out of the tithe; at
all events, Assur-bani-pal tells us that after the suppression of
the Babylonian revolt, he levied upon the people the provision
needed for the sacrifices made to Assur and Beltis and the gods
of Assyria. They were, however, often endowed specially; thus
Nebuchadrezzar made special provision for the daily sacrifice of
eight lambs in the temple of Nergal at Cuthah; and an earlier king
of Babylonia describes how he had increased the endowment of
the stated offerings at Sippara.
The daily sacrifice was called theaatttûku, a term which goes
back to the age when the Semite was first mingling with the
older Sumerian.^370 There were other terms in use to denote the
(^369) The tithe was paid on the 5th of Ab; on the 16th of Tammuz, nineteen days
earlier, Gobryas had entered Babylon with the soldiers of Cyrus.
(^370) A more comprehensive term wasginû,“the fixed offering,”which included
not only the daily sacrifices, but all other stated sacrifices as well.