434 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniabetween the religious law of Babylonia and that of the Israelites.
They may be traced in the numerous festivals of the calendar,
and the time of year at which they were held. Foremost among
them was the festival of the New Year. Babylonia was primarily
[473] an agricultural community, and the festivals of its gods, like
the names of the months, were determined by the necessities of
agriculture. Spring and autumn were marked by the sowing of
the seed and the garnering of the harvest. But neither the one nor
the other took place in all parts of the country at the same time
of the year. In the south the harvest might be gathered in when
the corn was sown in the north, or the seed sown when in colder
regions the harvest was gathered in.
Hence it was that the same festival might commemorate either
the beginning or the end of the agricultural year. But in either
case it was a period of rejoicing and rest from labour, of thanking
the gods for their benefits, and offering them the first-fruits of
the field. In the old days of Gudea of Lagas the year commenced
with the festival of the goddess Bau in the middle of October;
in the later Babylon of Khammurabi the feast was transferred to
the spring, and the first month of the year began in March. But
the older calendar of Babylonia had been already carried to the
West, and there preserved in a country to whose climatic and
agricultural conditions it was really inapplicable. The ancient
Canaanitish year began in the autumn in what the later calendar
reckoned the seventh month. It was not, however, till after the
final unification of the country under Khammurabi that a fixed
and uniform calendar was imposed upon all the sanctuaries of
Babylonia. At an earlier epoch the great sanctuaries had each
its own calendar; the months were variously named, and the
deities to whom the festivals were dedicated were not always the
same.^377 At Lagas it was Bau to whom the festival of the New
[474] Year was sacred; at Babylon it was Merodach.
(^377) On the early Babylonian calendar, see Radau,Early Babylonian History,
pp. 287-307.