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was elaborated in the schools. Astronomy, like all other sciences,
was under the control of the priests, the observatory rose by the
side of the school within the precincts of the temple, and the
dependence of the calendar on the observations of the astronomer
gave them a religious character. Moreover, the astro-theology of
Babylonia did not go back to primeval times. The identification
of the official gods with the heavenly bodies belongs to an
age when the official religion had already been crystallised into
shape, and a map of the heavens had been made. We can almost
watch its rise and trace its growth.
Nevertheless the rise and growth are of far earlier date than
was formerly imagined. Astro-theology was not a mere learned
scheme of allegorised science, the plaything of a school of
pedants; it exercised a considerable influence upon the religion
of Babylonia and upon the history of its development. It had,
moreover, a background in the faith of the people. Like the rivers
and streams, the stars also were really worshipped,^387 and the
symbols drawn on the seal-cylinders show that this worship must
go back to the oldest period of Babylonia. Even the ideograph
that denotes“a god”represents an eight-rayed star. The fact is [481]
significant. At the time when the pictorial hieroglyphics were
first being formed out of which the cuneiform characters were to
grow, the star was already the symbol and representative of the
divine. It was not as yet the more general and abstract“sky,”
it was the particular star that was adored as a god. Babylonian
religion, as far back as its written history leads us, really begins
with Sabaism.
How is this fact to be reconciled with the further fact that the
gods of Babylonia were once spirits and ghosts, thezi's of Eridu
and thelil's of Nippur? To this question no answer at present is
possible; at most we can only suggest that thezi, or spirit, was
localised in the star. A spirit of the sun was as conceivable as a
(^387) So in the second book of theSurpuseries (WAI.iv. 59, Col. ii. 106, Col. iv.
7-9, translated in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 508, 509);WAI.iii. 66.a9, 13.