The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

442 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

spirit of Ea, and the son of Ea, it must be remembered, became
a sun-god.“Theziof the god”meant originally in the primitive
picture-writing“the spirit of the star,”and the literal rendering of
the invocation in the early spells would be“the spirit of the star
who is lord of Du-azagga,” “the spirit of the star who is mistress
of the holy hill.”In the Book of Isaiah the Babylonian king is
made to say that he would enthrone himself among the gods on
the summit of the Chaldæan Olympos“above the stars of El”;
and Nin-ip, the interpreter of En-lil, was at once the sun-god
and the moon. Istar, it must not be forgotten, was primarily
the evening star; and Istar was not only supreme among the
goddesses of Babylonia, she was the type and representative of
them all. The signs of the Zodiac had once been the monster
allies of the dragon of chaos.
With all this, it may hereafter prove that the conception of
the divine as a star was introduced by a different race from
that which saw in it a spirit or a ghost. At all events, it was
a conception which the inscriptions of Southern Arabia have
[482] shown to have prevailed among the Western Semites. Professor
Hommel has made it clear^388 that the Semitic tribes to which
the Arabs of the south, the Aramæans, and the Hebrews alike
belonged, worshipped four supreme deities—Athtar, the evening
and morning star; the moon-god and its messenger or“Prophet”;
and the goddess of the sun. Athtar is the Babylonian Istar,
who has become a male god in her passage to the Semites;
and, while the people of Hadhramaut borrowed the name of Sin
from Babylonia, those of Qatabân borrowed the name of Nebo
(Anbây). Samas, the sun, has become a goddess; the moon-god
has taken the foremost place in the pantheon, and the sun has
accordingly been transformed into his colourless reflection. As
in the case of Istar, so too in that of the sun-god, the genderless
grammar of Sumerian facilitated the change. Â, the sun-god of

(^388) Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, ii. pp. 149-165.