Part II. The Religion Of The Babylonians.
Lecture I. Introductory.
It is now fourteen years ago since I delivered a course of
lectures for the Hibbert Trustees on the religion of the ancient
Babylonians. The subject at that time was almost untouched;
even such materials as were then accessible had been hardly
noticed, and no attempt had been made to analyse or reduce
them to order, much less to draw up a systematic account of
ancient Babylonian religion. It was necessary to lay the very
foundations of the study before it could be undertaken, to fix
the characteristic features of the Babylonian faith and the lines
along which it had developed, and, above all, to distinguish the
different elements of which it was composed. The published texts
did not suffice for such a work; they needed to be supplemented
from that great mass of unpublished cuneiform documents with
which the rooms of our museums are filled. My lectures were
necessarily provisional and preliminary only, and I had to content
myself with erecting a scaffold on which others might build. The
time had not yet come for writing a systematic description of
Babylonian religion, and of the phases through which it passed
[253] during the long centuries of its existence.
Nor has the time come yet. The best proof of this is the
unsatisfactory nature of the attempts that have recently been
made to accomplish the task. Our evidence is still too scanty