Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia. 289
and its Semitic population was therefore probably large. Harran,
the other seat of the moon-god, was equally beyond the limits of
Babylonia, and guarded the high road of commerce and war that
led from the East to the West. But the name Harran,“the road,”
is Babylonian, and, like its temple and god, the city doubtless
owed its origin to Babylonian colonists. They probably came
from Ur.
The moon-god of Ur is called the son of En-lil of Nippur,
and it may be therefore that Nippur was the mother-city of Ur.
But it must be remembered that whereas Ur was built on the
desert plateau of Arabia, Nippur stood among the marshes of
the Babylonian plain. Its sanctuary could not have been founded
before the marshes had been, at all events, partially drained,
and the inundating rivers been regulated by dykes and canals.
A settlement on the higher and drier ground would seem more
naturally to precede one in the pestiferous swamps below it,
and the fact that Ur was the neighbour of Eridu seems to point
to its early foundation and connection with the old seaport of
the country. At the same time the worship of the moon-god is
associated with the Semites of Arabia and the west rather than
with Eridu, whose god revealed himself to mankind by day and
not in the shades of night.^246
It was right and fitting, however, that the moon-god should [316]
be“the firstborn”of the god of Nippur. The realm of En-lil was
in the underground world of darkness, and the spirits over whom
he had ruled plied their work at night. Naturally, therefore, it was
from him and the dark world which originally belonged to him
(^246) Cf. Hommel,Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, ii. pp. 149-165. Hommel
has proved, with the help of the Minæan inscriptions, that primitive Semitic
religion consisted of moon and star worship, the moon-god Athtar and an
“angel”god standing at the head of the pantheon, while the sun-goddess was
attached to them as daughter or wife. The supreme Baal of the Western Semites
was thus originally the moon-god, a fact that throws light on his cult at Ur
and Harran, which lay outside Babylonia proper, and were inhabited by a large
West Semitic population.