326 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniaguarding the waters of life, while the Igigi or angels dwelt rather
with the gods in the heaven of light and blissfulness. It was on
this account that Assur-nazir-pal calls Nin-ip“the champion of
the Igigi,”and that elsewhere the god receives the title of“chief
of the angels.”But it was only in the later ages of Babylonian
religion, when the Semitic conception of divinity had become
[356] predominant, that a distinction was made between the spirits of
the earth and the air. It was only for the Semites that there were
spirits of the underworld and angels of heaven; the Sumerian had
known no difference between them; they were all alike Anunnas
or spirits, and Nin-ip had been lord, not of the Igigi alone, but
of the Anunna-ki as well.^280 He had, in fact, been one of them
himself; he was the minister and attendant of En-lil, and it was
never forgotten that, like the Anunna-ki, he was the“offspring
of Ê-kur,”the name at once of the temple of Nippur and of
the underground world of Hades. Sometimes he is said to have
sprung from Ê-sarra,“the house of the (spirit)-hosts.”He had
been a ghost in Nippur before he was transformed into a Semitic
god.
But he had been a ghost who was associated with the dawn,
and he thus became identified in the early Semitic age with the
rising sun. His solar character raised him to the rank of a Baal,
and, consequently, of a god. His older attributes, however, still
clung to him. He was a sun-god who had risen out of the earth
and of the darkness of night, and in him, therefore, the darker and
more violent side of the sun-god was reflected.^281 He became
essentially a god of war, and as such a special favourite of the
Assyrian kings. He it was who carried destruction over the earth
(^280) For the Anunna-ki and Igigi, see above, p. 344.
(^281) The solar character of Nin-ip was first pointed out by myself in the
Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, ii. (1873) p. 246, and again
in my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 152, 153. He was probably called Bêr in Assyrian,
but the Cilician Nineps shows that he was also known by his Sumerian title of
Nin-ip. See my paper in theProc. SBA.xx. 7, pp. 261, 262.