| Babylon - Akkad Berossus (c. 350 B.C - 281 BC) was a priest of Babylon, who lived on the island of Cos and opened a school. His book Babyloniaka, was dedicated to Antiochus I who reigned 292-262 BC. Berossus wrote the book to give the Greek people an understanding of Babylonian history. Unfortunately, his book was lost in the passage of time and the history it contained (of the Deluge) was left to us through Alexander Polyhistor, a Greek of the 1st century BC, who quoted Berossus in his writings. Well, this book of Polyhistor’s was lost as well but that work was quoted in Eusebius, especially in Chronicles, which comes to us through an Armenian translation. (52) We currently derive the majority of our understanding of Babylon from the writings that remain of Berossus. Babylonian culture had greatly improved learning than the earlier Sumer culture. According to Lambert and Miller: “Babylonian literature first developed in the early centuries of the second millennium, which are rightly considered its classical period. While Sumerian was still taught in the schools and was used by scribes, Babylonian was the everyday language and despite some literary archaism there is reason to believe that literary idioms and popular speech were closer than at any other time. This was, then, a period comparable with 5th century Athens, when great poets were competing for the drama prizes in the public theatre. It was an age of much literary creativity.” (53) Herodotus reported that the women of Babylon around 450 BC, made love to a stranger only once in her life as an initial sexual experience then married and stayed faithful from then on. (Or was supposed to at least) And Lucian, around AD 150, wrote that women of that time took strangers as lovers only on the feast day of Adonis. (54) The expansion of ancient Babylonia occurred simultaneously as that of ancient Assyria. The languages of the Akkadians was that of Sumer, while the Assyrian dialect was competing. (55) I quote here from Cyrus Gordon, in Before the Bible, on early language history: “The Akkadians borrowed the Sumerian system of writing and absorbed many Sumerian loanwords into the Akkadian language. Moreover, Sumerian remained the classical language of Akkadian culture throughout the 2500 years that Akkadian texts continued to be written in cuneiform. When this script was borrowed by the Hittites, the scribes of Anatolia continued to use Sumerian as well as Akkadian word-signs, even though the reader was supposed to pronounce them in Hittite. Sumerian as well as Akkadian words were borrowed into the Hittite language. Wherever the Akkadian influence spread (among the Hurrians, Hittites, Elamites, Canaanites and still farther afield in the Aegean and Egypt), the Sumerian impact was felt.” (56) Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigning from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. He conquered the city-states of Elam, Larsa, Eshnunna, and Mari. He ousted King Ishme-Dagan I of Assyria and took over most of Mesopotamia. (57) Hammurabi was credited in history with the Code of Hammurabi, which he claimed to have received from Shamash. |
Joseph Campbell, author of the Masks of God series, a “myth master,” who has written extensively on comparative religion and mythology, points out how this new role of the god-king was used to promulgate the Laws of Hammurabi by linking the king with the god Marduk: “When exalted Anu [god of the firmament], king of the angels, and Bel [god of the world mountain], who is the lord of heaven and earth; when these, who determine the destinies of the land, committed the sovereignty over all people to Marduk, who is the first-born of Ea; when they made Marduk great among the great gods; when they proclaimed his exalted name to Babylon, made Babylon unsurpassable in the regions of the world, and established for him in the midst an everlasting kingdom whose foundations are as firm as heaven and earth. “At that time Anu and Bel called to me, Hammurabi, the pious prince, worshipper of the gods, summoning me by name, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to wipe out the wicked and evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the human race, to illuminate the land, and to further the welfare of mankind.” (58) Next to Ea, Marduk was the most prominent healing divinity in Babylonia. (59) He had a temple at Babylon called E-Sagila (“Lofty House”) which was well known and attended. In all of the texts relating to him, the methods of healing are by purification, incantation and exorcism. (60) His name Marduk, amar-utu, means “bull calf of the sun god Utu (Shamash),” (61) making him another bovine mushroom deity. In the Babylonian Creation myth, Marduk slays Tiamat, the dragon of the deep, and cuts her into two halves to make the heavens and the earth. Here we have the example of the rise of a male god in the pantheon to the status of “hero” for slaying a goddess. This may indicate the more pronounced shift toward Patriarchy in Babylon. We have already seen how Sumerian culture was moving in this direction in their social fabric. (62) (52) Atra-Hasis; The Babylonian Story of the Flood, W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Eisenbrauns, Indiana, 1999, p. 134 (53) ibid, p. 24 (54) When God was a Woman, p. 159-60 (55) Before the Bible, p. 28 (56) ibid, p. 48 (57) ibid, p. 28 (58) Occidental Mythology, p. 74-76; Robert F. Harper, The Code Of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1904); Bruno Meissner, Babylon und Assyrian, II (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1920-25), p. 46; O.E. Ravn, Acra Orientalia, VII (1929), p. 81-90: Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd Ed. 1951), p. 14 (59) Zimmern, in ERE, ii, 312 (60) Healing Gods, p. 124-25 (61) Helmer Ringgren, (1974) Religions of The Ancient Near East, Translated by John Sturdy, The Westminster Press, p. 66 (62) Soma, Divine Hallucinogen, p. 16 |