76 SEMITIC LANGUAGE 



guages, but we should not expect any particular one of them to pre- 

 serve the original language in its purity, but all alike to change and 

 modify it. Neither should we expect the postulated original one-God 

 idea to be preserved in one out of all the tribes of the earth, and to 

 be sunk so completely beneath the religious consciousness of all the 

 other tribes as to be irrevocably lost to them. That supposition is 

 possible only by the help of another sheer assumption, namely, that 

 of a perpetual miracle which operated to preserve an idea in the 

 minds of the few in order that they might give it back again in the 

 course of the ages to the many, all of whom had it at the beginning. 

 What does our earliest historical literature in the field of Semitic 

 study teach us on this question of a primitive monotheism? In Baby- 

 lonia, at least, it teaches us what from other considerations we had 

 reason to anticipate. One of the many important results achieved 

 by the expedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania to 

 Babylonia was its discovery in Nuffar, the site of the ancient Nippur, 

 of some of the earliest royal inscriptions that have yet come down to 

 us. An inscription of one of these kings, Lugalzaggisi, who, about 

 4000 B.C., ruled over a territory almost as vast as that of the later 

 Sargon I, was brought to light. It contained over one hundred and 

 thirty-two lines and was written upon scores of large vases which 

 the king's piety had prompted him to present to the old national 

 sanctuary in Nippur. This king calls himself the priest of Ana, that 

 is, the sky-god. He was looked upon by the faithful eye of Lugal- 

 kurkura, that is, Bel. Intelligence was given to him by Ea, the son 

 of Bel, or the Babylonian Hermes. He was invested with power by 

 Utu, the sun-god, and nourished by Ninharsag, the great Abarakku 

 of the gods. It is highly probable that this Bel, whose epithet here is 

 "lord of the mountains" or "lord of lands," was in early times an 

 astral deity, in fact, the sun-god, although an earlier designation of 

 Bel was Enlil, "lord of demons." In any case, the story of Tiamat, 

 which represents the primeval conflict in which the gods of darkness 

 were assailed by the gods of light, the story of the struggle by which 

 cosmic order was wrested from the body of Chaos this story 

 appears to have passed through different recensions, and, in one 

 or more of them, Bel seems to have been the hero, and, if so, he was 

 in early times a god of light. This would make it all the easier for 

 the priestly schools to transfer to the solar deity Marduk, the god of 

 Babylon, the attributes of Bel when Babylon acquired the political 

 ascendency among the city kingdoms which had long struggled 

 for supremacy. This same Bel was worshiped in other early Baby- 

 lonian cities, in Erech, and Kish, for example, and Sin, the moon-god, 

 was the chief deity of the ancient city of Ur, and of the north Meso- 

 potamian sanctuary in Harran. The temple of Bel at Nippur was 

 erected, if the estimate of its excavators be correct, as early as 6000 



