Each people was permitted to carry back with it its ancestral gods.  The Jews alone had no images to take; the sacred vessels of the temple of Jerusalem were accordingly given to them.  It was a faithful remnant that returned to the land of their fathers, consisting mostly of priests and Levites, determined henceforward to obey strictly the laws of their God, and full of gratitude to their deliverer.  In Jerusalem Cyrus thus had a colony whose loyalty to himself and his successors could be trusted, and who would form, as it were, an outpost against attacks on the side of Egypt.

As long as Cyrus and his son Kambyses lived Babylonia also was tranquil.  They flattered the religious and political prejudices of their Babylonian subjects, and the priesthood saw in them the successors of a Sargon of Akkad.  But with the death of Kambyses came a change.  The new rulers of the empire of Cyrus were Persians, proud of their nationality and zealous for their Zoroastrian faith.  They had no reverence for Bel, no belief in the claim of Babylon to confer a title of legitimacy on the sovereign of western Asia.  The Babylonian priesthood chafed, the Babylonian people broke into revolt.  In October B.C. 521 a pretender appeared who took the name of Nebuchadrezzar II., and reigned for nearly a year.  But after two defeats in the field, he was captured in Babylon by Darius and put to death in August 520.  Once more, in B.C. 514, another revolt took place under a second pretender to the name of “Nebuchadrezzar the son of Nabonidos.”  The strong walls of Babylon resisted the Persian army for more than a year, and the city was at last taken by stratagem.  The walls were partially destroyed, but this did not prevent a third rebellion in the reign of Xerxes, while the Persian monarch was absent in Greece.  On this occasion, however, it was soon crushed, and E-Sagila, the temple of Bel, was laid in ruins.  But a later generation restored once more the ancient sanctuary of Merodach, at all events in part, and services in honour of Bel continued to be held there down to the time when Babylon was superseded by the Greek town of Seleucia, and the city of Nebuchadrezzar became a waste of shapeless mounds.

Babylonian religion was a mixture of Sumerian and Semitic elements.  The primitive Sumerian had believed in a sort of animism.  Each object had its zi or “spirit,” like men and beasts; the zi gave it its personality, and endowed it, as it were, with vital force.  The zi corresponded with the ka or “double” of the Egyptians, which accompanied like a shadow all things in heaven and earth.  The gods themselves had each his zi; it was this alone that made them permanent and personal.  With such a form of religion there could be neither deities nor priests in the usual sense of the words.  The place of the priest was taken by the sorcerer, who knew the spells that could avert the malevolence of the “spirits” or bring down their blessings upon mankind.