With the progress of civilisation, certain of the “spirits” emerged above the rest, and became veritable gods.  The “spirit” of heaven became Ana of Erech, the Sky-god; the “spirit” of earth passed into El-lil of Nippur; and the “spirit” of the deep into Ea of Eridu.  The change was hastened by contact with the Semite.  The Semite brought with him a new religious conception.  He believed in a god who revealed himself in the sun, and whom he addressed as Baal or “Lord.”  By the side of Baal stood his colourless reflection, the goddess Baalath, who owed her existence partly to the feminine gender possessed by the Semitic languages, partly to the analogy of the human family.  But the Baalim were as multitudinous as their worshippers and the high-places whereon they were adored; there was little difficulty, therefore, in identifying the gods and “spirits” of Sumer with the local Baals of the Semitic creed.

El-lil became Bel of Nippur, Asari or Merodach Bel of Babylon.  But in taking a Semitic form, the Sumerian divinities did not lose their old attributes.  Bel of Nippur remained the lord of the ghost-world, Bel-Merodach the god who “raises the dead to life” and “does good to man.”  Moreover, in one important point the Semite borrowed from the Sumerian.  The goddess Istar retained her independent position among the crowd of colourless female deities.  Originally the “spirit” of the evening-star, she had become a goddess, and in the Sumerian world the goddess was the equal of the god.  It is a proof of the influence of the Sumerian element in the Babylonian population, that this conception of the goddess was never forgotten in Babylonia; it was only when Babylonian culture was handed on to the Semitic nations of the west that Istar became either the male Atthar of southern Arabia and Moab, or the emasculated Ashtoreth of Canaan.

The official religion of Babylonia was thus the Baal-worship of the Semites engrafted on the animism of the Sumerians.  It was further modified by the introduction of star-worship.  How far this went back to a belief in the “spirits” of the stars, or whether it had a Semitic origin, we do not know; but it is significant that the cuneiform character which denotes “a god” is a picture of a star, and that the Babylonians were from the first a nation of star-gazers.  In the astro-theology of a later date the gods of the pantheon were identified with the chief stars of the firmament, but the system was purely artificial, and must have been the invention of the priests.

The religion and deities of Babylonia were adopted by the Assyrians.  But in Assyria they were always somewhat of an exotic, and even the learned class invoked Assur rather than the other gods.  Assur was the personification of the old capital of the country and of the nation itself, and though the scribes found an etymology for the name in that of An-sar, the primaeval god of Sumerian cosmogony, the fact was always remembered.  Assur was purely Semitic in