Domenico Bassi

Domenico Bassi (C.E.1859 - 1943), Italian librarian and papirologist.

Oriental mythologies

 * The fundamental principle of the Sumerian or Sumero-Akkadian religion was a crude shamanism: the belief in evil spirits (hence the magic aimed at averting the influences), at the head of which stood the spirit of the earth, Inki, and that of the sky, Anna. From the two supreme spirits, first conceived abstractly, then personified, a great host of aquatic and luminous divinities developed, which contributed to forming the substratum, so to speak, of the later Chaldean pantheon. These divinities with strange names, many of which we still ignore the meaning and pronunciation of, were assimilated, for the most part, by the Semites of Babylon to their own, representatives of physical phenomena, over which they presided. (pp. 1-2)
 * The extraordinary quantity of divine beings, major and minor, with which the Babylonians populated the world, at first excludes that they could have believed in the existence of a single god. Even if this idea passed through the mind of some Chaldean theologian, it is certain that the people never accepted it: none (and there are many thousands) of the tablets or inscriptions on hard stones, with prayers and magical formulas, which have come to light in the excavations made among the ruins of Mesopotamian cities contain not even the remotest hint of the unity of God. (p. 7)
 * He lives in the most sublime regions of the universe, in an atmosphere never disturbed by winds or storms, always pure and serene. It is the so-called "heaven of Anu", in which during the flood [...] the gods of the intermediate spaces and of the earth seek refuge, but do not dare to go beyond the threshold. (pp. 32-33)
 * The Assyrians saw in Asur the father and king of the other gods, the god of war, author of their victories, to whom the best part of the spoils was therefore offered, the god of hunting and, it seems, of health. (p. 35)
 * Ea is the main god of the most ancient phase of the Sumerian religion, which then passed into the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon, the god who in the magical spells of conjuration is invoked as "the spirit of the earth" and more precisely of the surface terraqueous. But Ea was not only the "lord of the earth", or In-ki, his ancient original name, but also the sovereign of the region of the atmosphere, within which life takes place in all its various and multiple forms. (p. 46)
 * As god of the waters, that is, of the ocean and of all the waters of the earth, whence his titles: «the master of the waters, the lord of the coasts, the sovereign of the sea, the king, the chief, the lord of the abyss », Sumerian Ea was the protector of fishermen and sailors, a character which he also preserved in Babylonian myth and in the Assyrian cult. (p. 47)
 * From his quality as king of the waters comes his wisdom, which makes him, as we read in various hymns, "the intelligent guide, the god of pure life, the lord of knowledge, of human glory". He was considered supremely good, indeed one of his ancient names was Dugga, "the good", and supremely beneficial, as he revealed himself at the time of the flood, providing for the salvation of Sitnapistim. He was also considered as the giver of the laws according to which princes and peoples must govern themselves, and therefore as a lover of justice: hence, again in the saga of the flood, the reproach that he leveled against Bel for not having made a distinction between good and bad, between innocent and guilty. (pp. 47-48)
 * Blacksmiths and goldsmiths, weavers, stone carvers, gardeners and farmers proclaimed him their patron and teacher; the scribes saw in him the source of their science; the doctors, that is, the magicians, spoke to the spirits in his name, using prayers that they had learned from him. (p. 49)
 * Samas had precisely the office of bringing the light "of the wide space of the sky" to the gods and men during the day. For this purpose he went out every morning from the "inside of heaven" through the eastern gate. All on fire and in a chariot driven by two squires and drawn by strong mules, "whose knees do not bend", he ran rapidly up the mountain range that encircles the world, that is, along the line that divides the sky from the earth. The flaming disk, which can be seen from down here, was none other than one of the wheels of the chariot. Having completed the daily journey, the god returned through the western gate behind the metal wall, which closes the part of the sky visible to men, and there he spent the night in his home, Ebabbarra (I-babbarra, «house of Babbarra» that is «of the sun»), of which his great temple of Sippara, called Ebabbarra, was an image. (p. 63)
 * As a bringer of light, Samas was considered one of the greatest enemies of the powers of evil, born of darkness and who especially with the favor of the latter exercised their disastrous action. (p. 65)
 * Like the other major deities of the Euphratic pantheon, Samas is named in imprecative formulas, where he appears not only as god of the sun, but also as judge and terrible punisher. I limit myself to mentioning one, which is perhaps the most important and in any case valid, one can say, for all of them: «may the god Samas, judge of heaven and earth, shatter his face (the guilty person) and convert him into darkness ( ?) the splendid day." (p. 66)
 * Originally he was a solar god in general, in the local aspect the sun-god of Eridu, and his cult connected with the worship of the sun. Then when the concept of the sun in its entirety was concretized in Samas, then in Marduk the morning sun and at the same time the spring sun were seen. He later passed from Eridu to Babylon, rising to the honor of the local and tutelary god of the great metropolis. As the political and religious importance of this city grew, Marduk simultaneously rose higher and higher in the celestial hierarchy; until at the apogee of Babylon's power he appears as head of all the Mesopotamian gods. (p. 80)
 * Among all the gods of the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon he was the one who had the most widespread and long-lasting cult. It is already mentioned in the private documents of the ancient dynasties of Babylon, from which it appears that the god was venerated together with Sin and Samas. All the monarchs of the Babylonian empire competed in paying homage to him. (p. 88)
 * The cult of Marduk flourished again during the Persian lordship through the work of Cyrus, who with fine political understanding was able to make the powerful priests of the deity favorable, who remained even in the period of decline of the Chaldean empire- Babylonian the chief deity of Babylon. Cambyses, following his father's example, held the ancient god in great honor, whose city continued for a long time to be the capital of the new empire founded by Cyrus. The great sanctuary of Marduk was then sacked and destroyed by Xerxes; which marked the end of his cult. (p. 90)
 * Istar is, without dispute, one of the divinities of the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon about which we have the most information, but at the same time it is the one we know least: there were many secondary forms and contradictory aspects and its myth had such a broad and intricate development. (p. 93)
 * The deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon are deities of the living, who reward the good, i.e. pious men, and punish the bad, the impious, precisely during their lives. The reward consists, as appears from the prayers of many monarchs to their patron gods, above all in a long prosperous life not saddened by disease, in a happy old age and in numerous posterity; the punishment, in being deprived of these gifts of divine benevolence: the wicked was the mockery of the evil spirits, who tormented him with every sort of infirmity before giving him the mortal blow. But if the ideas of the Babylonian-Assyrians on the course of earthly life with respect to the condition of the good and the bad are, as can be seen, very simple and clear, the same cannot be said of their notions regarding the future life: about which the texts are silent almost at all. It was believed in the immortality of the soul, and that it felt the pain of separation from the body more, if it was mistreated or left unburied. However, there is no mention of the fate of the soul depending on the annihilation or the persistence of the body itself in the tomb. (pp. 154-155)

Bibliography:

 * Domenico Bassi, Oriental mythologies. I. Babylonian-Assyrian mythology, Ulrico Hoepli, 1899.