The Sumerian records leave no possibility of doubt as to offerings of fish being made to the deities, not exclusively or specially to a deity of fish. They show Eannatum in early days offering at Telloh certain fish to various gods to secure their aid that the treaty which he had just concluded with the city of Umma might be maintained for all time unbroken.

Similar offerings present themselves all through the history of Assyria. Numerous tablets detailing the nature of the enjoined offerings include fish, and as numerous receipts by the temples acknowledge offerings of fish.[969] In the course of time votive offerings in ivory and bronze, etc., according to King, took the place of actual fish.[970]

The striking resemblance of the institution of the Scape-Goat in Palestine to the ancient Mashhulduppu or Babylonian Scape-Goat, both in object and high ceremonial ritual, is noted in my Jewish chapter.[971] But we cannot for one moment assume that sacrifices and oblations in Assyria evolved from perhaps the earliest primitive, i.e. human, sacrifice, or followed the same lines as those of Israel or of Rome. In the first nation human sacrifice probably prevailed in the earlier times to a wide extent, and in the second (as Varro indicates) “Populus pro se ignem animalia mittit,” and even “pisciculum pro animis humanis” became a not unusual and cheaper alternative.[972]

On the other hand, we possess, in historic and prehistoric Assyria, no trustworthy evidence of human sacrifice. Sayce, it is true, in 1875 published two texts, which, as he translated, demonstrated that human sacrifice did prevail. These, refuted by Ball, are not accepted as even a proper translation of the passage, much less a proof of the practice.

Jastrow has recently returned to the charge. He suggests that, “His eldest son shall he burn at the Khamm of Adad,” and other passages, establish that at one time children were offered in sacrifice, very much on the same lines as the later Judæan immolation of their children to Moloch, as when King Ahaz (2 Kings xvi. 3) “made his son to pass through the fire” in the Tophet just outside the gates of Jerusalem. But Jastrow finds even less favour now than Sayce did forty years ago.[973]

Campbell Thompson, after remarking that the existence of human sacrifice among either the Babylonian or Assyrian is not easy of satisfactory proof, concludes, “The fact is that human sacrifice goes out in proportion as civilisation comes in, and probably by the time men are ready to commit their religious ritual to writing, human sacrifice has ceased to be a regular and periodic rite: as the Assyrians were the highest civilised of all the Semites before our era, so in all probability fewest traces of this custom exist in their records.”

A semi-religious practice, not dissimilar in object to that of the Scape-Goat, can be discerned, if not as a vehicle for carrying away all the sins of the people, yet as a method of ridding the individual by the agency of some beast or fish of the affliction which lay upon him.

In one of the so-called Penitential Psalms or incantations, which the tablets from the library of Asur-bani-pal bequeath us, the prayerful desire to be free of suffering finds utterance in:—

This whole passage ought, however, to be regarded not as a Penitential Psalm so much as “a ceremony for cleansing a man from tabu, when he wishes to see something in a dream. It finds close connection with the Levitical charm, originating from sympathetic magic, e.g. for cleansing the leper or leprous house,” i.e. by the two doves, as in Leviticus xiv. 4.[974]

Langdon asserts that in the Sumero-Babylonian religion each individual in normal conditions was guided by a divine spirit or god (cf. the δαὶμων of Socrates and the genius of the Romans). When a man was possessed by the powers of evil he was estranged from his personal god, because some demon had attacked or driven out the protecting deity from his body. In this ancient period there seems to be no moral element whatever in the case. If a man became tabu (which the eating of fish in other countries than Assyria would involve), or possessed by some dangerous unclean power, which made him unholy and filled him with bodily or mental distress, this state came about solely because at some unguarded moment a demon had expelled the indwelling god.

The demon had to be exorcised by some method of atonement, of which the most important element was in Sumerian magic water, in Hebrew blood. “In view of the great influence which Babylonian magic appears to have exerted upon the Hebrew rituals, it is curious it did not succeed in banishing this gross Semitic practice. Blood of animals does not occur as a cleansing element in Babylonia,” an omission due apparently to the culture of the Sumerians “not permitting such crude ideas, and to their teaching those Semites with whom they came in contact a cleaner form of magic.”[975]

In addition to the demons or spirits described above we find others, which could and, unless the proper rites were paid to the dead, did affect the living. The greatest misfortune which could befall a man was to be deprived of proper burial.[976] His shade, ran the common belief, could not reach Arallū, but wandered disconsolately about the earth. When driven by pangs of hunger it perforce ate the offal or leavings of the street. As the Egyptians, to ensure the continued existence of the dead and his ka, provided sepulchral offerings (the depictments of which included fish[977]), so did the Babylonians, not only for a similar but also for the additional purpose of preserving themselves from torments.

To leave a body unburied was not unattended with danger to the living. The shade of the dead man might bewitch any person it met and cause him grievous sickness. The wandering shade of a man was called ekimmu, i.e. spectre. Only sorcerers possessed the power of casting a spell whereby the ekimmu might be made to harass a man. On the other hand, the spectre sometimes settled on a man of its own accord, in the hope that its victim would be driven to give it burial to free himself from its clutches.[978]

The Babylonian conception of the condition of the dead was an utterly joyless one. Arallū, or the House of the Dead, was dark and gloomy. Its dwellers never beheld the light of the sun, but sat in unchanging gloom. The Babylonians possessed no hope of a joyous life beyond the grave, nor did they imagine a paradise in which the deceased would live a life similar to that on earth.

The nature of the under-world can be gathered from the description given to Gilgamesh by the spirit of Enkidu risen from the grave (sometimes cited as an instance of necromancy), “the place where was the worm that devoured, and where all was cloaked in dust.”[979] The Hymn of the Descent of Ishtar into Hell goes farther:

The very curious bronze of the Le Clerq collection in Paris, in which ichthyic garments and gods of the under-world, Arallū, occur, must be my excuse for this too lengthy and almost fishless digression on the Babylonian dead. It shows several figures, two clad in garments of the form of a fish, with their scales very visible.

Two explanations of the bronze have been offered. The first, hitherto generally accepted, suggests that the figures are representations of the gods of the under-world, or of the dead waiting on a sick person, together with some demons of the under-world and two priests wearing fishlike raiment.[981]

My friend Professor Langdon has furnished me with another explanation, more detailed and more interesting.

This so-called representation of a scene in the lower world from a bronze talisman has been misunderstood. The obverse has three registers. In the upper register are depicted the seven devils, all with animal heads, in attitude of ferocious attack upon a human soul. The middle register represents a sick man who is supposed to be possessed by the seven devils. He lies upon a bed. At his head and feet stand two priests each arrayed to appear like fish: these are symbolic of Ea, god of the sea and patron of all magic. They clothed themselves in a fishlike robe to signify that they derived their divinations and incantations from the sacred water, of which Ea was the god.

In the lower register are drawings of cult utensils, such as holy water bowls, censers, etc., and of the fever demon Labartu, who has been driven from the body of the man and is in flight by boat. The reverse of this bronze has in deep relief one of the seven devils who is in the act of peering over the upper edge of the bronze, and gazing upon the scene of atonement and magical healing below.

The cuneiform texts prescribe that fumigation, either for cleansing a person or exorcising a demon, may be performed by the wizard, with or without a censer, a bowl, or lighted torch.[982]

Apart from its permeation of Israel in legislation as indicated in connection with Hammurabi’s Code, the influence of Assyria stands out in other ways clearly. The semi-similarity of treatment of the Deluge has already been noticed, while the rendering in the stories of Sargon and Moses of a widespread legend[983] differs only in such points of detail as the substitution of the Nile or (according to Arabic tradition) of a fish-pond for the Euphrates, and of the irrigator Akki as the discoverer of the chest of reeds for Pharaoh’s daughter.[984]

The assertion that the Old Testament is fairly saturated with Babylonian culture and folklore, and that even in the days of the New Testament we have not passed beyond the sphere of its impression hardly overshoots the mark, when the similarity of these and other instances is borne in mind.

The earliest point of contact between Babylon and Palestine is recorded in Genesis xiv. 1, which makes Abraham the contemporary of “Amraphel King of Shinar,” who most probably can now be identified with Hammurabi in the light of the recent discoveries of Kugler.[985]

The first connection of Israel with Assyria proper occurs in the reign of Shalmaneser II., in whose Monolith Inscription figures, as one of the allies of Benhadad I. of Damascus, the name of Ahâbbu Sir’lai, generally identified with Ahab, King of Israel.

Fish are discovered playing a part in auguries and divinations very similar to their rôle in Rome. Augury in both nations was regarded with deep veneration. It reached in Assyria a very high plane. It was practised as a recognised science by a large and organised body of the priesthood under the direct control and patronage of the King.

All strange occurrences in heaven or earth were referred to the seers. Almost every event of common life was believed by the pious Babylonian to require prophetic decision whether it boded well or ill.

Among the reforms undertaken by Urukagina was that of the college of the diviners, for he tells us that “he, who hitherto received one shekel for his work, took money no more.”

In the letters of Hammurabi these diviners were recognised as a regular Guild. Knowledge of the tablets of recorded answers, which, suiting the individual circumstances of each interrogator, had for generations been stored in the library, enabled them to render an interpretation of practically all events. Their forecasts had resort not only to astrology, but to other means, such as the observations of the movements of fish, of the flight of birds, and of the entrails and livers of sheep and other sacrificial animals, all of which were the subject of minute inspection.

The Babylonians in seeking to determine the future watched carefully the movements, etc., of fish. Although the greater part of the known divination tablets regarding fish omens are in a sad state of preservation, the following will serve as an example: “If fish in a river keep in a school and steadily face up stream, in that place will be peaceful habitation,” a deliverance hardly fraught with comfort at times of flood or drought!

Then again the passage (in Ezekiel xxi. 21-22), “The King of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver,” etc., is of great interest, as evidence that the Babylonians employed both Belomancy or divination by arrows, and Hepatoscopy or inspection of the liver.

Belomancy was practised by other nations,[986] notably in Arabia (as witness Mohammed’s command against the use of arrows, “an abomination of Satan’s work!”)[987] more frequently than in Babylonia. There it attained but secondary importance. The general method required the shaking or shuffling before the image or the sacred place of the deity of a set of arrows. In the temple of Mecca the three important arrows were named, The Commanding, The Forbidding, The Waiting.

Hepatoscopy: the liver among the Assyrians, the Jews,[988] the Greeks, and the Etruscans,[989] contested with the heart the honour of being the central organ of life. Its convulsive movements, when taken from the sacrificed victim, gave warnings of the future. So sacred was the liver held in Israel, that eating it was forbidden: it had to be returned to the Giver of Life.[990]

Fish were early utilised for the calendar of the year. The signs of the Zodiac showing Pisces, possibly derived from connection with the god of water, and Scorpio, possibly representing one of the Crustacea, date back to c. 3000 b.c.[991]