I.

Introduction

Babylonian Religion, moral and supernatural beliefs and ritual practices of the ancient Babylonians (see Babylonia). The cosmogony and cosmology of Babylonian religion—that is, the gods and demons, cults and priests, and moral and ethical teachings—were taken almost entirely from the Sumerians (see Sumer). The Babylonians, however, whose dominant ethnic strain was Amorite, undoubtedly modified many of the borrowed Sumerian religious beliefs and practices in accordance with their own cultural heritage and psychological disposition. To cite only two outstanding examples, it was the military success and political drive of the Semitic Amorites that made the city of Babylon the religious and cultural center of the land and that gave the Amorite god Marduk preeminence in the Babylonian pantheon. Nevertheless, the Babylonian theologians found it necessary to justify Marduk's newly acquired exalted position by the legal fiction that his Sumerian predecessors, the gods An and Enlil, had themselves officially transferred their powers to him.