COVERNMENT AND RELIGION. The government of Assyria was, as everywhere in the ancient orient, a monarchy in which the king was the undisputed autocrat. Everything centred in the monarch, and it is characteristic that, in the royal inscriptions detailing the campaigns, names of officers or officials are rarely mentioned. The king does everything, and in the pictorial repre sentations is always placed in the foreground. Yet we know that in many campaigns the rulers themselves were not present. and that the or ganization of the vast armies necessarily in volved delegating a large measure of authority to subordinates. The large cities had governors appointed by the king, and what did not fall directly tinder royal control was regulated by the priests, who were the judges of the courts, the scribes, the medical advisers, as well as the intermediaries between the gods and the people. The religion of the Assyrians was identical with that of Babylonia. Starting out with nature worship, the particular object of nature per sonified—primarily the sun or the moon—be came associated with a specific place, and as that place grew in importance, the deity who was the special patron of the place also as sumed greater significance. In this way the chief deity worshiped in the ancient capital Ashur ( Asshur, Assur), the name of whom was likewise Ashur, became the chief of the Assyrian pantheon, just as in the south Marduk, as the pa tron deity of the city of Babylon, became the head of the Babylonian pantheon. When the capital was transferred from Ashur to Caleb, and sub sequently to Nineveh, the worship of Ashur was too firmly established to permit of any change, and so the god moved to the new capital, just as he left the capital with the Assyrian armies and accompanied them from place to place. The
large temples that grew up in Assyria en tailed an elaborate organization of priests, which was modeled, as was the religious architecture, upon Babylonian prototypes. In the ritual prob ably some originality displayed in Assyria, though the methods of ascertaining the will of the deity, by means of oracles and omens, were practically identical in the north and south. Special prayers. however, were composed by As syrian priests to fit conditions prevailing in the north.
The dependence of Assyria upon Babylonia in everything pertaining to intellectual life is illus trated in the copies which Assyrian kings, no tably Asurbanipal, had prepared of the vast literary productions—legends, epics, omen col lections, medical compilations, text-books. etc.— which were the work of Babylonian priests, and formed the archives in the temples of Babylonia. The Assyrian priests likewise controlled the legal organization of the Empire; and the temples of the north, as in the south, were also the de positories in which records of commercial trans aetions, of legal disputes, of official procedure su•h as division of estates, marriage settlements, forms of adoption, and the like—were kept. The material used for writing was clay, readily fur nished by the soil, which was baked after the chareeters had been inscribed, and which proved to be most durable. See CUNEIFORM IxscnirrioNs.