Outside the inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria, there is but little
bearing upon the religion of those countries, the most important
fragment being the extracts from Berosus and Damascius referred to
above. Among the Babylonian and Assyrian remains, however, we have an
extensive and valuable mass of material, dating from the fourth or
fifth millennium before Christ until the disappearance of the
Babylonian system of writing about the beginning of the Christian era.
The earlier inscriptions are mostly of the nature of records, and give
information about the deities and the religion of the people in the
course of descriptions of the building and rebuilding of temples, the
making of offerings, the performance of ceremonies, etc. Purely
religious inscriptions are found near the end of the third millennium
before Christ, and occur in considerable numbers, either in the
original Sumerian text, or in translations, or both, until about the
third century before Christ. Among the more recent inscriptions--those
from the library of the Assyrian king Aššur-bani-âpli and the later
Babylonian temple archives,--there are many lists of deities, with
numerous identifications with each other and with the heavenly bodies,
and explanations of their natures. It is needless to say that all this
material is of enormous value for the study of the religion of the
Babylonians and Assyrians, and enables us to reconstruct at first hand
their mythological system, and note the changes which took place in
the course of their long national existence. Many interesting and
entertaining legends illustrate and supplement the information given
by the bilingual lists of gods, the bilingual incantations and hymns,
and the references contained in the historical and other documents. A
trilingual list of gods enables us also to recognise, in some cases,
the dialectic forms of their names.