Full Test Bank For Intermediate Accounting Reporting and Analysis 3Rd Edition James M Wahlen PDF Docx Full Chapter Chapter
Full Test Bank For Intermediate Accounting Reporting and Analysis 3Rd Edition James M Wahlen PDF Docx Full Chapter Chapter
Wahlen
4. The SEC uses its authority to establish accounting standards, while also enforcing regulations on
companies, exchanges, and investors.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.2 - LO: 1.2
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
5. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) began in 1973 after the AICPA phased out the Accounting
Principles Board
(APB). a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.3 - LO: 1.3
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
6.
FASB’s Emerging Issues Task Force assists and advises the FASB by identifying and addressing timely but
more narrow and specific standard setting issues.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.3 - LO: 1.3
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
KEYWORDS: Bloom's:
Remembering
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Chapter 1
7. The Codification is set up as a system of levels starting with sections, topics, and
subtopics. a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.4 - LO: 1.4
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
8. The Codification was established to assist in reducing the time necessary to research an accounting issue and
improve the ability to utilize accounting information that conforms with GAAP.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.4 - LO: 1.4
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
9. The convergence project between the IASB and GAAP was initiated in 2002 when the two boards entered into
the
“Northward
Agreement”. a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.5 - LO: 1.5
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
KEYWORDS: Bloom's:
Remembering
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Chapter 1
10. A potential issue facing the convergence project is that many companies have entered into contracts based upon
U.S.
GAAP financial reporting; many of these contracts will have to be renegotiated using IFRS which potentially
could cause some companies more harm than good.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.5 - LO: 1.5
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.6 - LO: 1.6
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
12. The statement of shareholders' equity reports the effects from the recognition or valuation of certain asset or
liability transactions that change Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.6 - LO: 1.6
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
KEYWORDS: Bloom's:
Remembering
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Chapter 1
13. “In carrying out their responsibilities as professionals, members should exercise sensitive professional and
moral judgments in all their activities.” This is the Integrity Principle of the AICPA Code of Professional
Conduct.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.7 - LO: 1.7
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
14. “Members should act in a way that will service the public interest, honor the public trust, and demonstrate
commitment to professionalism.” This is the Public Interest Principle of the AICPA’s Code of Professional
Conduct. a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.7 - LO: 1.7
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
15. Creditors' information needs revolve around all of the following decisions,
except
a. extending credit
b. maintaining a credit
relationship c. not extending
credit
d. investing in credit instruments
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ACCT.WHAL.16.1.1 - LO: 1.1
NATIONAL STANDARDS: United States - BUSPROG: Reflective Thinking
LOCAL STANDARDS: United States - OH - Default City - AICPA: FN-Decision Modeling
KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Remembering
KEYWORDS: Bloom's:
Remembering
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aloofness. Therefore, also, in Greek invocations and hymns we do
not often hear the echo of that sublimity that resounds in the Iranian,
Assyrian, and still more in the Hebrew liturgies.
Another interesting point of comparison is the relation of religion to
the arts and sciences. Their association may be said to have been
more intimate in Hellenism than it has been found to be in any other
creed. We can estimate what music and the drama owed to Apollo
and Dionysos, and how the life of the philosopher, artist, and poet
was considered consecrated to certain divinities. We hear of the
Delphic oracle encouraging philosophic pursuits. The name
“Museum” is a landmark in the religious history of education, and we
know that the temple of Asklepios in Kos was the cradle of the
school of modern medicine. The records of the other religions of this
area show glimpses of the same association, and more extended
research may throw further light on it. The Babylonian gods Nebo
and Ea were divinities of wisdom and the arts, and to the former,
who was the inventor of writing, the library of Ashurbanapal was
consecrated. Chaldean astronomy was evolved from their astrology,
which was itself a religious system. But demonology was stronger in
Assyria, Persia, and Egypt than in Hellas, and demonology is the foe
of science. In the Zend-Avesta the priestly medicine-man, who heals
by spell and exorcism, is ranked higher than the scientific
practitioner. A chapter might be written on the negative advantages
of Greek religion, and none was of greater moment than this—that it
had no sacred books or authoritative religious cosmogony to oppose
to the dawn and the development of scientific inquiry. Asklepios had
been a practitioner in the method of thaumaturgic cures, but he
accepted Hippokrates genially when the time came.
As regards the relation between Greek philosophy and Greek
religion, something may remain to be discovered by any scholar who
is equally familiar with both. It would be absurd to attempt to
summarise the facts in a few phrases here. I wish merely to indicate
the absence in pure Hellenic speculation of any elaborated system of
theosophy, such as the late Egyptian “gnosis,” till we come to Neo-
Platonism, when the Greek intellect is no longer pure. We discover
also a vacuum in the religious mind and nomenclature of the earlier
Greek: he had neither the concept nor any name to express the
concept of what we call “faith,” the intellectual acceptance and
confessional affirmation of certain dogmas concerning the divinity;
and in this respect he differed essentially not only from the Christian,
but also from the Iranian and Buddhistic votary.
A great part of the study of ancient religion is a study of ritual, and
it is interesting to survey the Mediterranean area, so as to discern
similarities or divergencies in the forms of religious service.
Everywhere we observe the blood-sacrifice of animals, and very
frequently the harmless offering of fruits and cereals, and now one,
now the other, in Greece as elsewhere, was regarded as the more
pious. The former is of the higher interest, for certain ideas which
have been constructive of higher religions—our own, for example—
have grown out of it. At first sight the animal oblation seems
everywhere much the same in character and significance. The
sacrificial ritual of Leviticus does not differ in any essential trait from
that which commended itself to the Greeks and the other peoples of
these lands. Certain animals are everywhere offered, at times as a
free and cheerful gift, at other times as an atonement to expiate sin
and to deprecate wrath. Certain other animals are tabooed, for
reasons that may repay searching out.
In most regions we have evidence of the practice of human
sacrifice, either as an established system or as an occasional
expedient. The motives that prompted it present an important and
intricate question to the modern inquirer. The two nations that grew
to abhor it and to protest against it were the Hebrew and the Greek,
though the latter did not wholly escape the taint of it; for he had
inherited the practice from his ancestral past, and he found it
indigenous in the lands he conquered. Repellent as the rite may be,
it much concerns the study of the religions of the cultured races.
Now, an interesting theory concerning sacrifice was expounded
and brought into prominent discussion by Professor Robertson Smith
in his Religion of the Semites, and in an earlier article in the
Encyclopædia Britannica—namely, that a certain type of ancient
sacrifice was a mystic sacramental communion, the worshipper
partaking of some sacred food or drink in which the spirit of the deity
was temporarily lodged. This mystic act, of which there is no clear
trace in the Old Testament, is reported from Egypt,25.1 and it appears
to have been part of the Attis ritual of Phrygia. We find doubtful
traces of it in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries; also a
glimpse of it here and there in the public religion of Hellas. But it is
best attested as a potent force in the Dionysiac worship, especially in
a certain savage ritual that we may call Thracian, but also in the
refined and Hellenised service as well.
I cannot dwell here on the various aspects of this problem. The
Hellenic statistics and their significance I have partly collected and
estimated in a paper published some years ago.25.2 The application
of the sacramental idea to the explanation of the Eleusinian
mysteries, ingeniously attempted by Dr. Jevons, I have discussed in
the third volume of my Cults of the Greek States; and the Dionysiac
communion-service is considered at length in the fifth.
The attractiveness of the mystic appeal of the Sacrament appears
to have increased in the later days of paganism, especially in its
period of struggle with Christianity. That strangest rite of the expiring
polytheism, the ταυροβόλιον, or the baptism in bull’s blood, in the
worship of Kybele, has been successfully traced back by M. Cumont
to the worship of the Babylonian Anaitis. The sacramental concept
was the stronghold of Mithraism, but can hardly be regarded as part
of its heritage from Persia, for it does not seem to have been familiar
to the Iranian religion nor to the Vedic Indian. In fact, the religious
history of no other Aryan race discloses it with clearness, save that
of the Thraco-Phrygian and Hellenic. Was it, then, a special product
of ancient “Mediterranean” religious thought? It would be important
to know, and Crete may one day be able to tell us, whether King
Minos took the sacrament. Meantime, I would urge upon those who
are studying this phenomenon in the various religions the necessity
of precise definition, so as to distinguish the different grades of the
sacramental concept, for loose statements are somewhat rife about
it.
Apart from the ritual of the altar, there is another mode of attaining
mystic union with the divinity—namely, by means of a sacred
marriage or simulated corporeal union. This is suggested by the
initiation formulæ of the mysteries of Attis-Kybele. The cult of Kybele
was connected with that of the Minoan goddess, and the strange
legend of Pasiphae and the bull-god lends itself naturally to this
interpretation. The Hellenic religion also presents us with a few
examples of the holy marriage of the human bride with the god, the
most notable being the annual ceremony of the union of the
“Queen,” the wife of the King Archon, at Athens, with Dionysos. And
in the mysteries of later paganism, as well as in certain forms and
symbolism of early Christianity, Professor Dieterich has traced the
surviving influence of this rite.
Among all the phenomena of ritual, none are more interesting or in
their effects more momentous than the rites that are associated with
the dogma of the death of the divinity. That the high gods are
naturally mortal and liable to death is an idea that is certainly rare,
though it may be found in Egyptian and old Teutonic mythology; but
the dogma of the annual or periodic death and resurrection of the
divinity has been, and is, enacted in much peasant ritual, and
worked for the purposes of agrarian magic in Europe and elsewhere.
More rarely we find the belief attached to the mystic forms and faith
of some advanced religion, and it is specially in the Mediterranean
area where it appears in a high stage of development. It is a salient
feature of the Egyptian worship of Isis; of the Sumerian-Babylonian
ritual, in which the dead Thammuz was bewailed, and which
penetrated Syria and other parts of Asia Minor; of the worship of
Attis and Adonis in Phrygia and the Lebanon; and of certain shrines
of the Oriental Aphrodite. It is associated often with orgiastic sorrow
and ecstatic joy, and with the belief in human immortality of which
the resurrection of the deity is the symbol and the efficacious means.
This idea and this ritual appears to have been alien to the native
Hellenic religion. The Hellenic gods and goddesses do not die and
rise again.
Only in one Aryan nation of antiquity, so far as I am aware, was
the idea clear and operative—the Thraco-Phrygian, in the religion of
Dionysos-Sabazios. This alien cult, when transplanted into Greece,
retained still some savagery in the rite that enacted the death of the
god; but in the Orphic sects the ritual idea was developed into a
doctrine of posthumous salvation, from which the later pre-Christian
world drew spiritual comfort and some fertile moral conceptions. This
Thracian-Dionysiac influence in Hellas, though chastened and
sobered by the sanity of the national temperament, initiated the
Hellene into a certain spiritual mood that was not naturally evoked by
the native religion; for it brought into his polytheism a higher
measure of enthusiasm, a more ecstatic spirit of self-abandonment,
than it possessed by its own traditional bent. Many civilised religions
appear to have passed beyond the phase of orgiastic fervour. It
emerges in the old Egyptian ritual, and most powerfully in the religion
of Phrygia and of certain districts of Syria; but it seems to have been
alien to the higher Semitic and the Iranian religions, as it was to the
native Hellenic.
I have only been able here, without argument or detailed
exposition, to present a short summary of the more striking
phenomena in the religious systems of our spiritual ancestors. Many
of the problems I have stated still invite further research, which may
considerably modify our theories. I claim that the subject possesses
a masterful interest both in its own right and for the light it sheds on
ancient philosophy, ancient art, and ancient institutions. And it ought
in the future to attract more and more the devotion of some of our
post-graduate students. Much remains to be done even for the
Hellenic and Roman religions, still more for those of Egypt and
Assyria. Here, in our University of Oxford, under whose auspices the
Sacred Books of the East were translated, and where the equipment
for the study is at least equal to that of any other centre of learning,
this appeal ought not to be made in vain.
CHAPTER II.
Statement of the Problem and the Evidence.
The subject I have chosen for this course may appear over-
ambitious; and the attempt to pass critical judgment upon the facts
that arise in this wide comparative survey may be thought
premature. For not only is the area vast, but large tracts of it are still
unexplored, while certain regions have yielded materials that are
ample and promising, but of which the true interpretation has not yet
been found. We have, for instance, abundant evidence flowing in
with ever-increasing volume of the Sumerian-Babylonian religion, but
only a portion of the cuneiform texts has as yet been authoritatively
translated and made available for the service of Comparative
Religion. The Hittite monuments are witnesses of primary value
concerning Hittite religion: but the Hittite script may reveal much
more that is vital to our view of it, and without the help of that script
we are not sure of the exact interpretation of those religious
monuments; but though we have recently heard certain encouraging
expressions of hope, the master-word has not yet been found that
can open the door to this buried treasure of knowledge. And again,
the attempt to gauge accurately the relation and the indebtedness of
Greek religion to that of the near East cannot be wholly successful,
until we know more of the Minoan-Mycenaean religion; and our hope
hangs here partly on the discovery of more monuments, but mainly, I
am convinced, on the decipherment of the mysterious Minoan
writing, to which great achievement Sir Arthur Evans’ recent work on
the Scripta Minoa is a valuable contribution. Therefore the time is
certainly not yet ripe for a final and authoritative pronouncement on
the great questions that I am venturing upon in this course.
But even the early premature attempts to solve a problem may
contribute something to the ultimate satisfying solution. And often in
the middle of our investigations, when new evidence continues to
pour in, there comes a moment when it is desirable to look around
and take stock, so to speak, to consider whether we can draw some
general conclusions with safety, or in what direction the facts appear
at this stage to be pointing. In regard to the religions of anterior Asia
and South-Eastern Europe, and the question of their relationships,
this is now, I feel, a seasonable thing to do—all the more because
the Asiatic region has been mainly explored by specialists, who have
worked, as was profitable and right, each in his special province,
without having the time or perhaps the training to achieve a
comparative survey of the whole. We know also by long experience
the peculiar dangers to which specialists are prone; in their
enthusiastic devotion to their own domain, they are apt to believe
that it supplies them with the master-key whereby to unlock many
other secret places of human history. This hope, soon to prove an
illusion, was regnant when the interpretation of the Sacred Vedic
Books was first accomplished. And now certain scholars, who are
distinguished specialists in Assyriology, are putting forward a similar
claim for Babylon, and are championing the view that the Sumerian-
Assyrian religion and culture played a dominating part in the
evolution of the Mediterranean civilisation, and that therefore much
of the religious beliefs and practices of the early Greeks and other
European stocks must be traced back to Mesopotamia as their
fountain-head.31.1 This will be encouraging to that distinguished
writer on Greek religion, Dr. O. Gruppe, who almost a generation ago
proclaimed in his Griechische Mythologie the dogma of the
emanation of all religion from a single centre, and the dependence of
Greece upon the near East.
Now there ought to be no prejudice a priori against such a theory,
which stands on a different footing from what I may call the Vedic
fallacy: and it is childish to allow to the Aryan, or any other racial
bias, any malignant influence in these difficult discussions. Those
who have worked for years upon the marvellously rich records of
Mesopotamian culture, whether at first hand or, like myself, at
second hand, cannot fail to receive the deepest impression of its
imperial grandeur and its forceful vitality, and of its intensity of
thought and purpose in the sphere of religion. Naturally, they may
feel, such spiritual power must have radiated influence far and wide
over the adjacent lands; and no one could maintain that South-
Eastern Europe was too remote to have been touched, perhaps
penetrated, by it. For we know that, under certain conditions, the
race-barrier falls down before the march of a conquering and
dominating religion. And now, in the new light of a wider historical
survey, instead of saying, as once was said, “What is more its own
than a people’s gods?” we may rather ask, “What is less its own than
a people’s gods?” always, however, remembering that race-tradition,
inherited instinctive feeling and thought, is very strong in these
matters, and that a people will, often unconsciously, cling to its
ancestral modes of religious consciousness and expression, while it
will freely borrow alien forms, names, and ritual.
The inquiry indicated by the title of these lectures is naturally
twofold; it may be applied either to the earlier or the later periods of
the Hellenic and Hellenic-Roman history. The question concerning
the later period, though much critical research is needed for its clear
solution, is far simpler and more hopeful: for the evidence is
immeasurably fuller and more precise, and historical dates and
landmarks are there to help. The history of the invasion of the West
by Mithraism has been masterfully stated by Cumont; the general
influence of the Anatolian religions upon Graeco-Roman society is
presented and estimated by the same writer in his Religious
Orientales; by Toutain, in his Les Cultes Paiens dans l’Empire
Romain; by our own scholar, Samuel Dill, in Roman Society in the
last Century of the Western Empire; and more summarily by
Salomon Reinach in his Orpheus. Therefore I am not going to
pursue the inquiry at this end, although I may have to notice and use
some of the later evidence. I am going to raise the question
concerning the very origins of the Hellenic religious system, so as to
test the recently proclaimed dogma of certain Assyriologists, and to
determine, if possible, whether the Orient played any formative part
in the organic development of Greek religion. For this is just the
question which, I venture to maintain, has never yet been critically
explored. From what I have said at the beginning, it is obvious that I
cannot promise final and proved results. It will be gain enough if we
can dimly discern something behind the veil that shrouds the origins
of things, can reach to something that has the air of a reasoned
scientific hypothesis, and still more if we can indicate the paths along
which one day light may come.
We may then begin at once with stating more clearly what are the
necessary conditions for a successful solution of the problem. First,
we must accomplish a thorough exploration of the religions of the
Anatolian and Mesopotamian lands; secondly, we must explore the
Minoan-Mycenaean religion, and estimate the strength of its
influence on the later period; thirdly, we must be able to decide what
beliefs and practices the Hellenes brought with them from the North;
lastly, before we can hope for any precision in our results, we must
be able to answer with some degree of accuracy a burning
chronological question: What was the date of the arrival through the
Balkans from the North of those Aryan-speaking tribes that by
mingling with the Southerners formed the Hellenic people of history?
For only then shall we be able to test the whole question, by
considering the position of the Eastern powers at this momentous
epoch. The third of these inquiries, concerning the aboriginal
religious ideas of the earliest Aryan Hellenes, is perhaps the most
troublesome of all. I may venture upon it at a later occasion, but it is
far too difficult and extensive to combine it with the others in a short
treatise. Nor can I do more than touch lightly on the Minoan-
Mycenaean period; for I wish to devote the greater part of these
lectures to the comparative survey of Greece, Anatolia, and
Mesopotamia, as this task has never yet been critically performed.
Something like an attempt was made by Tiele in his Histoire des
anciennes Religions, but when that book was written much of the
most important evidence had not yet come in.
But before beginning the exploration of any large area, whether for
the purposes of Comparative Religion, archaeology, or anthropology,
we must possess or acquire certain data of ethnography and secular
history. We must, for instance, face the chronological question that I
mentioned just above, before we can estimate the formative
influences at work in the earliest phases of Hellenic development.
Recent archaeological evidence, which I cannot here discuss,
renders us valuable aid at this critical point of our inquiry. We can no
longer relegate the earliest Hellenic invasion of Greece to a very
remote period of Mediterranean history. The arguments from the
Minoan culture, combined with the still more striking evidence, of
which the value is not yet fully appreciated, obtained by the recent
excavations of the British School on the soil of Thessaly,34.1 point to
the conviction that this, the epoch-making event of the world’s
secular and spiritual life, occurred not much earlier than 1500 B.C.
On this hypothesis, our quest becomes less vague. We can consider
what influences were likely to be radiating from the East upon the
opposite shores of the Aegean during those few centuries, in which
the Hellenic tribes were passing from barbarism to culture, and the
religious beliefs and ritual were developing into that comparatively
advanced and complex form of polytheism which is presented about
1000 B.C. in the Homeric poems. By this date we may assert that
the Hellenic spirit had evolved certain definite traits and had acquired
a certain autonomous power. While continuing always to be quickly
responsive to alien influence, it would not henceforth admit the alien
product with the submissive and infantine docility of barbarians In
fact, when we compare the Homeric religion with that of the fifth
century, we feel that in this particular sphere of the social and
spiritual life the Hellene in many essentials had already come to his
own in the Homeric period. Therefore, in trying to track the earliest
streams of influences that moulded his religious consciousness,
what was operative before the tenth century is of more primary
importance than what was at work upon him afterwards.
Now the most recent researches into Mesopotamian history
establish with certainty the conclusion that there was no direct
political contact possible between the powers in the valley of the
Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean, in the second
millennium B.C. It is true that the first Tiglath-Pileser, near the end of
the twelfth century, extended the Assyrian arms to the shores of
South-Eastern Asia, to Cilicia and Phoenicia35.1; but there does not
seem to have been any permanent Assyrian or Babylonian
settlement on this littoral. The city of Sinope in the north, which, as
the legend attests and the name that must be derived from the
Assyrian god Sin indicates, was originally an Assyrian colony, was
probably of later foundation, and geographically too remote to count
for the present inquiry. In fact, between the nascent Hellas and the
great world of Mesopotamia, there were powerful and possibly
independent strata of cultures interposing. We have to reckon first
with the great Hittite Kingdom, which included Cappadocia and
Northern Syria, and was in close touch with Phrygia and many of the
communities of the shore-line of Asia Minor; and which at the period
of the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence was in diplomatic relations and
on terms of equality with the Assyrian and Egyptian powers. And the
tendency of modern students, such as Messerschmidt in his Die
Hettiter, is to extend this ethnic name so as to include practically all
the Anatolian peoples who were other than the Aryan and Semitic
stocks. As far as I can discern, at the present stage of our
knowledge this is unscientific; and it is at present safer to regard the
pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Troad, Phrygia, Lycia, Caria, and Lydia,
possibly Cilicia, as varieties of an ancient Mediterranean stock to
which the people of the Minoan-Aegean culture themselves
belonged. At any rate, for the purposes of our religious comparison,
they are to be counted as a third stratum, through which as through
the Hittite the stream of influence from Mesopotamia would be
obliged to percolate before it could discharge itself upon the Hellenic
world. And these interjacent peoples are races of great mental gifts
and force; they were not likely to transmit the Mesopotamian
influence pure and unmingled with currents of their own religious life.
Therefore this great problem of old-world religion is no light one;
and fallacies here can only be avoided by the most critical
intelligence trained on the best method of comparative religious
study. We must endeavour to seize and comprehend the most
essential and characteristic features of the Babylonian-Assyrian cults
and theology; we must discover all that is at present possible, and
trust to the future for discovering more, concerning the Hittite
religion; and then we must glean all we can of the earliest forms of
cult in vogue among the other peoples of the Asia-Minor coast, and
in the early world of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture.
And if the phenomena of this area present us with certain general
resemblances to the Hellenic, we must not too hastily assume that
the West has borrowed from the East. For often in comparing the
most remote regions of the world we are struck with strange
similarities of myth and cult; and, where the possibility of borrowing
is ruled out, we must have recourse to the theory of spontaneous
generation working in obedience to similar psychical forces. The
hypothesis of borrowing, which is always legitimate where the
peoples with whom we are concerned are adjacent, is only raised to
proof either when the linguistic evidence is clear, for instance when
the divine names or the names of cult-objects are the same in the
various districts, or when the points of resemblance in ritual or
religious concept are numerous, striking, and fundamental, or
peculiar to the communities of a certain area. This is all the more
necessary to insist on, because many superficial points of
resemblance will be found in all religions that are at the same stage
of development.
Now, in beginning this wide comparative survey, one’s first
difficulty is to arrange the material in such a way as to enable one to
present a comparison that shall be definite and crucial. It would be
useless to attempt a mere synoptical outline of the Babylonian-
Sumerian religion; those whom that might content will find one in Dr.
Pinches’ handbook, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, or Mr.
King’s Babylonian Religion, while those who desire a more thorough
and detailed presentation of it will doubtless turn to the laborious and
critical volumes of Prof. Jastrow, Die Religion Babyloniens u.
Assyriens. But for me to try to present this complex polytheism en
bloc would be useless in view of my present object; for two elaborate
religious systems cannot effectively be compared en bloc. A more
hopeful method for those who have to pass cursorily over a great
area, is to select certain salient and essential features separately,
and to see how, in regard to each one, the adjacent religious
systems agree or differ. And the method I propose to pursue
throughout this course is as follows: Ignoring the embryology of the
subject, that is to say, all discussions about the genesis of religious
forms and ideas that would contribute nothing to our purpose, I will
try to define the morphology of the Mesopotamian and Anatolian
religions; and will first compare them with the Hellenic in respect of
the element of personality in the divine perception, the tendency to,
or away from, anthropomorphism, the relation of the deities to the
natural world, to the State, and to morality, and I will consider what
we can deduce from the study of the famous law-code of
Hammurabi. A special question will arise concerning the supremacy
of the goddess, a phenomenon which may be of some importance
as a clue in our whole inquiry. The comparison will then be applied to
the religious psychology of the different peoples; and here it will be
useful to analyse and define that element of the religious temper
which we call fanaticism, and which sometimes affords one of the
crucial distinctions between one religion and another.
We may also obtain evidence from a comparison of the
cosmogonic ideas prevalent over this area, so far as the records
reveal any, as well as of the eschatological beliefs concerning man’s
future destiny and his posthumous existence. Finally, we must
compare the various cult-objects and forms of ritual, the significance
of the sacrifice; the position and organisation of the priesthood; and
here it will be convenient to consider the ritual of magic as well as of
the higher service and the part played by magic within the limits of
the higher religion. If under each of these heads we have been able
to discover certain salient points of divergence or resemblance
between the Hellene and the Mesopotamian, we may be able to
draw a general deduction of some probability concerning the whole
question. In any case we may be encouraged by the assurance that
the comparison of two complex and highly developed religions is
fruitful and interesting in itself, whether it yields us definite historical
conclusions or not.
CHAPTER III.
The Morphology of the Compared Religions.