Wherever, in fact, Semitic influence prevailed, the goddess, as opposed to the god, tended to disappear. It was but a step from the conception of a god with a colourless counterpart, whose very existence seemed to be due to the necessities of grammar, to that of a deity who absorbed within himself the female as well as the male principles of the universe, and who stood alone and unmated. A goddess who depended for her existence on a grammatical accident could have no profound or permanent hold on the belief of the people; she necessarily fell into the background, and the prerogatives which had belonged to her were transferred to the god. Istar herself, thanks to the masculine form of her name, became a god in Southern Arabia, and was identified with Chemosh in Moab, while even in Babylonia and Assyria she assumed the attributes of a male divinity, and was adored as the goddess of war as well as of love.(267) In Assyria, indeed, her warlike character predominated: she took the place of the war-gods of Babylonia, and armed herself with the falchion and bow.
I shall have hereafter to point out how this tendency on the part of the goddess to vanish, as it were, out of sight, leaving the god alone in possession, resulted in Assyria in raising its supreme god Assur to something of the position occupied by Yahveh in Israel. Assur is wifeless; now and again, it is true, a wife is assigned to him by the pedantry of the scribes, but who it should be was never settled; and that he needed a wife at all, was never acknowledged generally. Like Chemosh in Moab, Assur reigns alone; and though the immemorial influence of Babylonia kept alive the worship of Istar by the side of him, it was Assur and Assur only who led the Assyrian armies to victory, and in whose name they subdued the disobedient. It was not until the kings of Assyria became kings also of Babylon that Istar encroached on the rights of Assur, or that an Assyrian monarch betook himself to her rather than to the god of his fathers in the hour of his necessity. As long as the capital remained at the old city of Assur, none but the god Assur might direct the counsels and campaigns of its princes, or confer upon them the crown of sovereignty. When Tiglath-pileser III. acknowledged himself the son of Bel-Merodach, and received from his hands the right to rule, it was a sign that the older Assyrian dynasty had passed away, that the kingdom had become a cosmopolitan empire, and that the venerable traditions of Babylon had subjugated its conquerors from the north. The mixed races of Babylonia had overcome the purer Semites of Assyria, Istar had prevailed against Assur, and Semitic monotheism sought a home in the further West.