It would depend, however, upon other factors, besides the merely political ones, whether these cults would take a sufficiently deep hold upon the people to lead to the evolution of deities, entirely dissociated from fixed seats, who might be worshipped anywhere, and whose attributes would tend to become more and more abstract in character.

Such a process, however, could not be completed by the silent working of what, for want of a better name, we call the genius of the people.

It requires the assistance, conscious and in a measure pedantic, of the thinkers and spiritual guides of a people.

In other words, the advance in religious conceptions from the point at which we find them when the union of the Babylonian states takes place, is conditioned upon the infusion of the theological spirit into the mass of beliefs that constituted the ancient heritage of the people.
On the other hand, various circumstances have already been suggested that cooeperated, already prior to the days of Hammurabi, in weeding out the superfluity of deities, at least so far as recognition of them in the official inscriptions of the rulers were concerned.

Deities, attached to places of small and ever-diminishing importance would, after being at first adopted into the pantheon by some ruler desirous of emphasizing his control over the town in question, end in being entirely absorbed by some more powerful god, whose attributes were similar to those of his minor companion.