The Two Babylons root "*aus-", meaning "dawn," potentially by way of . "Ishtar" is a Semitic name of uncertain etymology, possibly taken from the same root as Assyria, or from a semitic word meaning "to irrigate." Hislop ultimately claimed to trace Catholic doctrines back to the worship of Nimrod, asserting that the Roman Catholic Church represented Whore of Babylon of the Book of Revelation and that "the Pope himself is truly and properly the lineal representative of Belshazzar". He claimed that the Christogram IHS, the first three Greek letters in the name of Jesus, represented Latin characters standing for Isis, Horus and Seb.
The Cults of the Greek States at any rate, a reputation of being a "bizarre and hopeless thing". The work, as Farnell freely states in his preface, is indebted to Frazer's "The Golden Bough", which generated a whole new way of studying and analysing religion, i. e. comparatively and abstractly. The author states in his preface to the work that, "a compendious account of Greek cults [...] has long been a desideratum in English," and as such Farnell wrote "The Cults of the Greek States" to sate that desire. Farnell, however, ensured that his work was thoroughly modern for its time. His work did not draw