THE STORY OF CHALDEA. (continued 4)

21. George Smith indignantly repudiated this mythic interpretation of the hero's exploits, and claimed for them a strictly historical character. But we have seen that the two are by no means incompatible, since history, when handed down through centuries by mere oral tradition, is liable to many vicissitudes in the telling and retelling, and people are sure to arrange their favorite and most familiar stories, the mythical signification of which has long been forgotten, around the central figure of the heroes they love best, around the most important but vaguely recollected events in their national life. Hence it came to pass that identically the same stories, with but slight local variations, were told of heroes in different nations and countries; for the stock of original, or, as one may say, primary myths is comparatively small and the same for all, dating back to a time when mankind was not yet divided. In the course of ages and migrations it has been altered, like a rich hereditary robe, to fit and adorn many and very different persons.

22. One of the prettiest, oldest, and most universally favorite solar myths is the one which represents the Sun as a divine being, youthful and of surpassing beauty, beloved by or wedded to an equally powerful goddess, but meeting a premature death by accident and descending into the dark land of shades, from which, however, after a time he returns as glorious and beautiful as before. In this poetical fancy, the land of shades symbolizes the numb and lifeless period of winter as aptly as the Waters of Death in the Izdubar Epic, while the seeming death of the young god answers to the sickening of the hero at that declining season of the year when the sun's rays lose their vigor and are overcome by the powers of darkness and cold. The goddess who loves the fair young god, and mourns him with passionate grief, until her wailings and prayers recall him from his deathlike trance, is Nature herself, loving, bountiful, ever productive, but pale, and bare, and powerless in her widowhood, while the sun-god, the spring of life whence she draws her very being, lies captive in the bonds of their common foe, grim Winter, which is but a form of Death itself. Their reunion at the god's resurrection in spring is the great wedding-feast, the revel and holiday-time of the world.

23. This simple and perfectly transparent myth has been worked out more or less elaborately in all the countries of the East, and has found its way in some form or other into all the nations of the three great white races—of Japhet, Shem, and Ham—yet here again the precedence in point of time seems due to the older and more primitive—the Yellow or Turanian race; for the most ancient, and probably original form of it is the one which was inherited by the Semitic settlers of Chaldea from their Shumiro-Accadian predecessors, as shown by the Accadian name of the young solar god, Dumuzi, "the unfortunate husband of the goddess Ishtar," as he is called in the sixth tablet of the Izdubar epic. The name has been translated "Divine Offspring," but in later times lost all signification, being corrupted into Tammuz. In some Accadian hymns he is invoked as "the Shepherd, the lord Dumuzi, the lover of Ishtar." Well could a nomadic and pastoral people poetically liken the sun to a shepherd, whose flocks were the fleecy clouds as they speed across the vast plains of heaven or the bright, innumerable stars. This comparison, as pretty as it is natural, kept its hold in all ages and nations on the popular fancy, which played on it an infinite variety of ingenious changes, but it is only cuneiform science which has proved that it could be traced back to the very earliest race whose culture has left its mark on the world.

24. Of Dumuzi's tragic death no text deciphered until now unfortunately gives the details. Only the remarkable fragment about the black pine of Eridhu, "marking the centre of the earth, in the dark forest, into the heart whereof man hath not penetrated," (see p. 287) tantalizingly ends with these suggestive words: "Within it Dumuzi...." Scholars have found reason for conjecturing that this fragment was the beginning of a mythical narrative recounting Dumuzi's death, which must have been represented as taking place in that dark and sacred forest of Eridhu,—probably through the agency of a wild beast sent against him by a jealous and hostile power, just as the bull created by Anu was sent against Izdubar.[BI] One thing, however, is sure, that both in the earlier (Turanian) and in the later (Semitic) calendary of Chaldea, there was a month set apart in honor and for the festival of Dumuzi. It was the month of June-July, beginning at the summer solstice, when the days begin to shorten, and the sun to decline towards its lower winter point—a retrograde movement, ingeniously indicated by the Zodiacal sign of that month, the Cancer or Crab. The festival of Dumuzi lasted during the six first days of the month, with processions and ceremonies bearing two distinct characters. The worshippers at first assembled in the guise of mourners, with lamentations and loud wailings, tearing of clothes and of hair, as though celebrating the young god's funeral, while on the sixth day his resurrection and reunion to Ishtar was commemorated with the noisiest, most extravagant demonstrations of rejoicing. This custom is alluded to in Izdubar's scornful answer to Ishtar's love-message, when he says to her: "Thou lovedst Dumuzi, for whom they mourn year after year," and was witnessed by the Jews when they were carried prisoners to Babylon as late as 600 b.c., as expressly mentioned by Ezekiel, the prophet of the Captivity:—"Then he brought me to the door of the Lord's house which was towards the north; and behold, there sat the women weeping for Tammuz." (Ezekiel, iii. 14.)

25. A favorite version of Dumuzi's resurrection was that which told how Ishtar herself followed him into the Lower World, to claim him from their common foe, and thus yielded herself for a time into the power of her rival, the dread Queen of the Dead, who held her captive, and would not have released her but for the direct interference of the great gods. This was a rich mine of epic material, from which songs and stories must have flowed plentifully. We are lucky enough to possess a short epic on the subject, in one tablet, one of the chief gems of the indefatigable George Smith's discoveries,—a poem of great literary beauty, and nearly complete to within a few lines of the end, which are badly injured and scarcely legible. It is known under the name of "The Descent of Ishtar," as it relates only this one incident of the myth. The opening lines are unsurpassed for splendid poetry and sombre grandeur in any, even the most advanced literature.

26. "Towards the land whence there is no return, towards the house of corruption, Ishtar, the daughter of Sin, has turned her mind ... towards the dwelling that has an entrance but no exit, towards the road that may be travelled but not retraced, towards the hall from which the light of day is shut out, where hunger feeds on dust and mud, where light is never seen, where the shades of the dead dwell in the dark, clothed with wings like birds. On the lintel of the gate and in the lock dust lies accumulated.—Ishtar, when she reached the land whence there is no return, to the keeper of the gate signified her command: 'Keeper, open thy gate that I may pass. If thou openest not and I may not enter, I will smite the gate, and break the lock, I will demolish the threshold and enter by force; then will I let loose the dead to return to the earth, that they may live and eat again; I will make the risen dead more numerous than the living.' The gate-keeper opened his lips and spoke:—'Be appeased, O Lady, and let me go and report thy name to Allat the Queen.'"

Here follow a few much injured lines, the sense of which could not be restored in its entirety. The substance is that the gate-keeper announces to Allat that her sister Ishtar has come for the Water of Life, which is kept concealed in a distant nook of her dominions, and Allat is greatly disturbed at the news. But Ishtar announces that she comes in sorrow, not enmity:—

"I wish to weep over the heroes who have left their wives. I wish to weep over the wives who have been taken from their husbands' arms. I wish to weep over the Only Son—(a name of Dumuzi)—who has been taken away before his time."

Then Allat commands the keeper to open the gates and take Ishtar through the sevenfold enclosure, dealing by her as by all who come to those gates, that is, stripping her of her garments according to ancient custom.

"The keeper went and opened the gate: 'Enter, O Lady, and may the halls of the Land whence there is no return be gladdened by thy presence.' At the first gate he bade her enter and laid his hand on her; he took the high headdress from her head: 'Why, O keeper, takest thou the high headdress from my head?'—'Enter, O Lady; such is Allat's command.'"

The same scene is repeated at each of the seven gates; the keeper at each strips Ishtar of some article of her attire—her earrings, her necklace, her jewelled girdle, the bracelets on her arms and the bangles at her ankles, and lastly her long flowing garment. On each occasion the same words are repeated by both. When Ishtar entered the presence of Allat, the queen looked at her and taunted her to her face: then Ishtar could not control her anger and cursed her. Allat turned to her chief minister Namtar, the god of Pestilence—meet servant of the queen of the dead!—who is also the god of Fate, and ordered him to lead Ishtar away and afflict her with sixty dire diseases,—to strike her head and her heart, and her eyes, her hands and her feet, and all her limbs. So the goddess was led away and kept in durance and in misery. Meanwhile her absence was attended with most disastrous consequences to the upper world. With her, life and love had gone out of it; there were no marriages any more, no births, either among men or animals; nature was at a standstill. Great was the commotion among the gods. They sent a messenger to Êa to expose the state of affairs to him, and, as usual, to invoke his advice and assistance. Êa, in his fathomless wisdom, revolved a scheme. He created a phantom, Uddusunamir.

"'Go,' he said to him; 'towards the Land whence there is no return direct thy face; the seven gates of the Arallu will open before thee. Allat shall see thee and rejoice at thy coming, her heart shall grow calm and her wrath shall vanish. Conjure her with the name of the great gods, stiffen thy neck and keep thy mind on the Spring of Life. Let the Lady (Ishtar) gain access to the Spring of Life and drink of its waters.'—Allat, when she heard these things, beat her breast and bit her fingers with rage. Consenting, sore against her will, she spoke:—'Go, Uddusunamir! May the great jailer place thee in durance! May the foulness of the city ditches be thy food, the waters of the city sewers thy drink! A dark dungeon be thy dwelling, a sharp pole thy seat!'"

Then she ordered Namtar to let Ishtar drink of the Spring of Life and to bear her from her sight. Namtar fulfilled her command and took the goddess through the seven enclosures, at each gate restoring to her the article of her attire that had been taken at her entrance. At the last gate he said to her:

"Thou hast paid no ransom to Allat for thy deliverance; so now return to Dumuzi, the lover of thy youth; sprinkle over him the sacred waters, clothe him in splendid garments, adorn him with gems."

26. The last lines are so badly mutilated that no efforts have as yet availed to make their sense anything but obscure, and so it must remain, unless new copies come to light. Yet so much is, at all events, evident, that they bore on the reunion of Ishtar and her young lover. The poem is thus complete in itself; but some think that it was introduced into the Izdubar epic as an independent episode, after the fashion of the Deluge narrative, and, if so, it is supposed to have been part of the seventh tablet. Whether such were really the case or no, matters little in comparison with the great importance these two poems possess as being the most ancient presentations, in a finished literary form, of the two most significant and universal nature-myths—the Solar and the Chthonic (see p. 272), the poetical fancies in which primitive mankind clothed the wonders of the heavens and the mystery of the earth, being content to admire and imagine where it could not comprehend and explain. We shall be led back continually to these, in very truth, primary myths, for they not only served as groundwork to much of the most beautiful poetry of the world but suggested some of its loftiest and most cherished religious conceptions.

[* For a metrical version by Prof. Dyer of the story of "Ishtar's Descent," see Appendix, p. 367.]

FOOTNOTES:

VIII.

RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.—IDOLATRY AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM.—THE CHALDEAN LEGENDS AND THE BOOK OF GENESIS.—RETROSPECT.

1. In speaking of ancient nations, the words "Religion" and "Mythology" are generally used indiscriminately and convertibly. Yet the conceptions they express are essentially and radically different. The broadest difference, and the one from which all others flow, is that the one—Religion—is a thing of the feelings, while the other—Mythology—is a thing of the imagination. In other words, Religion comes from within—from that consciousness of limited power, that inborn need of superior help and guidance, forbearance and forgiveness, from that longing for absolute goodness and perfection, which make up the distinctively human attribute of "religiosity," that attribute which, together with the faculty of articulate speech, sets Man apart from and above all the rest of animated creation. (See p. 149.) Mythology, on the other hand, comes wholly from without. It embodies impressions received by the senses from the outer world and transformed by the poetical faculty into images and stories. (See definition of "Myth" on p. 294.) Professor Max Müller of Oxford has been the first, in his standard work "The Science of Language," clearly to define this radical difference between the two conceptions, which he has never since ceased to sound as a keynote through the long series of his works devoted to the study of the religions and mythologies of various nations. A few illustrations from the one nation with which we have as yet become familiar will help once for all to establish a thorough understanding on this point, most essential as it is to the comprehension of the workings of the human mind and soul throughout the long roll of struggles, errors and triumphs, achievements and failures which we call the history of mankind.

2. There is no need to repeat here instances of the Shumiro-Accadian and Chaldean myths; the last three or four chapters have been filled with them. But the instances of religious feeling, though scattered in the same field, have to be carefully gleaned out and exhibited, for they belong to that undercurrent of the soul which pursues its way unobtrusively and is often apparently lost beneath the brilliant play of poetical fancies. But it is there nevertheless, and every now and then forces its way to the surface shining forth with a startling purity and beauty. When the Accadian poet invokes the Lord "who knows lie from truth," "who knows the truth that is in the soul of man," who "maketh lies to vanish," who "turneth wicked plots to a happy issue"—this is religion, not mythology, for this is not a story, it is the expression of a feeling. That "the Lord" whose divine omniscience and goodness is thus glorified is really the Sun, makes no difference; that is an error of judgment, a want of knowledge, but the religious feeling is splendidly manifest in the invocation. But when, in the same hymn, the Sun is described as "stepping forth from the background of the skies, pushing back the bolts and opening the gate of the brilliant heaven, and raising his head above the land," etc., (see p. 172) that is only a very beautiful, imaginative description of a glorious natural phenomenon—sunrise; it is magnificent poetry, religious in so far as the sun is considered as a Being, a Divine Person, the object of an intensely devout and grateful feeling; still this is not religion, it is mythology, for it presents a material image to the mind, and one that can be easily turned into narrative, into a story,—which, in fact, suggests a hero, a king, and a story. Take, again, the so-called "Penitential Psalms." To the specimen given on p. 178, let us add, for greater completeness, the following three remarkable fragments:

"God, my creator, take hold of my arms! Direct the breath of my mouth, my hands direct, O lord of light."

"Lord, let not thy servant sink! Amidst the tumultuous waters take hold of his hand!"

"He who fears not his God, will be cut off even like a reed. He who honors not his goddess, his bodily strength will waste away; like to a star of heaven, his splendor will pale; he will vanish like to the waters of the night."

3. All this is religion, of the purest, loftiest kind; fruitful, too, of good, the only real test of true religion. The deep humility, the trustful appeal, the feeling of dependence, the consciousness of weakness, of sin, and the longing for deliverance from them—these are all very different from the pompous phrases of empty praise and sterile admiration; they are things which flow from the heart, not the fancy, which lighten its weight of sorrow and self-reproach, brighten it with hope and good resolutions, in short, make it happier and better—what no mere imaginative poetry, however fine, can do.

4. The radical distinction, then, between religious feeling and the poetical faculty of mythical creation, is easy to establish and follow out. On the other hand, the two are so constantly blended, so almost inextricably interwoven in the sacred poetry of the ancients, in their views of life and the world, and in their worship, that it is no wonder they should be so generally confused. The most correct way of putting the case would be, perhaps, to say that the ancient Religions—meaning by the word the whole body of sacred poetry and legends as well as the national forms of worship—were made up originally in about equal parts of religious feeling and of mythology. In many cases the exuberance of the imagination gained the upper hand, and there was such a riotous growth of mythical imagery and stories that the religious feeling was almost stifled under them. In others, again, the myths themselves suggested religious ideas of the deepest import and loftiest sublimity. Such was particularly the case with the solar and Chthonic Myths—the poetical presentation of the career of the Sun and the Earth—as connected with the doctrine of the soul's immortality.

5. A curious and significant observation has been made in excavating the most ancient graves in the world, those of the so-called Mound-builders. This name is not that of any particular race or nation, but is given indiscriminately to all those peoples who lived, on any part of the globe, long before the earliest beginnings of even the remotest times which have been made historical by preserved monuments or inscriptions of any kind. All we know of those peoples is that they used to bury their dead—at least those of special renown or high rank—in deep and spacious stone-lined chambers dug in the ground, with a similar gallery leading to them, and covered by a mound of earth, sometimes of gigantic dimensions—a very hill. Hence the name. Of their life, their degree of civilization, what they thought and believed, we have no idea except in so far as the contents of the graves give us some indications. For, like the later, historical races, of which we find the graves in Chaldea and every other country of the ancient world, they used to bury along with the dead a multitude of things: vessels, containing food and drink; weapons, ornaments, household implements. The greater the power or renown of the dead man, the fuller and more luxurious his funeral outfit. It is indeed by no means rare to find the skeleton of a great chief surrounded by those of several women, and, at a respectful distance, more skeletons—evidently those of slaves—whose fractured skulls more than suggest the ghastly custom of killing wives and servants to do honor to an illustrious dead and to keep him company in his narrow underground mansion. Nothing but a belief in the continuation of existence after death could have prompted these practices. For what was the sense of giving him wives and slaves, and domestic articles of all kinds, food and weapons, unless it were for his service and use on his journey to the unknown land where he was to enter on a new stage of existence, which the survivors could not but imagine to be a reproduction, in its simple conditions and needs, of the one he was leaving? There is no race of men, however primitive, however untutored, in which this belief in immortality is not found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The belief is implanted in man by the wish; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; and all human beings that come into the world have to learn to face the thought of it, and the reality too, in others, before they lie down and accept it for themselves. But what if death be not destruction? If it be but a passage from this into another world,—distant, unknown and perforce mysterious, but certain nevertheless, a world on the threshold of which the earthly body is dropped as an unnecessary garment? Then were death shorn of half its terrors. Indeed, the only unpleasantness about it would be, for him who goes, the momentary pang and the uncertainty as to what he is going to; and, for those who remain, the separation and the loathsome details—the disfigurement, the corruption. But these are soon gotten over, while the separation is only for a time; for all must go the same way, and the late-comers will find, will join their lost ones gone before. Surely it must be so! It were too horrible if it were not; it must be—it is! The process of feeling which arrived at this conclusion and hardened it into absolute faith, is very plain, and we can easily, each of us, reproduce it in our own souls, independently of the teachings we receive from childhood. But the mind is naturally inquiring, and involuntarily the question presents itself: this solution, so beautiful, so acceptable, so universal,—but so abstract—what suggested it? What analogy first led up to it from the material world of the senses? To this question we find no reply in so many words, for it is one of those that go to the very roots of our being, and such generally remain unanswered. But the graves dug by those old Mound-Builders present a singular feature, which almost seems to point to the answer. The tenant of the funereal chamber is most frequently found deposited in a crouching attitude, his back leaning against the stone-lined wall, and with his face turned towards the West, in the direction of the setting sun.... Here, then, is the suggestion, the analogy! The career of the sun is very like that of man. His rising in the east is like the birth of man. During the hours of his power, which we call the Day, he does his allotted work, of giving light and warmth to the world, now riding radiant and triumphant across an azure sky, now obscured by clouds, struggling through mists, or overwhelmed by tempests. How like the vicissitudes that checker the somewhat greater number of hours—or days—of which the sum makes up a human life! Then when his appointed time expires, he sinks down,—lower, lower—and disappears into darkness,—dies. So does man. What is this night, death? Is it destruction, or only a rest, or an absence? It is at all events not destruction. For as surely as we see the sun vanish in the west this evening, feeble and beamless, so surely shall we behold him to-morrow morning rise again in the east, glorious, vigorous and young. What happens to him in the interval? Who knows? Perhaps he sleeps, perhaps he travels through countries we know not of and does other work there; but one thing is sure: that he is not dead, for he will be up again to-morrow. Why should not man, whose career so much resembles the sun's in other respects, resemble him in this? Let the dead, then, be placed with their faces to the west, in token that theirs is but a setting like the sun's, to be followed by another rising, a renewed existence, though in another and unknown world.

6. All this is sheer poetry and mythology. But how great its beauty, how obvious its hopeful suggestiveness, if it could appeal to the groping minds of those primitive men, the old Mound-Builders, and there lay the seed of a faith which has been more and more clung to, as mankind progressed in spiritual culture! For all the noblest races have cherished and worked out the myth of the setting sun in the most manifold ways, as the symbol of the soul's immortality. The poets of ancient India, some three thousand years ago, made the Sun the leader and king of the dead, who, as they said, followed where he had gone first, "showing the way to many." The Egyptians, perhaps the wisest and most spiritual of all ancient nations, came to make this myth the keystone of their entire religion, and placed all their burying-places in the west, amidst or beyond the Libyan ridge of hills behind which the sun vanished from the eyes of those who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. The Greeks imagined a happy residence for their bravest and wisest, which they called the Islands of the Blest, and placed in the furthest West, amidst the waters of the ocean into which the sun descends for his nightly rest.

7. But the sun's course is twofold. If it is complete—beginning and ending—within the given number of hours which makes the day, it is repeated on a larger scale through the cycle of months which makes the year. The alternations of youth and age, triumph and decline, power and feebleness, are there represented and are regularly brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater hold on the fancy of the scientifically inclined Chaldeans, and which we find embodied with such admirable completeness in their great epic. We shall see, later on, more exclusively imaginative and poetical races showing a marked preference for the career of the sun as the hero of a day, and making the several incidents of the solar-day myth the subject of an infinite variety of stories, brilliant or pathetic, tender or heroic. But there is in nature another order of phenomena, intimately connected with and dependent on the phases of the sun, that is, the seasons, yet very different in their individual character, though pointing the same way as regards the suggestion of resurrection and immortality—the phenomena of the Earth and the Seed. These may in a more general way be described as Nature's productive power paralyzed during the numbed trance of winter, which is as the sleep of death, when the seed lies in the ground hid from sight and cold, even as a dead thing, but awaking to new life in the good time of spring, when the seed, in which life was never extinct but only dormant, bursts its bonds and breaks into verdant loveliness and bountiful crops. This is the essence and meaning of the Chthonic or Earth-myth, as universal as the Sun-myth, but of which different features have also been unequally developed by different races according to their individual tendencies. In the Chaldean version, the "Descent of Ishtar," the particular incident of the seed is quite wanting, unless the name of Dumuzi's month, "The Boon of the Seed" ("Le Bienfait de la Semence." Lenormant), may be considered as alluding to it. It is her fair young bridegroom, the beautiful Sun-god, whom the widowed goddess of Nature mourns and descends to seek among the dead. This aspect of the myth is almost exclusively developed in the religions of most Canaanitic and Semitic nations of the East, where we shall meet with it often and often. And here it may be remarked, without digressing or anticipating too far, that throughout the ancient world, the Solar and Chthonic cycles of myths have been the most universal and important, the very centre and groundwork of many of the ancient mythic religions, and used as vehicles for more or less sublime religious conceptions, according to the higher or lower spiritual level of the worshipping nations.

8. It must be confessed that, amidst the nations of Western Asia, this level was, on the whole, not a very lofty one. Both the Hamitic and Semitic races were, as a rule, of a naturally sensuous disposition; the former being, moreover, distinguished by a very decidedly material turn of mind. The Kushites, of whom a branch perhaps formed an important portion of the mixed population of Lower Mesopotamia, and especially the Canaanites, who spread themselves over all the country between the great rivers and the Western Sea—the Mediterranean—were no exception to this rule. If their priests—their professed thinkers, the men trained through generations for intellectual pursuits—had groped their way to the perception of One Divine Power ruling the world, they kept it to themselves, or, at least, out of sight, behind a complicated array of cosmogonic myths, nature-myths, symbols and parables, resulting in Chaldea in the highly artificial system which has been sketched above—(see Chapters V. and VI.)—a system singularly beautiful and deeply significant, but of which the mass of the people did not care to unravel the subtle intricacies, being quite content to accept it entire, in the most literal spirit, elementary nature-gods, astronomical abstractions, cosmogonical fables and all—questioning nothing, at peace in their mind and righteously self-conscious if they sacrificed at the various time-honored local shrines, and conformed to the prescribed forms and ceremonies. To these they privately added those innumerable practices of conjuring and rites of witchcraft, the heirloom of the older lords of the soil, which we saw the colleges of learned priests compelled, as strangers and comparative newcomers, to tolerate and even sanction by giving them a place, though an inferior one, in their own nobler system (see p. 250). Thus it was that, if a glimmer of Truth did feebly illumine the sanctuary and its immediate ministers, the people at large dwelt in the outer darkness of hopeless polytheism and, worse still, of idolatry. For, in bowing before the altars of their temples and the images in wood, stone or metal in which art strove to express what the sacred writings taught, the unlearned worshippers did not stop to consider that these were but pieces of human workmanship, deriving their sacredness solely from the subjects they treated and the place they adorned, nor did they strive to keep their thoughts intent on the invisible Beings represented by the images. It was so much simpler, easier and more comfortable to address their adoration to what was visible and near, to the shapes that were so closely within reach of their senses, that seemed so directly to receive their offerings and prayers, that became so dearly familiar from long associations. The bulk of the Chaldean nation for a long time remained Turanian, and the materialistic grossness of the original Shumiro-Accadian religion greatly fostered its idolatrous tendencies. The old belief in the talismanic virtues of all images (see p. 162) continued to assert itself, and was easily transferred to those representing the divinities of the later and more elaborate worship. Some portion of the divine substance or spirit was supposed somehow to pass into the material representation and reside therein. This is very clear from the way in which the inscriptions speak of the statues of gods, as though they were persons. Thus the famous cylinder of the Assyrian conqueror Asshurbanipal tells how he brought back "the goddess Nana," (i.e., her statue) who at the time of the great Elamite invasion, "had gone and dwelt in Elam, a place not appointed for her," and now spoke to him the king, saying: "From the midst of Elam bring me out and cause me to enter into Bitanna"—her own old sanctuary at Erech, "which she had delighted in." Then again the Assyrian conquerors take especial pride in carrying off with them the statues of the gods of the nations they subdue, and never fail to record the fact in these words: "I carried away their gods," beyond a doubt with the idea that, in so doing, they put it out of their enemies' power to procure the assistance of their divine protectors.

9. In the population of Chaldea the Semitic element was strongly represented. It is probable that tribes of Semites came into the country at intervals, in successive bands, and for a long time wandered unhindered with their flocks, then gradually amalgamated with the settlers they found in possession, and whose culture they adopted, or else formed separate settlements of their own, not even then, however, quite losing their pastoral habits. Thus the Hebrew tribe, when it left Ur under Terah and Abraham (see page 121), seems to have resumed its nomadic life with the greatest willingness and ease, after dwelling a long time in or near that popular city, the principal capital of Shumir, the then dominant South. Whether this tribe were driven out of Ur, as some will have it,[BJ] or left of their own accord, it is perhaps not too bold to conjecture that the causes of their departure were partly connected with religious motives. For, alone among the Chaldeans and all the surrounding nations, this handful of Semites had disentangled the conception of monotheism from the obscuring wealth of Chaldean mythology, and had grasped it firmly. At least their leaders and elders, the patriarchs, had arrived at the conviction that the One living God was He whom they called "the Lord," and they strove to inspire their people with the same faith, and to detach them from the mythical beliefs, the idolatrous practices which they had adopted from those among whom they lived, and to which they clung with the tenacity of spiritual blindness and long habit. The later Hebrews themselves kept a clear remembrance of their ancestors having been heathen polytheists, and their own historians, writing more than a thousand years after Abraham's times, distinctly state the fact. In a long exhortation to the assembled tribes of Israel, which they put in the mouth of Joshua, the successor of Moses, they make him say:—"Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood" (i.e., the Euphrates, or perhaps the Jordan) "in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nachor, and they served other gods." And further on: " ... Put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood and in Egypt, and serve ye the Lord.... Choose you this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." (Joshua, xxiv. 2, 14, 15.) What more probable than that the patriarchs, Terah and Abraham, should have led their people out of the midst of the Chaldeans, away from their great capital Ur, which held some of the oldest and most renowned Chaldean sanctuaries, and forth into the wilderness, partly with the object of removing them from corrupting associations. At all events that branch of the Hebrew tribe which remained in Mesopotamia with Nahor, Abraham's brother (see Gen. xxiv. xxix. and ff.), continued heathen and idolatrous, as we see from the detailed narrative in Genesis xxxi., of how Rachel "had stolen the images that were her father's" (xxxi. 19), when Jacob fled from Laban's house with his family, his cattle and all his goods. No doubt as to the value and meaning attached to these "images" is left when we see Laban, after having overtaken the fugitives, reprove Jacob in these words:—"And now, though thou wouldst needs be gone, because thou sore longedst for thy father's house, yet wherefore hast thou stolen my gods?" (xxxi. 30), to which Jacob, who knows nothing of Rachel's theft, replies:—"With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, let him not live" (xxxi. 32). But "Rachel had taken the images and put them in the camel's furniture, and sat upon them. And Laban searched all the tent, but found them not" (xxxi. 34). Now what could have induced Rachel to commit so dishonorable and, moreover, dangerous an action, but the idea that, in carrying away these images, her family's household "gods," she would insure a blessing and prosperity to herself and her house? That by so doing, she would, according to the heathens' notion, rob her father and old home of what she wished to secure herself (see page 344), does not seem to have disturbed her. It is clear from this that, even after she was wedded to Jacob the monotheist, she remained a heathen and idolater, though she concealed the fact from him.

10. On the other hand, wholesale emigration was not sufficient to remove the evil. Had it indeed been a wilderness, unsettled in all its extent, into which the patriarchs led forth their people, they might have succeeded in weaning them completely from the old influences. But, scattered over it and already in possession, were numerous Canaanite tribes, wealthy and powerful under their chiefs—Amorites, and Hivites, and Hittites, and many more. In the pithy and picturesque Biblical language, "the Canaanite was in the land" (Genesis, xii. 6), and the Hebrews constantly came into contact with them, indeed were dependent on their tolerance and large hospitality for the freedom with which they were suffered to enjoy the pastures of "the land wherein they were strangers," as the vast region over which they ranged is frequently and pointedly called. Being but a handful of men, they had to be cautious in their dealings and to keep on good terms with the people among whom they were brought. "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you," admits Abraham, "bowing himself down before the people of the land," (a tribe of Hittites near Hebron, west of the Dead Sea), when he offers to buy of them a field, there to institute a family burying-place for himself and his race; for he had no legal right to any of the land, not so much as would yield a sepulchre to his dead, even though the "children of Heth" treat him with high honor, and, in speaking to him, say, "My lord," and "thou art a mighty prince among us" (Genesis, xxiii.). This transaction, conducted on both sides in a spirit of great courtesy and liberality, is not the only instance of the friendliness with which the Canaanite owners of the soil regarded the strangers, both in Abraham's lifetime and long after his death. His grandson, the patriarch Jacob, and his sons find the same tolerance among the Hivites of Shalem, who thus commune among themselves concerning them:—"These men are peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land and trade therein; for the land, behold it is large enough for them; let us take their daughters for wives, and let us give them our daughters." And the Hivite prince speaks in this sense to the Hebrew chief:—"The soul of my son longeth for your daughter: I pray you, give her him to wife. And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us and take our daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us, and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein."

11. But this question of intermarriage was always a most grievous one; the question of all others at which the Hebrew leaders strictly drew the line of intercourse and good-fellowship; the more stubbornly that their people were naturally much inclined to such unions, since they came and went freely among their hosts, and their daughters went out, unhindered, "to see the daughters of the land." Now all the race of Canaan followed religions very similar to that of Chaldea, only grosser still in their details and forms of worship. Therefore, that the old idolatrous habits might not return strongly upon them under the influence of a heathen household, the patriarchs forbade marriage with the women of the countries through which they passed and repassed with their tents and flocks, and themselves abstained from it. Thus we see Abraham sending his steward all the way back to Mesopotamia to seek a wife for his son Isaac from among his own kinsfolk who had stayed there with his brother Nahor, and makes the old servant solemnly swear "by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth": "Thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell." And when Esau, Isaac's son, took two wives from among the Hittite women, it is expressly said that they were "a grief of mind unto Isaac and Rebekah;" and Isaac's most solemn charge to his other son, Jacob, as he sends him from him with his blessing, is: "Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan." Whithersoever the Hebrews came in the course of their long wanderings, which lasted many centuries, the same twofold prohibition was laid on them: of marrying with native women—"for surely," they are told, "they will turn away your heart after their gods," and of following idolatrous religions, a prohibition enforced by the severest penalties, even to that of death. But nothing could keep them long from breaking the law in both respects. The very frequency and emphasis with which the command is repeated, the violence of the denunciations against offenders, the terrible punishments threatened and often actually inflicted, sufficiently show how imperfectly and unwillingly it was obeyed. Indeed the entire Old Testament is one continuous illustration of the unslackening zeal with which the wise and enlightened men of Israel—its lawgivers, leaders, priests and prophets—pursued their arduous and often almost hopeless task, of keeping their people pure from worships and practices which to them, who had realized the fallacy of a belief in many gods, were the most pernicious abominations. In this spirit and to this end they preached, they fought, they promised, threatened, punished, and in this spirit, in later ages, they wrote.

12. It is not until a nation is well established and enjoys a certain measure of prosperity, security and the leisure which accompanies them, that it begins to collect its own traditions and memories and set them down in order, into a continuous narrative. So it was with the Hebrews. The small tribe became a nation, which ceased from its wanderings and conquered for itself a permanent place on the face of the earth. But to do this took many hundred years, years of memorable adventures and vicissitudes, so that the materials which accumulated for the future historians, in stories, traditions, songs, were ample and varied. Much, too, must have been written down at a comparatively early period. How early must remain uncertain, since there is unfortunately nothing to show at what time the Hebrews learned the art of writing and their characters thought, like other alphabets, to be borrowed from those of the Phœnicians. However that may be, one thing is sure: that the different books which compose the body of the Hebrew Sacred Scriptures, which we call "the Old Testament," were collected from several and different sources, and put into the shape in which they have descended to us at a very late period, some almost as late as the birth of Christ. The first book of all, that of Genesis, describing the beginnings of the Jewish people,—("Genesis" is a Greek word, which means "Origin")—belongs at all events to a somewhat earlier date. It is put together mainly of two narratives, distinct and often different in point of spirit and even fact. The later compiler who had both sources before him to work into a final form, looked on both with too much respect to alter either, and generally contented himself with giving them side by side, (as in the story of Hagar, which is told twice and differently, in Chap. XVI. and Chap. XXI.), or intermixing them throughout, so that it takes much attention and pains to separate them, (as in the story of the Flood, Chap. VI.-VIII.). This latter story is almost identical with the Chaldean Deluge-legend included in the great Izdubar epic, of which it forms the eleventh tablet. (See Chap. VII.) Indeed, every child can see, by comparing the Chaldean cosmogonic and mythical legends with the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, those which relate to the beginnings not so much of the Hebrew people as of the human race and the world in general, that both must originally have flowed from one and the same spring of tradition and priestly lore. The resemblances are too staring, close, continuous, not to exclude all rational surmises as to casual coincidences. The differences are such as most strikingly illustrate the transformation which the same material can undergo when treated by two races of different moral standards and spiritual tendencies. Let us briefly examine both, side by side.

13. To begin with the Creation. The description of the primeval chaos—a waste of waters, from which "the darkness was not lifted," (see p. 261)—answers very well to that in Genesis, i. 2: "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The establishment of the heavenly bodies and the creation of the animals also correspond remarkably in both accounts, and even come in the same order (see p. 264, and Genesis, i. 14-22). The famous cylinder of the British Museum (see No. 62, p. 266) is strong presumption in favor of the identity of the Chaldean version of the first couple's disobedience with the Biblical one. We have seen the important position occupied in the Chaldean religion by the symbol of the Sacred Tree, which surely corresponds to the Tree of Life in Eden (see p. 268), and probably also to that of Knowledge, and the different passages and names ingeniously collected and confronted by scholars leave no doubt as to the Chaldeans having had the legend of an Eden, a garden of God (see p. 274). A better preserved copy of the Creation tablets with the now missing passages may be recovered any day, and there is no reason to doubt that they will be found as closely parallel to the Biblical narrative as those that have been recovered until now. But even as we have them at present it is very evident that the groundwork, the material, is the same in both. It is the manner, the spirit, which differs. In the Chaldean account, polytheism runs riot. Every element, every power of nature—Heaven, Earth, the Abyss, Atmosphere, etc.—has been personified into an individual divine being actively and severely engaged in the great work. The Hebrew narrative is severely monotheistic. In it God does all that "the gods" between them do in the other. Every poetical or allegorical turn of phrase is carefully avoided, lest it lead into the evil errors of the sister-nation. The symbolical myths—such as that of Bel's mixing his own blood with the clay out of which he fashions man,(see p. 266)—are sternly discarded, for the same reason. One only is retained: the temptation by the Serpent. But the Serpent being manifestly the personification of the Evil Principle which is forever busy in the soul of man, there was no danger of its being deified and worshipped; and as, moreover, the tale told in this manner very picturesquely and strikingly points a great moral lesson, the Oriental love of parable and allegory could in this instance be allowed free scope. Besides, the Hebrew writers of the sacred books were not beyond or above the superstitions of their country and age; indeed they retained all of these that did not appear to them incompatible with monotheism. Thus throughout the Books of the Old Testament the Chaldean belief in witchcraft, divination from dreams and other signs is retained and openly professed, and astrology itself is not condemned, since among the destinations of the stars is mentioned that of serving to men "for signs": "And God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years" (Genesis, i. 14). Even more explicit is the passage in the triumphal song of Deborah the prophetess, where celebrating the victory of Israel over Sisera, she says: "They fought from heaven: the stars in their courses fought against Sisera" (Judges, v. 20). But a belief in astrology by no means implies the admission of several gods. In one or two passages, indeed, we do find an expression which seems to have slipped in unawares, as an involuntary reminiscence of an original polytheism; it is where God, communing with himself on Adam's trespass, says: "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" (Gen. iii. 22). An even clearer trace confronts us in one of the two names that are given to God. These names are "Jehovah," (more correctly "Yahveh") and "Elohim." Now the latter name is the plural of El, "god," and so really means "the gods." If the sacred writers retained it, it was certainly not from carelessness or inadvertence. As they use it, it becomes in itself almost a profession of faith. It seems to proclaim the God of their religion as "the One God who is all the gods," in whom all the forces of the universe are contained and merged.

14. There is one feature in the Biblical narrative, which, at first sight, wears the appearance of mythical treatment: it is the familiar way in which God is represented as coming and going, speaking and acting, after the manner of men, especially in such passages as these: "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Gen. iii. 8); or, "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and he clothed them" (Gen. iii. 21). But such a judgment would be a serious error. There is nothing mythical in this; only the tendency, common to all mankind, of endowing the Deity with human attributes of form, speech and action, whenever the attempt was made to bring it very closely within the reach of their imagination. This tendency is so universal, that it has been classed, under a special name, among the distinctive features of the human mind. It has been called Anthropomorphism, (from two Greek words Anthropos, "man," and morphê, "form,") and can never be got rid of, because it is part and parcel of our very nature. Man's spiritual longings are infinite, his perceptive faculties are limited. His spirit has wings of flame that would lift him up and bear him even beyond the endlessness of space into pure abstraction; his senses have soles of lead that ever weigh him down, back to the earth, of which he is and to which he must needs cling, to exist at all. He can conceive, by a great effort, an abstract idea, eluding the grasp of senses, unclothed in matter; but he can realize, imagine, only by using such appliances as the senses supply him with. Therefore, the more fervently he grasps an idea, the more closely he assimilates it, the more it becomes materialized in his grasp, and when he attempts to reproduce it out of himself—behold! it has assumed the likeness of himself or something he has seen, heard, touched—the spirituality of it has become weighted with flesh, even as it is in himself. It is as it were a reproduction, in the intellectual world, of the eternal strife, in physical nature, between the two opposed forces of attraction and repulsion, the centrifugal and centripetal, of which the final result is to keep each body in its place, with a well-defined and limited range of motion allotted to it. Thus, however pure and spiritual the conception of the Deity may be, man, in making it real to himself, in bringing it down within his reach and ken, within the shrine of his heart, will, and must perforce make of it a Being, human not only in shape, but also in thought and feeling. How otherwise could he grasp it at all? And the accessories with which he will surround it will necessarily be suggested by his own experience, copied from those among which he moves habitually himself. "Walking in the garden in the cool of the day" is an essentially Oriental and Southern recreation, and came quite naturally to the mind of a writer living in a land steeped in sunshine and sultriness. Had the writer been a Northerner, a denizen of snow-clad plains and ice-bound rivers, the Lord might probably have been represented as coming in a swift, fur-lined sleigh. Anthropomorphism, then, is in itself neither mythology nor idolatry; but it is very clear that it can with the utmost ease glide into either or both, with just a little help from poetry and, especially, from art, in its innocent endeavor to fix in tangible form the vague imaginings and gropings, of which words often are but a fleeting and feeble rendering. Hence the banishment of all material symbols, the absolute prohibition of any images whatever as an accessory of religious worship, which, next to the recognition of One only God, is the keystone of the Hebrew law:—"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.—Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them" (Exodus, xx. 3-5).

But, to continue our parallel.

15. The ten antediluvian kings of Berosus, who succeed the apparition of the divine Man-Fish, Êa-Oannes (see p. 196), have their exact counterpart in the ten antediluvian patriarchs of Genesis, v. Like the Chaldean kings, the patriarchs live an unnatural number of years. Only the extravagant figures of the Chaldean tradition are considerably reduced in the Hebrew version. While the former allots to its kings reigns of tens of thousands of years (see p. 196); the latter cuts them down to hundreds, and the utmost that it allows to any of its patriarchs is nine hundred and sixty-nine years of life (Methuselah).

16. The resemblances between the two Deluge narratives are so obvious and continuous, that it is not these, but the differences that need pointing out. Here again the sober, severely monotheistic character of the Hebrew narrative contrasts most strikingly with the exuberant polytheism of the Chaldean one, in which Heaven, Sun, Storm, Sea, even Rain are personified, deified, and consistently act their several appropriate and most dramatic parts in the great cataclysm, while Nature herself, as the Great Mother of beings and fosterer of life, is represented, in the person of Ishtar, lamenting the slaughter of men (see p. 327). Apart from this fundamental difference in spirit, the identity in all the essential points of fact is amazing, and variations occur only in lesser details. The most characteristic one is that, while the Chaldean version describes the building and furnishing of a ship, with all the accuracy of much seafaring knowledge, and does not forget even to name the pilot, the Hebrew writer, with the clumsiness and ignorance of nautical matters natural to an inland people unfamiliar with the sea or the appearance of ships, speaks only of an ark or chest. The greatest discrepancy is in the duration of the flood, which is much shorter in the Chaldean text than in the Hebrew. On the seventh day already, Hâsisadra sends out the dove (see p. 316). But then in the Biblical narrative itself, made up, as was remarked above, of two parallel texts joined together, this same point is given differently in different places. According to Genesis, vii. 12, "the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights," while verse 24 of the same chapter tells us that "the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days." Again, the number of the saved is far larger in the Chaldean account: Hâsisadra takes with him into the ship all his men-servants, his women-servants, and even his "nearest friends," while Noah is allowed to save only his own immediate family, "his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives" (Genesis, vi. 18). Then, the incident of the birds is differently told: Hâsisadra sends out three birds, the dove, the swallow, and the raven; Noah only two—first the raven, then three times in succession the dove. But it is startling to find both narratives more than once using the same words. Thus the Hebrew writer tells how Noah "sent forth a raven, which went to and fro," and how "the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot and returned." Hâsisadra relates: "I took out a dove and sent it forth. The dove went forth, to and fro, but found no resting-place and returned." And further, when Hâsisadra describes the sacrifice he offered on the top of Mount Nizir, after he came forth from the ship, he says: "The gods smelled a savor; the gods smelled a sweet savor." "And the Lord smelled a sweet savor," says Genesis,—viii. 21—of Noah's burnt-offering. These few hints must suffice to show how instructive and entertaining is a parallel study of the two narratives; it can be best done by attentively reading both alternately, and comparing them together, paragraph by paragraph.

17. The legend of the Tower of Languages (see above, p. 293, and Genesis, xi. 3-9), is the last in the series of parallel Chaldean and Hebrew traditions. In the Bible it is immediately followed by the detailed genealogy of the Hebrews from Shem to Abraham. Therewith evidently ends the connection between the two people, who are severed for all time from the moment that Abraham goes forth with his tribe from Ur of the Chaldees, probably in the reign of Amarpal (father of Hammurabi), whom the Bible calls Amraphel, king of Shineâr. The reign of Hammurabi was, as we have already seen (see p. 219), a prosperous and brilliant one. He was originally king of Tintir (the oldest name of Babylon), and when he united all the cities and local rulers of Chaldea under his supremacy, he assorted the pre-eminence among them for his own city, which he began to call by its new name, Ka-dimirra (Accadian for "Gate of God," which was translated into the Semitic Bab-Il). This king in every respect opens a new chapter in the history of Chaldea. Moreover, a great movement was taking place in all the region between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf; nations were forming and growing, and Chaldea's most formidable rival and future conqueror, Assyria, was gradually gathering strength in the north, a fierce young lion-cub. By this newcomer among nations our attention will henceforth mainly be claimed. Let us, therefore, pause on the high place to which we have now arrived, and, casting a glance backward, take a rapid survey of the ground we have covered.

18. Looking with strained eyes into a past dim and gray with the scarce-lifting mists of unnumbered ages, we behold our starting-point, the low land by the Gulf, Shumir, taking shape and color under the rule of Turanian settlers, the oldest known nation in the world. They drain and till the land, they make bricks and build cities, and prosper materially. But the spirit in them is dark and lives in cowering terror of self-created demons and evil things, which they yet believe they can control and compel. So their religion is one, not of worship and thanksgiving, but of dire conjuring and incantation, inconceivable superstition and witchcraft, an unutterable dreariness hardly lightened by the glimmering of a nobler faith, in the conception of the wise and beneficent Êa and his ever benevolently busy son, Meridug. But gradually there comes a change. Shumir lifts its gaze upward, and as it takes in more the beauty and the goodness of the world—in Sun and Moon and Stars, in the wholesome Waters and the purifying serviceable Fire, the good and divine Powers—the Gods multiply and the host of elementary spirits, mostly evil, becomes secondary. This change is greatly helped by the arrival of the meditative, star-gazing strangers, who take hold of the nature-worship and the nature-myths they find among the people to which they have come—a higher and more advanced race—and weave these, with their own star-worship and astrological lore, into a new faith, a religious system most ingeniously combined, elaborately harmonized, and full of profoundest meaning. The new religion is preached not only in words, but in brick and stone: temples arise all over the land, erected by the patesis—the priest-kings of the different cities—and libraries in which the priestly colleges reverently treasure both their own works and the older religious lore of the country. The ancient Turanian names of the gods are gradually translated into the new Cushito-Semitic language; yet the prayers and hymns, as well as the incantations, are still preserved in the original tongue, for the people of Turanian Shumir are the more numerous, and must be ruled and conciliated, not alienated. The more northern region, Accad, is, indeed, more thinly peopled; there the tribes of Semites, who now arrive in frequent instalments, spread rapidly and unhindered. The cities of Accad with their temples soon rival those of Shumir and strive to eclipse them, and their patesis labor to predominate politically over those of the South. And it is with the North that the victory at first remains; its pre-eminence is asserted in the time of Sharrukin of Agadê, about 3800 b.c., but is resumed by the South some thousand years later, when a powerful dynasty (that to which belong Ur-êa and his son Dungi) establishes itself in Ur, while Tintir, the future head and centre of the united land of Chaldea, the great Babylon, if existing at all, is not yet heard of. It is these kings of Ur who first take the significant title "kings of Shumir and Accad." Meanwhile new and higher moral influences have been at work; the Semitic immigration has quickened the half mythical, half astronomical religion with a more spiritual element—of fervent adoration, of prayerful trust, of passionate contrition and self-humiliation in the bitter consciousness of sin, hitherto foreign to it, and has produced a new and beautiful religious literature, which marks its third and last stage. To this stage belong the often mentioned "Penitential Psalms," Semitic, nay, rather Hebrew in spirit, although still written in the old Turanian language (but in the northern dialect of Accad, a fact that in itself bears witness to their comparative lateness and the locality in which they sprang up), and too strikingly identical with similar songs of the golden age of Hebrew poetry in substance and form, not to have been the models from which the latter, by a sort of unconscious heredity, drew its inspirations. Then comes the great Elamitic invasion, with its plundering of cities, desecration of temples and sanctuaries, followed probably by several more through a period of at least three hundred years. The last, that of Khudur Lagamar, since it brings prominently forward the founder of the Hebrew nation, deserves to be particularly mentioned by that nation's historians, and, inasmuch as it coincides with the reign of Amarpal, king of Tintir and father of Hammurabi, serves to establish an important landmark in the history both of the Jews and of Chaldea. When we reach this comparatively recent date the mists have in great part rolled aside, and as we turn from the ages we have just surveyed to those that still lie before us, history guides us with a bolder step and shows us the landscape in a twilight which, though still dim and sometimes misleading, is yet that of breaking day, not of descending night.

19. When we attempt to realize the prodigious vastness and remoteness of the horizon thus opened before us, a feeling akin to awe overcomes us. Until within a very few years, Egypt gloried in the undisputed boast of being the oldest country in the world, i.e., of reaching back, by its annals and monuments, to an earlier date than any other. But the discoveries that are continually being made in the valley of the two great rivers have forever silenced that boast. Chaldea points to a monumentally recorded date nearly 4000 b.c. This is more than Egypt can do. Her oldest authentic monuments,—her great Pyramids, are considerably later. Mr. F. Hommel, one of the leaders of Assyriology, forcibly expresses this feeling of wonder in a recent publication:[BK] "If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand b.c., in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture adopted by them,—a culture, moreover, which appears to have sprouted in Accad as a cutting from Shumir—then the latter must naturally be far, far older still, and have existed in its completed form in the fifth thousand b.c.—an age to which I now unhesitatingly ascribe the South-Babylonian incantations." This would give our mental vision a sweep of full six thousand years, a pretty respectable figure! But when we remember that these first known settlers of Shumir came from somewhere else, and that they brought with them more than the rudiments of civilization, we are at once thrown back at least a couple of thousands of years more. For it must have taken all of that and more for men to pass from a life spent in caves and hunting the wild beasts to a stage of culture comprising the invention of a complete system of writing, the knowledge and working of metals, even to the mixing of copper and tin into bronze, and an expertness in agriculture equal not only to tilling, but to draining land. If we further pursue humanity—losing at last all count of time in years or even centuries—back to its original separation, to its first appearance on the earth,—if we go further still and try to think of the ages upon ages during which man existed not at all, yet the earth did, and was beautiful to look upon—(had there been any to look on it), and good for the creatures who had it all to themselves—a dizziness comes over our senses, before the infinity of time, and we draw back, faint and awed, as we do when astronomy launches us, on a slender thread of figures, into the infinity of space. The six ages of a thousand years each which are all that our mind can firmly grasp then come to seem to us a very poor and puny fraction of eternity, to which we are tempted to apply almost scornfully the words spoken by the poet of as many years: "Six ages! six little ages! six drops of time!"

FOOTNOTES:

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII.

Professor Louis Dyer has devoted some time to preparing a free metrical translation of "Ishtar's Descent." Unfortunately, owing to his many occupations, only the first part of the poem is as yet finished. This he most kindly has placed at our disposal, authorizing us to present it to our readers.

ISHTAR IN URUGAL.

ISHTAR'S LAMENT.

NINKIGAL'S COMMAND TO THE WARDER.

Want of space bids us limit ourselves to these few fragments—surely sufficient to make our readers wish that Professor Dyer might spare some time to the completion of his task.

INDEX.

A.

Abel, killed by Cain, 129.

Abraham, wealthy and powerful chief, 200;

goes forth from Ur, 201;

his victory over Khudur-Lagamar, 222-224.

Abu-Habba, see Sippar.

Abu-Shahrein, see Eridhu.

Accad, Northern or Upper Chaldea, 145;

meaning of the word, ib.;

headquarters of Semitism, 204-205.

Accads, see Shumiro-Accads.

Accadian language, see Shumiro-Accadian.

Agadê, capital of Accad, 205.

Agglutinative languages, meaning of the word, 136-137;

characteristic of Turanian nations, ib.;

spoken by the people of Shumir and Accad, 144.

Agricultural life, third stage of culture, first beginning of real civilization, 122.

Akki, the water-carrier, see Sharrukin of Agadê.

Alexander of Macedon conquers Babylon, 4;

his soldiers destroy the dams of the Euphrates, 5.

Allah, Arabic for "God," see Ilu.

Allat, queen of the Dead, 327-329.

Altaï, the great Siberian mountain chain, 146;

probable cradle of the Turanian race, 147.

Altaïc, another name for the Turanian or Yellow Race, 147.

Amarpal, also Sin-Muballit, king of Babylon, perhaps Amraphel, King of Shinar, 226.

Amorite, the, a tribe of Canaan, 133.

Amraphel, see Amarpal.

Ana, or Zi-ana—"Heaven," or "Spirit of Heaven," p. 154.

Anatu, goddess, mother of Ishtar, smites Êabâni with death and Izdubar with leprosy, 310.

Anthropomorphism, meaning of the word, 355;

definition and causes of, 355-357.

Anu, first god of the first Babylonian Triad, same as Ana, 240;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Anunnaki, minor spirits of earth, 154, 250.

Anunit (the Moon), wife of Shamash, 245.

Apsu (the Abyss), 264.

Arali, or Arallu, the Land of the Dead, 157;

its connection with the Sacred Mountain, 276.

Arallu, see Arali.

Aram, a son of Shem, eponymous ancestor of the Aramæans in Gen. x., 131.

Arabs, their conquest and prosperous rule in Mesopotamia, 5;

Baghdad, their capital, 5;

nomads in Mesopotamia, 8;

their superstitious horror of the ruins and sculptures, 11;

they take the gigantic head for Nimrod, 22-24;

their strange ideas about the colossal winged bulls and lions and their destination, 24-25;

their habit of plundering ancient tombs at Warka, 86;

their conquests and high culture in Asia and Africa, 118.

Arbela, city of Assyria, built in hilly region, 50.

Architecture, Chaldean, created by local conditions, 37-39;

Assyrian, borrowed from Chaldea, 50.

Areph-Kasdîm, see Arphaxad, meaning of the word, 200.

Arphaxad, eldest son of Shem, 200.

Arphakshad, see Arphaxad.

Asshur, a son of Shem, eponymous ancestor of the Assyrians in Genesis X., 131.

Asshurbanipal, King of Assyria, his Library, 100-112;

conquers Elam, destroys Shushan, and restores the statue of the goddess Nana to Erech, 194-195.

Asshur-nazir-pal, King of Assyria, size of hall in his palace at Calah (Nimrud), 63.

Assyria, the same as Upper Mesopotamia, 7;

rise of, 228.

Astrology, meaning of the word, 106;

a corruption of astronomy, 234;

the special study of priests, ib.

Astronomy, the ancient Chaldeans' proficiency in, 230;

fascination of, 231;

conducive to religious speculation, 232;

degenerates into astrology, 234;

the god Nebo, the patron of, 242.

B.

Babbar, see Ud.

Babel, same as Babylon, 237.

Bab-el-Mandeb, Straits of, 189.

Bab-ilu, Semitic name of Babylon; meaning of the name, 225, 249.

Babylonia, a part of Lower Mesopotamia, 7;

excessive flatness of, 9;

later name for "Shumir and Accad" and for "Chaldea," 237.

Baghdad, capital of the Arabs' empire in Mesopotamia, 5;

its decay, 6.

Bassorah, see Busrah.

Bedouins, robber tribes of, 8;

distinctively a nomadic people, 116-118.

Bel, third god of the first Babylonian Triad, 239;

meaning of the name, 240;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246;

his battle with Tiamat, 288-290.

Belit, the wife of Bel, the feminine principle of nature, 244-245;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Bel-Maruduk, see Marduk.

Berosus, Babylonian priest; his History of Chaldea, 128;

his version of the legend of Oannes, 184-185;

his account of the Chaldean Cosmogony, 260-261, 267;

his account of the great tower and the confusion of tongues, 292-293;

his account of the Deluge, 299-301.

Birs-Nimrud or Birs-i-Nimrud, see Borsippa.

Books, not always of paper, 93;

stones and bricks used as books, 97;

walls and rocks, ib., 97-99.

Borsippa (Mound of Birs-Nimrud), its peculiar shape, 47;

Nebuchadnezzar's inscription found at, 72;

identified with the Tower of Babel, 293.

Botta begins excavations at Koyunjik, 14;

his disappointment, 15;

his great discovery at Khorsabad, 15-16.

Bricks, how men came to make, 39;

sun-dried or raw, and kiln-dried or baked, 40;

ancient bricks from the ruins used for modern constructions; trade with ancient bricks at Hillah, 42.

British Museum, Rich's collection presented to, 14.

Busrah, or Bassorah, bulls and lions shipped to, down the Tigris, 52.

Byblos, ancient writing material, 94.

C.

Ca-Dimirra (or Ka-Dimirra), second name of Babylon; meaning of the name, 216, 249.

Cain, his crime, banishment, and posterity, 129.

Calah, or Kalah, one of the Assyrian capitals, the Larissa of Xenophon, 3.

Calendar, Chaldean, 230, 318-321, 325.

Canaan, son of Ham, eponymous ancestor of many nations, 134.

Canaanites, migrations of, 190.

Cement, various qualities of, 44.

Chaldea, the same as Lower Mesopotamia, 7;

alluvial formation of, 37-38;

its extraordinary abundance in cemeteries, 78;

a nursery of nations, 198;

more often called by the ancients "Babylonia," 237.

Chaldeans, in the sense of "wise men of the East," astrologer, magician, soothsayer,—a separate class of the priesthood, 254-255.

Charm against evil spells, 162.

Cherub, Cherubim, see Kirûbu.

China, possibly mentioned in Isaiah, 136, note.

Chinese speak a monosyllabic language, 137;

their genius and its limitations, 138, 139;

oldest national religion of, 180, 181;

their "docenal" and "sexagesimal" system of counting, 230-231.

Chronology, vagueness of ancient, 193-194;

extravagant figures of, 196-197;

difficulty of establishing, 211-212.

Chthon, meaning of the word, 272.

Chthonic Powers, 272, 273.

Chthonic Myths, see Myths.

Cissians, see Kasshi.

Cities, building of, fourth stage of culture, 123, 124.

Classical Antiquity, meaning of the term; too exclusive study of, 12.

Coffins, ancient Chaldean, found at Warka: "jar-coffins," 82;

"dish-cover" coffins, 84;

"slipper-shaped" coffin (comparatively modern), 84-86.

Conjuring, against demons and sorcerers, 158-159;

admitted into the later reformed religion, 236.

Conjurors, admitted into the Babylonian priesthood, 250.

Cossæans, see Kasshi.

Cosmogonic Myths, see Myths.

Cosmogony, meaning of the word, 259;

Chaldean, imparted by Berosus, 260-261;

original tablets discovered by Geo. Smith, 261-263;

their contents, 264 and ff.;

Berosus again, 267.

Cosmos, meaning of the word, 272.

Cuneiform writing, shape and specimen of, 10;

introduced into Chaldea by the Shumiro-Accads, 145.

Cush, or Kush, eldest son of Ham, 186;

probable early migrations of, 188;

ancient name of Ethiopia, 189.

Cushites, colonization of Turanian Chaldea by, 192.

Cylinders: seal cylinders in hard stones, 113-114;

foundation-cylinders, 114;

seal-cylinders worn as talismans, 166;

Babylonian cylinder, supposed to represent the Temptation and Fall, 266.

D.

Damkina, goddess, wife of Êa, mother of Meridug, 160.

Decoration: of palaces, 58-62;

of walls at Warka, 87-88.

Delitzsch, Friedrich, eminent Assyriologist, favors the Semitic theory, 186.

Deluge, Berosus' account of, 299-301;

cuneiform account, in the 11th tablet of the Izdubar Epic, 314-317.

Demon of the South-West Wind, 168.

Diseases conceived as demons, 163.

Divination, a branch of Chaldean "science," in what it consists, 251-252;

collection of texts on, in one hundred tablets, 252-253;

specimens of, 253-254.

Draining of palace mounds, 70;

of sepulchral mounds at Warka, 86-87.

Dumuzi, the husband of the goddess Ishtar, 303;

the hero of a solar Myth, 323-326.

Dur-Sharrukin, (see Khorsabad),

built in hilly region, 50.

E.

Êa, sometimes Zi-kî-a, the Spirit of the Earth and Waters, 154;

protector against evil spirits and men, 160;

his chief sanctuary at Eridhu, 215;

second god of the first Babylonian Triad, 239;

his attributions, 240;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Êabâni, the seer, 304;

invited by Izdubar, 304-305;

becomes Izdubar's friend, 307;

vanquishes with him the Elamite tyrant Khumbaba, 308;

smitten by Ishtar and Anatu, 310;

restored to life by the gods, 314.

Ê-Babbara, "House of the Sun," 215, 248.

Eber, see Heber.

El, see Ilu.

Elam, kingdom of, conquered by Asshurbanipal, 194;

meaning of the name, 220.

Elamite conquest of Chaldea, 219-221, 224-225.

Elohim, one of the Hebrew names for God, a plural of El, 354.

See Ilu.

Emanations, theory of divine, 238-239;

meaning of the word, 239.

Enoch, son of Cain, 129.

Enoch, the first city, built by Cain, 129.

Epic Poems, or Epics, 298-299.

Epic-Chaldæan, oldest known in the world, 299;

its division into tablets, 302.

Eponym, meaning of the word, 133.

Eponymous genealogies in Genesis X., 132-134.

Epos, national, meaning of the word, 299.

Erech (now Mound of Warka), oldest name Urukh, immense burying-grounds around, 80-82;

plundered by Khudur-Nankhundi, king of Elam, 195;

library of, 209.

Eri-Aku (Ariokh of Ellassar), Elamite king of Larsam, 226.

Eridhu (modern Abu-Shahrein), the most ancient city of Shumir, 215;

specially sacred to Êa, 215, 246, 287.

Ethiopians, see Cush.

Excavations, how carried on, 30-34.

F.

Fergusson, Jas., English explorer and writer on art subjects, 56.

Finns, a nation of Turanian stock, 138.

Flood, or Deluge, possibly not universal, 128-129.

G.

Gan-Dunyash, or Kar-Dunyash, most ancient name of Babylonia proper, 225, 286.

Genesis, first book of the Pentateuch, 127-129;

Chapter X. of, 130-142;

meaning of the word, 353.

Gibil, Fire, 173;

hymn to, 16;

his friendliness, 174;

invoked to prosper the fabrication of bronze, 16.

Gisdhubar, see Izdubar.

Gudêa, patesi of Sir-burla, 214.

H.

Ham, second son of Noah, 130;

meaning of the name, 186.

Hammurabi, king of Babylon and all Chaldea, 226;

his long and glorious reign, ib.;

his public works and the "Royal Canal," 227.

Harimtu ("Persuasion"), one of the handmaidens of Ishtar, 305.

Hâsisadra, same as Xisuthros, 303;

gives Izdubar an account of the great Flood, 314-317.

Heber, a descendant of Shem, eponymous ancestor of the Hebrews in Genesis X., 131, 222.

Heroes, 296-298.

Heroic Ages, 299.

Heroic Myths, see Myths.

Hillah, built of bricks from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, carries on trade with ancient bricks, 42.

Himâlaya Mountains, 188.

Hindu-Cush (or Kush) Mountains, 188.

Hit, ancient Is, on the Euphrates, springs of bitumen at, 44.

Hivite, the, a tribe of Canaan, 133.

Hungarians, a nation of Turanian stock, 138.

I.

Idpa, the Demon of Fever, 156.

Igigi, three hundred, spirits of heaven, 250.

Ilu, or El, Semitic name for "god," 232.

Im, or Mermer, "Wind," 154.

India, 188.

Indus, the great river of India, 188.

Intercalary months, introduced by the Chaldeans to correct the reckoning of their year, 230.

Is, see Hit.

Ishtar, the goddess of the planet Venus, 242;

the Warrior-Queen and Queen of Love, 245;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246;

offers her love to Izdubar, 308;

is rejected and sends a monstrous bull against him, 309;

causes Êabâni's death and Izdubar's illness, 310;

descent of, into the land of shades, 326-330.

Izdubar, the hero of the great Chaldean Epic, 303;

his dream at Erech, 304;

invites Êabâni, 304-305;

vanquishes with his help Khumbaba, the Elamite tyrant of Erech, 308;

offends Ishtar, 308;

vanquishes the divine Bull, with Êabâni's help, 309;

is smitten with leprosy, 310;

travels to "the mouth of the great rivers" to consult his immortal ancestor Hâsisadra, 310-313;

is purified and healed, 313;

returns to Erech; his lament over Êabâni's death, 313-314;

solar character of the Epic, 318-322.

J.

Jabal and Jubal, sons of Lamech, descendants of Cain, 129.

Japhet, third son of Noah, 130.

Javan, a son of Japhet, eponymous ancestor of the Ionian Greeks, 134.

"Jonah's Mound," see Nebbi-Yunus.

Jubal, see Jabal and Jubal.

K.

Ka-Dingirra, see Ca-Dimirra.

Kar-Dunyash, see Gan-Dunyash.

Kasbu, the Chaldean double hour, 230.

Kasr, Mound of, ruins of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, 42.

Kasshi (Cossæans or Cissians), conquer Chaldea, 228.

Kerbela and Nedjif, goal of pilgrim-caravans from Persia, 78.

Kerubim, see Kirûbu.

Khorsabad, Mound of, Botta's excavations and brilliant discovery at, 15-16.

Khudur-Lagamar (Chedorlaomer), king of Elam and Chaldea, his conquests, 221;

plunders Sodom and Gomorrah with his allies, 222;

is overtaken by Abraham and routed, 223;

his probable date, 224.

Khudur-Nankhundi, king of Elam, invades Chaldea and carries the statue of the goddess Nana away from Erech, 195.

Khumbaba, the Elamite tyrant of Erech vanquished by Izdubar and Êabâni, 308.

Kirûbu, name of the Winged Bulls, 164.

Koyunjik, Mound of Xenophon's Mespila, 14;

Botta's unsuccessful exploration of, 15;

valuable find of small articles in a chamber at, in the palace of Sennacherib, 34.

Kurds, nomadic tribes of, 8.

L.

Lamech, fifth descendant of Cain, 129.

Larissa, ruins of ancient Calah, seen by Xenophon, 3.

Larsam (now Senkereh), city of Shumir, 215.

Layard meets Botta at Mossul in 1842, 17;

undertakes the exploration of Nimrud, 17-18;

his work and life in the East, 19-32;

discovers the Royal Library at Nineveh (Koyunjik), 100.

Lebanon Mountains, 190.

Lenormant, François, eminent French Orientalist; his work on the religion of the Shumiro-Accads, 152-153;

favors the Cushite theory, 186.

Library of Asshurbanipal in his palace at Nineveh (Koyunjik); discovered by Layard, 100;

re-opened by George Smith, 103;

contents and importance of, for modern scholarship, 106-109;

of Erech, 209.

Loftus, English explorer; his visit to Warka in 1854-5, 80-82;

procures slipper-shaped coffins for the British Museum, 36.

Louvre, Assyrian Collection at the, 17;

"Sarzec collection" added, 89.

Louvre, Armenian contrivance for lighting houses, 68.

M.

Madai, a son of Japhet, eponymous ancestor of the Medes, 135.

Magician, derivation of the word, 255.

Marad, ancient city of Chaldea, 303.

Marduk, or Maruduk (Hebrew Merodach), god of the planet Jupiter, 241;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246;

special patron of Babylon, 249.

Maskim, the seven, evil spirits, 154;

incantation against the, 155;

the same, poetical version, 182.

Maspero, G., eminent French Orientalist, 197.

Medes, Xenophon's erroneous account of, 3-4;

mentioned under the name of Madai in Genesis X., 135.

Media, divided from Assyria by the Zagros chain, 50.

Ménant, Joachim, French Assyriologist; his little book on the Royal Library at Nineveh, 105.

Meridug, son of Êa, the Mediator, 160;

his dialogues with Êa, 161-162.

Mermer, see Im.

Merodach, see Marduk.

Mesopotamia, meaning of the name, 5;

peculiar formation of, 6;

division of, into Upper and Lower, 7.

Mespila, ruins of Nineveh; seen by Xenophon, 3;

now Mound of Koyunjik, 14.

Migrations of tribes, nations, races;

probable first causes of prehistoric migrations, 119;

caused by invasions and conquests, 125;

of the Turanian races, 146-147;

of the Cushites, 188;

of the Canaanites, 190.

Mizraim ("the Egyptians"), a son of Ham, eponymous ancestor of the Egyptians, 133;

opposed to Cush, 189.

Monosyllabic languages—Chinese, 136-137.

Monotheism, meaning of the word, 238;

as conceived by the Hebrews, 344-345.

Mosul, the residence of a Turkish Pasha; origin of the name, 6;

the wicked Pasha of, 20-23.

Mound-Builders, their tombs, 335-338.

Mounds, their appearance, 9-10;

their contents, 11;

formation of, 72;

their usefulness in protecting the ruins and works of art, 74;

sepulchral mounds at Warka, 79-87.

Mugheir, see Ur.

Mul-ge, "Lord of the Abyss," 154.

Mummu-Tiamat (the "Billowy Sea"), 264;

her hostility to the gods, 288;

her fight with Bel, 288-290.

Mythology, definition of, 331;

distinction from Religion, 331-334.

Myths, meaning of the word, 294;

Cosmogonic, 294;

Heroic, 297-298;

Solar, 322, 339-340;

Chthonic, 330, 340-341.

N.

Nabonidus, last king of Babylon, discovers Naram-sin's cylinder, 213;

discovers Hammurabi's cylinder at Larsam, 218-219.

Namtar, the Demon of Pestilence, 156, 157;

incantation against, 167;

Minister of Allat, Queen of the Dead, 328, 329.

Nana, Chaldean goddess, her statue restored by Asshurbanipal, 195, 343-344;

wife of Anu, 245.

Nannar, see Uru-Ki.

Naram-Sin, son of Sargon I. of Agadê;

his cylinder discovered by Nabonidus, 213.

Nations, gradual formation of, 125-126.

Nebbi-Yunus, Mound of, its sacredness, 11;

its size, 49.

Nebo, or Nabu, the god of the planet Mercury, 242;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon;

his palace, now Mound of Kasr, 42;

his inscription of Borsippa, 72.

Nedjif, see Kerbela.

Nergal, the god of the planet Mars, and of War, 242;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Niffer, see Nippur.

Nimrod, dams on the Euphrates attributed to, by the Arabs, 5;

his name preserved, and many ruins called by it, 11;

gigantic head declared by the Arabs to be the head of, 22-24.

Nimrud, Mound of, Layard undertakes the exploration of, 17.

Nin-dar, the nightly sun, 175.

Nineveh, greatness and utter destruction of, 1;

ruins of, seen by Xenophon, called by him Mespila, 3;

site of, opposite Mossul, 11.

Nin-ge, see Nin-kî-gal.

Ninîb, or Ninêb, the god of the planet Saturn, 241;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Nin-kî-gal, or Nin-ge, "the Lady of the Abyss," 157.

Nippur (now Niffer), city of Accad, 216.

Nizir, Mount, the mountain on which Hâsisadra's ship stood still, 301;

land and Mount, 316

Noah and his three sons, 130.

Nod, land of ("Land of Exile," or "of Wanderings"), 129.

Nomads, meaning of the word, and causes of nomadic life in modern times, 118.

O.

Oannes, legend of, told by Berosus, 185.

Oasis, meaning of the word, 118.

P.

Palaces, their imposing aspect, 54;

palace of Sennacherib restored by Fergusson, 56;

ornamentation of palaces, 58;

winged Bulls and Lions at gateways of, 58;

sculptured slabs along the walls of, 58-60;

painted tiles used for the friezes of, 60-62;

proportions of halls, 63;

roofing of, 62-66;

lighting of, 66-68.

Papyrus, ancient writing material, 94.

Paradise, Chaldean legend of, see , Sacred Tree and Ziggurat.

Meaning of the word, 277.

Parallel between the Book of Genesis and the Chaldean legends, 350-360.

Pastoral life, second stage of culture, 120;

necessarily nomadic, 121.

Patesis, meaning of the word, 203;

first form of royalty in Chaldean cities, ib., 235.

Patriarchal authority, first form of government, 123;

the tribe, or enlarged family, first form of the State, 123.

Penitential Psalms, Chaldean, 177-179.

Persian Gulf, flatness and marshiness of the region around, 7;

reached further inland than now, 201.

Persians, rule in Asia, 2;

the war between two royal brothers, 2;

Persian monarchy conquered by Alexander, 4;

not named in Genesis X., 134.

Platforms, artificial, 46-49.

Polytheism, meaning of the word, 237;

tendency to, of the Hebrews, combated by their leaders, 345-350.

Priesthood, Chaldean, causes of its power and influence, 233-234.

R.

Races, Nations, and Tribes represented in antiquity under the name of a man, an ancestor, 130-134;

black race and yellow race omitted from the list in Genesis X., 134-142;

probable reasons for the omission, 135, 140.

Ramân, third god of the second Babylonian Triad, his attributions, 240-241;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Rassam, Hormuzd, explorer, 247, 248.

Rawlinson, Sir Henry, his work at the British Museum, 152.

Religion of the Shumiro-Accads the most primitive in the world, 148;

characteristics of Turanian religions, 180, 181;

definition of, as distinguished from Mythology, 331-334.

Religiosity, distinctively human characteristic, 148;

its awakening and development, 149-152.

Rich, the first explorer, 13;

his disappointment at Mossul, 14.

S.

Sabattuv, the Babylonian and Assyrian "Sabbath," 256.

Sabeism, the worship of the heavenly bodies,

a Semitic form of religion, 232;

fostered by a pastoral and nomadic life, ib.

Sabitu, one of the maidens in the magic grove, 311.

Sacred Tree, sacredness of the Symbol, 268;

its conventional appearance on sculptures and cylinders, 268-270;

its signification, 272-274;

its connection with the legend of Paradise, 274-276.

Sargon of Agadê, see Sharrukin.

Sarzec, E. de, French explorer;

his great find at Tell-Loh, 88-90;

statues found by him, 214.

Scorpion-men, the Warders of the Sun, 311.

Schrader, Eberhard, eminent Assyriologist, favors the Semitic theory, 186.

Semites (more correctly Shemites),

one of the three great races given in Genesis X.;

named from its eponymous ancestor, Shem, 131.

Semitic language, 199;

culture, the beginning of historical times in Chaldea, 202, 203.

Sennacherib, king of Assyria, his palace at Koyunjik, 34;

Fergusson's restoration of his palace, 56;

his "Will" in the library of Nineveh, 109.

Senkereh, see Larsam.

Sepharvaim, see Sippar.

Seth (more correctly Sheth), third son of Adam, 131.

Shamash, the Sun-god, second god of the Second Babylonian Triad, 240;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246;

his temple at Sippar discovered by H. Rassam, 247, 248.

Shamhatu ("Grace"), one of the handmaidens of Ishtar, 305.

Sharrukin I. of Agadê (Sargon I.), 205;

legend about his birth, 206;

his glorious reign, 206;

Sharrukin II. of Agadê (Sargon II.), 205;

his religious reform and literary labors, 207, 208;

probable founder of the library at Erech, 209;

date of, lately discovered, 213.

Shem, eldest son of Noah, 130;

meaning of the name, 198.

Shinar, or Shineâr, geographical position of, 127.

Shumir, Southern or Lower Chaldea, 145.

Shumir and Accad, oldest name for Chaldea, 143, 144.

Shumiro-Accadian, oldest language of Chaldea, 108;

Agglutinative, 145.

Shumiro-Accads, oldest population of Chaldea, of Turanian race, 144;

their language agglutinative, 145;

introduce into Chaldea cuneiform writing, metallurgy and irrigation, ib.;

their probable migration, 146;

their theory of the world, 153.

Shushan (Susa), capital of Elam, destroyed by Asshurbanipal, 194.

Siddim, battle in the veil of, 221, 222.

Sidon, a Phœnician city, meaning of the name, 133;

the "first-born" son of Canaan, eponymous ancestor of the city in Genesis X., ib.

Siduri, one of the maidens in the magic grove, 311.

Sin, the Moon-god, first god of the Second Babylonian Triad, 240;

one of the "twelve great gods," 246;

attacked by the seven rebellious spirits, 291.

Sin-Muballit, see Amarpal.

Sippar, sister city of Agadê, 205;

Temple of Shamash at, excavated by H. Rassam, 247, 248.

Sir-burla (also Sir-gulla, or Sir-tella, or Zirbab), ancient city of Chaldea, now Mound of Tell-Loh; discoveries at, by Sarzec, 88-90.

Sir-gulla, see Sir-burla.

Smith, George, English explorer; his work at the British Museum, 102;

his expeditions to Nineveh, 103;

his success, and his death, 104;

his discovery of the Deluge Tablets, 301.

Sorcerers believed in, 157.

Spirits, belief in good and evil, the first beginning of religion, 150;

elementary, in the primitive Shumiro-Accadian religion, 153-155;

evil, 155-157;

allowed an inferior place in the later reformed religion, 236, 250;

rebellion of the seven evil, their attack against the Moon-god, 290, 291.

Statues found at Tell-Loh, 88, 214.

Style, ancient writing instrument, 94, 109.

Synchronism, meaning of the word, 212.

T.

Tablets, in baked or unbaked clay, used as books, 109;

their shapes and sizes, 109;

mode of writing on, 109-110;

baking of, 110;

great numbers of, deposited in the British Museum, 110-112;