Note 54.2 — Chapter III · NOTES

In the Amer. Journ. Archael., 1887, pp. 59-60, Frothingham cites examples from Assyrian cylinders of birds on pillars or altar with worshippers approaching: one of these shows us a seated god in front of the bird (pl. vii. 1); on another, a warrior approaches a tabernacle, within which is a horse’s head on an altar, and near it a bird on a column (pl. vii. 2; cf. the boundary-stone of Nebuchadnezzar I., published by Miss Harrison, Trans. Congr. Hist. Rel., 1908, vol. ii. p. 158); we find also a winged genius adoring an altar on which is a cock. But cocks and other birds were sacrificial animals in Babylonian ritual, and might be interpreted in all these cases as mere temporary embodiments of the divinity’s power; the human-shaped divinity is once represented by the side of the bird, and might always have been imagined as present though unseen.