xclude those
of neighbouring cities: their alliances and their borrowings from one
another--The sky-gods and the earth-gods, the sidereal gods: the moon
and the sun.

The feudal gods: several among them unite to govern the world; the two
triads of Eridu--The supreme triad: Anu the heaven; Bel the earth and
his fusion with the Babylonian Merodach; Ea, the god of the waters--The
second triad: Sin the moon and Shamash the sun; substitution of Bamman
for Ishtar in this triad; the winds and the legend of Adapa, the
attributes of Ramman--The addition of goddesses to these two triads;
the insignificant position which they occupy.

The assembly of the gods governs the world: the bird Zu steals the
tablets of destiny--Destinies are written in the heavens and determined
by the movements of the stars; comets and their presiding deities, Nebo
and Ishtai--The numerical value of the gods--The arrangement of the
temples, the local priesthood, festivals, revenues of the gods and gifts
made to them--Sacrifices, the expiation of crimes--Death and the future
of the soul--Tombs and the cremation of the dead; the royal sepulchres
and funerary rites--Hades and its sovereigns: Nergal, Allat, the
descent of Ishtar into the infernal regions, and the possibility of a
resurrection The invocation of the dead--The ascension of Etana._

[Illustration: 124.jpg Chapter II]

CHAPTER II--THE TEMPLES AND THE GODS OF CHALDAEA

_The construction and revenues of the temples--Popular gods and
theological triads--The dead and Hades_.

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the
Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses,
even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and
industrious people: on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in
which no architectural outline can be distinguished--mounds of stiff
and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the
rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man.

[Illustration: 126.jpg PLAN OF THE RUINS OF WAKKA]

In the estimation of the Chaldaean architects, stone was a material of
secondary consideration: as it was necessary to bring it from a great
distance and at considerable expense, they used it very sparingly, and
then merely for lintels, uprights, thresholds, for hinges on which to
hang their doors, for dressings in some of their state apartments, in
cornices or sculptured friezes on the extern