he fatal tablets of
Shamash, and could spell them out line by line.

The Chaldaens were disposed to regard the planets as perverse sheep who
had escaped from the fold of the stars to wander wilfully in search of
pasture.* At first they were considered to be so many sovereign deities,
without other function than that of running through the heavens and
furnishing there predictions of the future; afterwards two of them
descended to the earth, and received upon it the homage of men* --Ishtar
from the inhabitants of the city of Dilbat, and Nebo* from those of
Borsippa. Nebo assumed the _role_ of a soothsayer and a prophet. He
knew and foresaw everything, and was ready to give his advice upon any
subject: he was the inventor of the method of making clay tablets,
and of writing upon them. Ishtar was a combination of contradictory
characteristics.****

* Their generic name, read as "lubat," in Sumero-Accadian,
"bibbu" in Semitic speech (Fr. Lenormant, _Essai de
Commentaire de Berose_, pp. 370, 371), denoted a quadruped,
the species of which Lenormant was not able to define;
Jensen (_Die Kosmologie_, pp. 95-99) identified it with the
sheep and the ram. At the end of the account of the
creation, Merodach-Jupiter is compared with a shepherd who
feeds the flock of the gods on the pastures of heaven (cf.
p. 15 of the present work).

** The site of Dilbat is unknown: it has been sought in the
neighbourhood of Kishu and Babylon (Delitzsch, _Wo lag das
Paradies?_ p. 219); it is probable that it was in the
suburbs of Sippara. The name given to the goddess was
transcribed AeXckit (Hesychius, _sub voce_), and signifies
the herald, the messenger of the day.

*** The role of Nebo was determined by the early
Assyriologists (Rawlin-son, _On the Religion of the
Babylonians and Assyrians_, pp. 523-52G; Oppeet, _Expedition
en Mesopotamie_, vol. ii. p. 257; Lenormant, _Essai de
Commentaire de Berose_, pp. 114-116). He owed his functions
partly to his alliance with other gods (Sayce, _Religion of
the Ancient Babylonians_, pp. 118, 119).

**** See the chapter devoted by Sayce to the consideration
of Ishtar in his Religion of the Ancient Babylonians (IV.
Tammuz and Ishtar, p. 221, et seq.), and the observations
made by Jeremias on the subject in the sequel of his
Izdubar-Nimrod (Ishtar-Astarte im Izdubar-Epos