ry).

[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Stone of Merodach-Baladan I. (Smith's _Assyrian
Discoveries_).]

The chief atmospheric phenomena were also personified; of this we may give
one example. All travellers in Chaldaea agree in their descriptions of those
sudden storms which burst on the country from a clear sky, especially
towards the commencement of summer. Without a single premonitory symptom, a
huge, black water-spout advances from some point on the horizon, its flanks
shooting lightnings and thunder. In a few minutes it reaches the traveller
and wraps him in its black vapours; the sand-laden wind blinds him, the
rain pours upon him in solid sheets; but he has hardly realized his
position before the storm is past and the sun is again shining in the blue
depths above. But for torn and overthrown tents and trees uprooted or
struck by the electric fluid, a stranger to the country might almost
believe himself to have been the sport of a dream.[106]

[Illustration: FIG. 11.--Assyrian Cylinder, in the National Library, Paris.
Jasper.]

[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Assyrian Cylinder, in the National Library, Paris.
Serpentine.]

The force and suddenness of these visitations could hardly fail to impress
the imagination of a people exposed to them, and it is not surprising that
Mesopotamia had its god of storms and thunder. He, Raman, it is, perhaps,
who is figured in the bas-relief from Nimroud reproduced below (Figs. 13
and 14),[107] in which a god appears bearing an axe in his right hand, and,
in his left, a kind of faggot, whose significance might have escaped us but
for the light thrown upon it by classic sculpture. The latter no doubt
borrowed a well-known form from the east, and the object in question is
nothing less than the thunderbolt given by Greek artists to their Zeus.

[Illustration: FIG. 13.--Gods carried in procession; from Layard's
_Monuments of Nineveh_, first series, pl. 65.]

It was this adoration of the stars and planets that led by degrees to what
we call polytheism. Man partitioned those terrible powers of nature of
which he felt himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, between
crowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whom
he did his best to propitiate by gifts and to compel by magic. Little by
little, intelligence perfected that work of abstraction and simplification
by which all races but those who have stuck fast in the conceptions of
their infancy have arrived at a