d fish bones are also present in great numbers. In
one tomb the snout of a swordfish has been found, in another a wild boar's
skull. It would seem too that the idea of adding imitation viands to real
ones occurred to the Chaldaeans as well as to the Egyptians.[435] From one
grave opened by Taylor four ducks carved in stone were taken.

The sepulchres in which the objects we have been mentioning were found, are
the most ancient in Chaldaea--on this all the explorers are agreed. Their
situation in the lowest part of the funerary mounds, the aspect of the
characters engraved upon the cylinders and the style of the things they
contained, all go to prove their age. In similar tombs discovered by M. de
Sarzec at Sirtella, in the same region, a tablet of stone and a bronze
statuette, differing in no important particular from those deposited in
foundation stones, were found. The texts engraved upon them leave no doubt
as to their great antiquity.[436] It is then to the early Chaldaean monarchy
that we must assign these tombs, which so clearly betray ideas and beliefs
practically identical with those that find their freest expression in the
mastabas of the ancient Egyptian Empire.

In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, the human intellect arrived with the lapse of
time at something beyond this childish and primitive belief. Men did not,
however, repel it altogether as false and ridiculous; they continued to
cherish it at the bottom of their hearts, and to allow it to impose certain
lines of action upon them which otherwise could hardly be explained or
justified. As in Egypt, and in later years in Greece, a new and more
abstract conception was imposed upon the first. Logically, the second
theory was the negation of its predecessor, but where imagination and
sentiment play the principal _role_, such contradictions are lost sight of.

We have elsewhere[437] traced the process by which the imagination was led
to sketch out a new explanation of the mystery of death. As man's
experience increased, and his faculty for observation became more powerful,
he had to make a greater mental effort before he could believe in the
immortality of the body, and in a life prolonged to infinity in the
darkness of the tomb. In order to satisfy the craving for perpetuity, a
something was imagined, we can hardly say what, a shade, an _imago_, that
detached itself from the body at the moment of death, and took itself off
with the lightness of a bird. A great spac