* * *

They have brought their pure water,
Anat, the great spouse of Anou,
Has held thee in her sacred arms;
Iaou has transferred thee into a holy place;
He has transferred thee from his sacred hands;
He has transferred thee into the midst of honey and fat,
He has poured magic water into thy mouth,
And the virtue of the water has opened thy mouth.

* * * * *

As to where this paradise was placed we have no certain information. It
could hardly have been a mere separate district of that abode of shades
that is painted in such sombre colours. We must suppose that it was open to
the sunlight; it was perhaps on one of the slopes of the _Northern
Mountain_, in the neighbourhood of the luminous summit on which the gods
and goddesses had their home.

The idea of a reward for the just carries as its corollary that of a
punishment for the unjust, but in spite of the logical connection between
the two notions, we cannot affirm that the Elysium of these Semites had a
Tartarus by its side. No allusion to such a place has been found in any of
the texts already translated. On the other hand, we find some evidence that
the Assyrians believed in the resurrection of the dead. Marduk and his
spouse Zarpanitu often bear the title of "those who make the dead live
again" (_muballith_ or _muballithat miti_ or _mituti_). The same epithet is
sometimes given to other deities, especially to Istar. As yet we do not
know when and under what conditions renewed life was to be granted.

We need hardly add that the ideas that find expression in the Assyrian
texts were by no means peculiar to the northern people. All Assyriologists
agree that in everything connected with the intellect, the Assyrians
invented nothing; they did nothing but adapt and imitate, translate and
copy from the more prolific Chaldaeans, who furnished as it were the bread
upon which their minds were nourished. It is the Chaldee intellect that we
study when we question the texts from the library of Assurbanipal.

Other passages in these terra-cotta books help to complete and illustrate
those from which we have, as it were, gained a first glimpse of the
Assyrian Under-world; but we shall never, in all probability, know it as we
already know that of the Egyptians. This is partly, perhaps, because it was
less complex, and partly because the fascination it exercised over the mind
of man was not s