umiliation
were appointed from time to time. There was also a weekly Sabattu or
"Sabbath," on the 1st, 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days of the month, as
well as on the 19th, the last day of the seventh week from the beginning
of the previous month. The Sabbath is described as "a day of rest for
the heart," and all work upon it was forbidden. The king was not allowed
to change his dress, to ride in his chariot, or even to take medicine,
while the prophet himself was forbidden to utter his prophecies.

The mass of the people looked forward to a dreary existence beyond the
grave. The shades of the dead flitted like bats in the darkness of the
under-world, hungry and cold, while the ghosts of the heroes of the past
sat beside them on their shadowy thrones, and Allat, the mistress of
Hades, presided over the warders of its seven gates. The Sumerians had
called it "the land whence none return," though in the theology of Eridu
and Babylon Asari or Merodach was already a god who, through the wisdom
of his father Ea, "restored the dead to life." But as the centuries
passed, new and less gloomy ideas grew up in regard to the future life.
In a prayer for the Assyrian king the writer asks that he may enjoy an
endless existence hereafter in "the land of the silver sky," and the
realms of the gods of light had been peopled with the heroes of
Babylonian literature at an early date.

The belief in Hades went back to those primitive ages when the Sumerians
of Eridu conceived of the earth as floating on the deep, which
surrounded it as a snake with its coils, while the sky covered it above
like an extinguisher, and was supported on the peak of "the mountain of
the world," where the gods had their abode. This primitive cosmological
conception underwent changes in the course of time, but the underlying
idea of an abyss of waters out of which all things were shaped remained
to the end. The Chaldaean Epic of the Creation declares that "in the
beginning," "the chaos of the deep" had been the "mother" of both heaven
and earth, out of whom first came the primaeval deities Lakhmu and
Lakhamu, and then An-sar and Ki-sar, the upper and lower firmament. Long
ages had to elapse before the Trinity of the later theology--Anu, Ea,
and Bel--were born of these, and all things made ready for the genesis
of the present world. Merodach, the champion of the gods of light and
law, had first to do battle with Tiamat, "the dragon" of "the deep," and
her allies o