* I have softened down a good deal the account of the seduction, which is described with a sincerity and precision truly primitive.

Shamash had reasons for being urgent. Khumbaba, King of Elam, had invaded the country of the Euphrates, destroyed the temples, and substituted for the national worship the cult of foreign deities;* the two heroes in concert could alone check his advance, and kill him. They collected their troops, set out on the march, having learned from a female magician that the enemy had concealed himself in a sacred grove. They entered it in disguise, "and stopped in rapture for a moment before the cedar trees; they contemplated the height of them, they contemplated the thickness of them; the place where Khumbaba was accustomed to walk up and down with rapid strides, alleys were made in it, paths kept up with great care. They saw at length the hill of cedars, the abode of the gods, the sanctuary of Irnini, and before the hill, a magnificent cedar, and pleasant grateful shade." They surprised Khumbaba at the moment when he was about to take his outdoor exercise, cut off his head, and came back in triumph to Uruk.** "Gilgames brightened his weapons, he polished his weapons. He put aside his war-harness, he put on his white garments, he adorned himself with the royal insignia, and bound on the diadem: Gilgames put his tiara on his head, and bound on his diadem."

* Khumbaba contains the name of the Elamite god, Khumba, whichenters into the composition of names of towns, like Ti- Khumbi; or into those of princes, as Khumbanigash, Khumbasundasa, Khumbasidh. The comparison between Khumbaba and Combabos, the hero of a singular legend, current in the second century of our era, does not seem to be admissible, at least for the present. The names agree well in sound, but, as Oppert has rightly said, no event in the history of Combabos finds a counterpart in anything we know of that of Khumbaba up to the present.

** G. Smith places at this juncture Gilgames's accession to the throne; this is not confirmed by the fragments of the text known up to the present, and it is not even certain that the poem relates anywhere the exaltation and coronation of the hero. It would appear even that Gilgames is recognized from the beginning as King of Uruk, the well- protected.

Ishtar saw him thus adorned, and the same passion consumed her which inflames mortals.* "To the love of Gilgames she raised her eyes, the mighty Ishtar, and she said, 'Come, Gilgames, be my husband, thou! Thy love, give it to me, as a gift to me, and thou shalt be my spouse, and I shall be thy wife. I will place thee in a chariot of lapis and gold, with golden wheels and mountings of onyx: thou shalt be drawn in it by great lions, and thou shalt enter our house with the odorous incense of cedar-wood. When thou shalt have entered our house, all the country by the sea shall embrace thy feet, kings shall bow down before thee, the nobles and the great ones, the gifts of the mountains and of the plain they will bring to thee as tribute. Thy oxen shall prosper, thy sheep shall be doubly fruitful, thy mules shall spontaneously come under the yoke, thy chariot-horse shall be strong and shall galop, thy bull under the yoke shall have no rival.'" Gilgames repels this unexpected declaration with a mixed feeling of contempt and apprehension: he abuses the goddess, and insolently questions her as to what has become of her mortal husbands during her long divine life. "Tammuz, the spouse of thy youth, thou hast condemned him to weep from year to year.** Nilala, the spotted sparrow-hawk, thou lovedst him, afterward thou didst strike him and break his wing: he continues in the wood and cries: 'O, my wings!'*** Thou didst afterwards love a lion of mature strength, and then didst cause him to be rent by blows, seven at a time.**** Thou lovedst also a stallion magnificent in the battle; thou didst devote him to death by the goad and whip: thou didst compel him to galop for ten leagues, thou didst devote him to exhaustion and thirst, thou didst devote to tears his mother Silili.

* Ishtar's declaration to Gilgames and the hero's reply have been frequently translated and summarized since the discovery of the poem. Smith thought to connect this episode with the "Descent of Ishtar to Hades," which we shall meet with further on in this History, but his opinion is no longer accepted. The "Descent of Ishtar" in its present condition is the beginning of a magical formula: it has nothing to do with the acts of Gilgames.

** Tammuz-Adonis is the only one known to us among this long list of the lovers of the goddess. The others must have been fairly celebrated among the Chaldaeans, since the few words devoted to each is sufficient to recall them to the memory of the reader, but we have not as yet found anything bearing upon their adventures in the table of the ancient Chaldaeo-Assyrian classics, which had been copied out by a Ninevite scribe for the use of Assur-bani-pal, the title of the poems is wanting.

*** The text gives kappi, and the legend evidently refers to a bird whose cry resembles the word meaning "my wings." The spotted sparrow-hawk utters a cry which may be strictly understood and interpreted in this way.

**** This is evidently the origin of our fable of the "Amorous Lion."

Thou didst also love the shepherd Tabulu, who lavished incessantly upon thee the smoke of sacrifices, and daily slaughtered goats to thee; thou didst strike him and turn him into a leopard; his own servants went in pursuit of him, and his dogs followed his trail.* Thou didst love Ishullanu, thy father's gardener, who ceaselessly brought thee presents of fruit, and decorated every day thy table. Thou raisedst thine eyes to him, thou seizedst him: 'My Ishullanu, we shall eat melons, then shalt thou stretch forth thy hand and remove that which separates us.' Ishullanu said to thee: 'I, what dost thou require from me? O my mother, prepare no food for me, I myself will not eat: anything I should eat would be for me a misfortune and a curse, and my body would be stricken by a mortal coldness.' Then thou didst hear him and didst become angry, thou didst strike him, thou didst transform him into a dwarf, thou didst set him up on the middle of a couch; he could not rise up, he could not get down from where he was. Thou lovest me now, afterwards thou wilt strike me as thou didst these."**

* The changing of a lover, by the goddess or sorceress who loves him, into a beast, occurs pretty frequently in Oriental tales; as to the man changed by Ishtar into a brute, which she caused to be torn by his own hounds, we may compare the classic story of Artemis surprised at her bath by Actseon.

** As to the misfortune of Ishullanu, we may compare the story in the Abrabian Nights of the Fisherman and the Genie shut up in the leaden bottle. The king of the Black Islands was transformed into a statue from the waist to the feet by the sorceress, whom he had married and afterwards offended; he remained lying on a bed, from which he could not get down, and the unfaithful one came daily to whip him.

"When Ishtar heard him, she fell into a fury, she ascended to heaven. The mighty Ishtar presented herself before her father Anu, before her mother Anatu she presented herself, and said: 'My father, Grilgames has despised me. Grilgames has enumerated my unfaithfulnesses, my unfaithfulnesses and my ignominies.' Anu opened his mouth and spake to the mighty Ishtar: 'Canst thou not remain quiet now that Gilgames has enumerated to thee thy unfaithfulnesses, thy unfaithfulnesses and ignominies?'" But she refused to allow the outrage to go unpunished. She desired her father to make a celestial urus who would execute her vengeance on the hero; and, as he hesitated, she threatened to destroy every living thing in the entire universe by suspending the impulses of desire, and the effect of love. Anu finally gives way to her rage: he creates a frightful urus, whose ravages soon rendered uninhabitable the neighbourhood of Uruk the well-protected. The two heroes, Gilgames and Eabani, touched by the miseries and terror of the people, set out on the chase, and hastened to rouse the beast from its lair on the banks of the Euphrates in the marshes, to which it resorted after each murderous onslaught.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a Chaldaean intaglio in the New York Museum. The original is about an inch and a half in height.

A troop of three hundred valiant warriors penetrated into the thickets in three lines to drive the animal towards the heroes. The beast with head lowered charged them; but Eabani seized it with one hand by the right horn, and with the other by the tail, and forced it to rear. Gilgames at the same instant, seizing it by the leg, plunged his dagger into its heart. The beast being despatched, they celebrated their victory by a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and poured out a libation to Sharnash, whose protection had not failed them in this last danger. Ishtar, her projects of vengeance having been defeated, "ascended the ramparts of Uruk the well-protected. She sent forth a loud cry, she hurled forth a malediction: 'Cursed be Gilgames, who has insulted me, and who has killed the celestial urus.' Eabani heard these words of Ishtar, he tore a limb from the celestial urus and threw it in the face of the goddess: 'Thou also I will conquer, and I will treat thee like him: I will fasten the curse upon thy sides.' Ishtar assembled her priestesses, her female votaries, her frenzied women, and together they intoned a dirge over the limb of the celestial urus. Gilgames assembled all the turners in ivory, and the workmen were astonished at the enormous size of the horns; they were worth thirty mimae of lapis, their diameter was a half-cubit, and both of them could contain six measures of oil." He dedicated them to Shamash, and suspended them on the corners of the altar; then he washed his hands in the Euphrates, re-entered Uruk, and passed through the streets in triumph. A riotous banquet ended the day, but on that very night Eabani felt himself haunted by an inexplicable and baleful dream, and fortune abandoned the two heroes. Gilgames had cried in the intoxication of success to the women of Uruk: "Who shines forth among the valiant? Who is glorious above all men? Gilgames shines forth among the valiant, Gilgames is glorious above all men." Ishtar made him feel her vengeance in the destruction of that beauty of which he was so proud; she covered him with leprosy from head to foot, and made him an object of horror to his friends of the previous day. A life of pain and a frightful death—he alone could escape them who dared to go to the confines of the world in quest of the Fountain of Youth and the Tree of Life which were said to be there hidden; but the road was rough, unknown, beset by dangers, and no one of those who had ventured upon it had ever returned. Gilgames resolved to brave every peril rather than submit to his fate, and proposed this fresh adventure to his friend Eabani, who, notwithstanding his sad forebodings, consented to accompany him. They killed a tiger on the way, but Eabani was mortally wounded in a struggle in which they engaged in the neighbourhood of Nipur, and breathed his last after an agony of twelve days' duration.

"Gilgames wept bitterly over his friend Eabani, grovelling on the bare earth." The selfish fear of death struggled in his spirit with regret at having lost so dear a companion, a tried friend in so many encounters. "I do not wish to die like Eabani: sorrow has entered my heart, the fear of death has taken possession of me, and I am overcome. But I will go with rapid steps to the strong Shamashnapishtim, son of Ubaratutu, to learn from him how to become immortal." He leaves the plain of the Euphrates, he plunges boldly into the desert, he loses himself for a whole day amid frightful solitudes. "I reached at nightfall a ravine in the mountain, I beheld lions and trembled, but I raised my face towards the moon-god, and I prayed: my supplication ascended even to the father of the gods, and he extended over me his protection." A vision from on high revealed to him the road he was to take. With axe and dagger in hand, he reached the entrance of a dark passage leading into the mountain of Mashu,* "whose gate is guarded day and night by supernatural beings."

* The land of Mashu is the land to the west of the Euphrates, coterminous on one part with the northern regions of the Red Sea, on the other with the Persian Gulf; the name appears to be preserved in that of the classic Mesene, and possibly in the land of Massa of the Hebrews.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian intaglio.

"The scorpion-men, of whom the stature extends upwards as far as the supports of heaven, and of whom the breasts descend as low as Hades, guard the door. The terror which they inspire strikes down like a thunderbolt; their look kills, their splendour confounds and overturns the mountains; they watch over the sun at his rising and setting. Grilgames perceived them, and his features were distorted with fear and horror; their savage appearance disturbed his mind. The scorpion-man said to his wife: 'He who comes towards us, his body is marked by the gods.'* The scorpion-woman replied to him: 'In his mind he is a god, in his mortal covering he is a man.' The scorpion-man spoke and said: 'It is as the father of the gods, has commanded, he has travelled over distant regions before joining us, thee and me.'" Gilgames learns that the guardians are not evilly disposed towards him, and becomes reassured, tell them his misfortunes and implores permission to pass beyond them so as to reach "Sha-mashnapishtim, his father, who was translated to the gods, and who has at his disposal both life and death." The scorpion-man in vain shows to him the perils before him, of which the horrible darkness enveloping the Mashu mountains is not the least: Gilgames proceeds through the depths of the darkness for long hours, and afterwards comes out in the neighbourhood of a marvellous forest upon the shore of the ocean which encircles the world. One tree especially excites his wonder: "As soon as he sees it he runs towards it. Its fruits are so many precious stones, its boughs are splendid to look upon, for the branches are weighed down with lapis, and their fruits are superb." When his astonishment had calmed down, Gilgames begins to grieve, and to curse the ocean which stays his steps. "Sabitu, the virgin who is seated on the throne of the seas," perceiving him from a distance, retires at first to her castle, and barricades herself within it. He calls out to her from the strand, implores and threatens her in turn, adjures her to help him in his voyage. "If it can be done, I will cross the sea; if it cannot be done, I will lay me down on the land to die." The goddess is at length touched by his tears. "Gilgames, there has never been a passage hither, and no one from time immemorial has been able to cross the sea. Shamash the valiant crossed the sea; after Shamash, who can cross it? The crossing is troublesome, the way difficult, perilous the Water of Death, which, like a bolt, is drawn between thee and thy aim. Even if, Gilgames, thou didst cross the sea, what wouldest thou do on arriving at the Water of Death?" Arad-Ea, Shamashnapishtim's mariner, can alone bring the enterprise to a happy ending: "if it is possible, thou shalt cross the sea with him; if it is not possible, thou shalt retrace thy steps."

* We must not forget that Gilgames is covered with leprosy; this is the disease with which the Chaldaean gods mark their enemies when they wish to punish them in a severe fashion.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a Chaldaean intaglio in the British Museum. The original measures a little over an inch.

Arad-Ea and the hero took ship: forty days' tempestuous cruising brought them to the Waters of Death, which with a supreme effort they passed. Beyond these they rested on their oars and loosed their girdles: the happy island rose up before them, and Shamashnapishtim stood upon the shore, ready to answer the questions of his grandson.

None but a god dare enter his mysterious paradise: the bark bearing an ordinary mortal must stop at some distance from the shore, and the conversation is carried on from on board. Gilgames narrated once more the story of his life, and makes known the object of his visit; Shamashnapishtim answers him stoically that death follows from an inexorable law, to which it is better to submit with a good grace. "However long the time we shall build houses, however long the time we shall put our seal to contracts, however long the time brothers shall quarrel with each other, however long the time there shall be hostility between kings, however long the time rivers shall overflow their banks, we shall not be able to portray any image of death. When the spirits salute a man at his birth, then the genii of the earth, the great gods, Mamitu the moulder of destinies, all of them together assign a fate to him, they determine for him his life and death; but the day of his death remains unknown to him." Gilgames thinks, doubtless, that his forefather is amusing himself at his expense in preaching resignation, seeing that he himself had been able to escape this destiny. "I look upon thee, Shamashnapishtim, and thy appearance has not changed: thou art like me and not different, thou art like me and I am like thee. Thou wouldest be strong enough of heart to enter upon a combat, to judge by thy appearance; tell me, then, how thou hast obtained this existence among the gods to which thou hast aspired?" Shamashnapishtim yields to his wish, if only to show him how abnormal his own case was, and indicate the merits which had marked him out for a destiny superior to that of the common herd of humanity. He describes the deluge to him, and relates how he was able to escape from it by the favour of Ea, and how by that of Bel he was made while living a member of the army of the gods. "'And now,' he adds, 'as far as thou art concerned, which one of the Gods will bestow upon thee the strength to obtain the life which thou seekest? Come, go to sleep!' Six days and seven nights he is as a man whose strength appears suspended, for sleep has fallen upon him like a blast of wind. Shamashnapishtim spoke to his wife: 'Behold this man who asks for life, and upon whom sleep has fallen like a blast of wind.' The wife answers Shamashnapishtim, the man of distant lands: 'Cast a spell upon him, this man, and he will eat of the magic broth; and the road by which he has come, he will retrace it in health of body; and the great gate through which he has come forth, he will return by it to his country.' Shamashnapishtim spoke to his wife: 'The misfortunes of this man distress thee: very well, cook the broth, and place it by his head.' And while Gilgames still slept on board his vessel, the material for the broth was gathered; on the second day it was picked, on the third it was steeped, on the fourth Shamashnapishtim prepared his pot, on the fifth he put into it 'Senility,' on the sixth the broth was cooked, on the seventh he cast his spell suddenly on his man, and the latter consumed the broth. Then Gilgames spoke to Shamashnapishtim, the inhabitant of distant lands: 'I hesitated, slumber laid hold of me; thou hast cast a spell upon me, thou hast given me the broth.'" The effect would not have been lasting, if other ceremonies had not followed in addition to this spell from the sorcerer's kitchen: Gilgames after this preparation could now land upon the shore of the happy island and purify himself there. Shamashnapishtim confided this business to his mariner Arad-Ea: "'The man whom thou hast brought, his body is covered with ulcers, the leprous scabs have spoiled the beauty of his body. Take him, Arad-Ea, lead him to the place of purification, let him wash his ulcers white as snow in the water, let him get rid of his scabs, and let the sea bear them away so that at length his body may appear healthy. He will then change the fillet which binds his brows, and the loin-cloth which hides his nakedness: until he returns to his country, until he reaches the end of his journey, let him by no means put off the loin-cloth, however ragged; then only shall he have always a clean one.' Then Arad-Ea took him and conducted him to the place of purification: he washed his ulcers white as snow in the water, he got rid of his scabs, and the sea carried them away, so that at length his body appeared healthy. He changed the fillet which bound his brows, the loincloth which hid his nakedness: until he should reach the end of his journey, he was not to put off the loin-cloth, however ragged; then alone was he to have a clean one." The cure effected, Gilgames goes again on board his bark, and returns to the place where Shamashnapishtim was awaiting him.

Shamashnapishtim would not send his descendant back to the land of the living without making him a princely present. "His wife spoke to him, to him Shamashnapishtim, the inhabitant of distant lands: 'Gilgames has come, he is comforted, he is cured; what wilt thou give to him, now that he is about to return to his country?' He took the oars, Gilgames, he brought the bark near the shore, and Shamashnapishtim spoke to him, to Gilgames: 'Gilgames, thou art going from here comforted; what shall I give thee, now that thou art about to return to thy country? I am about to reveal to thee, Gilgames, a secret, and the judgment of the gods I am about to tell it thee. There is a plant similar to the hawthorn in its flower, and whose thorns prick like the viper. If thy hand can lay hold of that plant without being torn, break from it a branch, and bear it with thee; it will secure for thee an eternal youth.'Gilgames gathers the branch, and in his joy plans with Arad-Ea future enterprises: 'Arad-Ea, this plant is the plant of renovation, by which a man obtains life; I will bear it with me to Uruk the well-protected, I will cultivate a bush from it, I will cut some of it, and its name shall be, "the old man becomes young by it;" I will eat of it, and I shall repossess the vigour of my youth.'" He reckoned without the gods, whose jealous minds will not allow men to participate in their privileges. The first place on which they set foot on shore, "he perceived a well of fresh water, went down to it, and whilst he was drawing water, a serpent came out of it, and snatched from him the plant, yea—the serpent rushed out and bore away the plant, and while escaping uttered a malediction. That day Gilgames sat down, he wept, and his tears streamed down his cheeks he said to the mariner Arad-Ba: 'What is the use, Arad-Ea, of my renewed strength; what is the use of my heart's rejoicing in my return to life? It is not myself I have served; it is this earthly lion I have served. Hardly twenty leagues on the road, and he for himself alone has already taken possession of the plant. As I opened the well, the plant was lost to me, and the genius of the fountain took possession of it: who am I that I should tear it from him?'" He re-embarks in sadness, he re-enters Uruk the well-protected, and at length begins to think of celebrating the funeral solemnities of Eabani, to whom he was not able to show respect at the time of his death. He supervises them, fulfils the rites, intones the final chant: "The temples, thou shalt enter them no more; the white vestments, thou shalt no longer put them on; the sweet-smelling ointments, thou shalt no longer anoint thyself with them to envelop thee with their perfume. Thou shalt no longer press thy bow to the ground to bend it, but those that the bow has wounded shall surround thee; thou no longer holdest thy sceptre in thy hand, but spectres fascinate thee; thou no longer adornest thy feet with wings, thou no longer givest forth a sound upon the earth. Thy wife whom thou lovedst thou embracest her no more; thy wife whom thou hatedst thou beatest her no more. Thy daughter whom thou lovedst thou embracest her no more; thy daughter whom thou hatedst, thou beatest her no more. The resounding earth lies heavy upon thee, she who is dark, she who is dark, Tjinazu the mother, she who is dark, whose side is-not veiled with splendid vestments, whose bosom, like a new-born animal, is not covered. Eabani has descended from the earth to Hades; it is not the messenger of Nergal the implacable who has snatched him away, it is not the plague which has carried him off, it is not consumption that has carried him off, it is the earth which has carried him off; it is not the field of battle which has carried him off, it is the earth which has carried him off!" Gilgames dragged himself along from temple to temple, repeating his complaint before Bel and before Sin, and at length threw himself at the feet of the god of the Dead, Nergal: "'Burst open the sepulchral cavern, open the ground, that the spirit of Eabani may issue from the soil like a blast of wind.' As soon as Nergal the valiant heard him, he burst open the sepulchral vault, he opened the earth, he caused the spirit of Eabani to issue from the earth like a blast of wind." Gilgames interrogates him, and asks him with anxiety what the state of the dead may be: "'Tell, my friend, tell, my friend, open the earth and what thou seest tell it.'—'I cannot tell it thee, my friend, I cannot tell it thee; if I should open the earth before thee, if I were to tell to thee that which I have seen, terror would overthrow thee, thou wouldest faint away, thou wouldest weep.'—'Terror will overthrow me, I shall faint away, I shall weep, but tell it to me.'" And the ghost depicts for him the sorrows of the abode and the miseries of the shades. Those only enjoy some happiness who have fallen with arms in their hands, and who have been solemnly buried after the fight; the manes neglected by their relatives succumb to hunger and thirst.* "On a sleeping couch he lies, drinking pure water, he who has been killed in battle. 'Thou hast seen him?'—'I have seen him; his father and his mother support his head, and his wife bends over him wailing.' 'But he whose body remains forgotten in the fields,—thou hast seen him?'—'I have seen him; his soul has no rest at all in the earth.' 'He whose soul no one cares for,—thou hast seen him?'—'I have seen him; the dregs of the cup, the remains of a repast, that which is thrown among the refuse of the street, that is what he has to nourish him.'" This poem did not proceed in its entirety, or at one time, from the imagination of a single individual. Each episode of it answers to some separate legend concerning Gilgames, or the origin of Uruk the well-protected: the greater part preserves under a later form an air of extreme antiquity, and, if the events dealt with have not a precise bearing on the life of a king, they paint in a lively way the vicissitudes of the life of the people.** These lions, leopards, or gigantic uruses with which Grilgames and his faithful Eabani carry on so fierce a warfare, are not, as is sometimes said, mythological animals.

* Cf. vol. i. pp. 160, 161 of this History for analogous ideas among the Egyptians as to the condition of the dead who were neglected by their relatives: the Egyptian double had to live on the same refuse as the Chaldaean soul.

** G. Smith, identifying Gilgames with Nimrod, believes, on the other hand, that Nimrod was a real king, who reigned in Mesopotamia about 2250 B.C.; the poem contains, according to him, episodes, more or less embellished, in the life of the sovereign.

Similar monsters, it was believed, appeared from time to time in the marshes of Chaldaea, and gave proof of their existence to the inhabitants of neighbouring villages by such ravages as real lions and tigers commit in India or the Sahara. It was the duty of chiefs on the border lands of the Euphrates, as on the banks of the Nile, as among all peoples still sunk in semi-barbarism, to go forth to the attack of these beasts single-handed, and to sacrifice themselves one after the other, until one of them more fortunate or stronger than the rest should triumph over these mischievous brutes. The kings of Babylon and Nineveh in later times converted into a pleasure that which had been an official duty of their early predecessors: Gilgames had not yet arrived at that stage, and the seriousness, not to speak of the fear, with which he entered on the fight with such beasts, is an evidence of the early date of the portions of his history which are concerned with his hunting exploits. The scenes are represented on the seals of princes who reigned prior to the year 3000 B.C., and the work of the ancient engraver harmonizes so perfectly with the description of the comparatively modern scribe that it seems like an anticipated illustration of the latter; the engravings represent so persistently and with so little variation the images of the monsters, and those of Gilgames and his faithful Eabani, that the corresponding episodes in the poem must have already existed as we know them, if not in form, at least in their main drift. Other portions of the poem are more recent, and it would seem that the expedition against Khumbaba contains allusions to the Elamite* invasions from which Chaldaea had suffered so much towards the XXth century before our era. The traditions which we possess of the times following the Deluge, embody, like the adventures of Gilganes, very ancient elements, which the scribes or narrators wove together in a more or less skilful manner around the name of some king or divinity.

* Smith thought he could restore from the poem a part of Chaldaean history: he supposed Izdubar-Nimrod to have been, about 2250, the liberator of Babylon, oppressed by Elam, and the date of the foundation of a great Babylonian empire to have coincided with his victory over the Elamites. The annals of Assurbanipal show us, in fact, that an Elamite king, Kudurnankhundi, had pillaged Uruk about 2280 B.C., and had transported to Susa a statue of the goddess Ishtar.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a Chaldaean intaglio in the British Museum. The original measures about 1 2/5 inch in height.

The fabulous chronicle of the cities of the Euphrates existed, therefore, in a piecemeal condition—in the memory of the people or in the books of the priests—before even their primitive history began; the learned who collected it later on had only to select some of the materials with which it furnished them, in order to form out of them a connected narrative, in which the earliest ages were distinguished from the most recent only in the assumption of more frequent and more direct interpositions of the powers of heaven in the affairs of men. Every city had naturally its own version, in which its own protecting deities, its heroes and princes, played the most important parts. That of Babylon threw all the rest into the shade; not that it was superior to them, but because this city had speedily become strong enough to assert its political supremacy over the whole region of the Euphrates. Its scribes were accustomed to see their master treat the lords of other towns as subjects or vassals. They fancied that this must have always been the case, and that from its origin Babylon had been recognized as the queen-city to which its contemporaries rendered homage. They made its individual annals the framework for the history of the entire country, and from the succession of its princely families on the throne, diverse as they were in origin, they constructed a complete canon of the kings of Chaldaea.

But the manner of grouping the names and of dividing the dynasties varied according to the period in which the lists were drawn up, and at the present time we are in possession of at least two systems which the Babylonian historians attempted to construct. Berossus, who communicated one of them to the Greeks about the beginning of the IInd century B.C., would not admit more than eight dynasties in the period of thirty-six thousand years between the Deluge and the Persian invasion. The lists, which he had copied from originals in the cuneiform character, have suffered severely at the hands of his abbreviators, who omitted the majority of the names which seemed to them very barbarous in form, while those who copied these abbreviated lists have made such further havoc with them that they are now for the most part unintelligible. Modern criticism has frequently attempted to restore them, with varying results; the reconstruction here given, which passes for the most probable, is not equally certain in all its parts:—*



It was not without reason that Berossus and his authorities had put the sum total of reigns at thirty-six thousand years; this number falls in with a certain astrological period, during which the gods had granted to the Chaldaeans glory, prosperity, and independence, and whose termination coincided with the capture of Babylon by Cyrus.** Others before them had employed the same artifice, but they reckoned ten dynasties in the place of the eight accepted by Berossus:—

* After the example of G. B. Niebuhr, Gutschmid admitted here, as Oppert did, 45 Assyrians; he based his view on Herodotus, in which it is said that the Assyrians held sway in Asia for 520 years, until its conquest by the Medes. Upon the improbability of this opinion, see Schrader's demonstration.

** The existence of this astronomical or astrological scheme on which Berossus founded his chronology, was pointed out by Brandis, afterwards by Gutschmid; it is now generally accepted.



Attempts have been made to bring the two lists* into harmony, with varying results; in my opinion, a waste of time and labour. For even comparatively recent periods of their history, the Chaldaeans, like the Egyptians, had to depend upon a collection of certain abbreviated, incoherent, and often contradictory documents, from which they found it difficult to make a choice: they could not, therefore, always come to an agreement when they wished to determine how many dynasties had succeeded each other during these doubtful epochs, how many kings were included in each dynasty, and what length of reign was to be assigned to each king. We do not know the motives which influenced Berossus in his preference of one tradition over others; perhaps he had no choice in the matter, and that of which he constituted himself the interpreter was the only one which was then known. In any case, the tradition he followed forms a system which we cannot, modify without misinterpreting the intention of those who drew it up or who have handed it down to us. We must accept or reject it just as it is, in its entirety and without alteration: to attempt to adapt it to the testimony of the monuments would be equivalent to the creation of a new system, and not to the correction simply of the old one. The right course is to put it aside for the moment, and confine ourselves to the original lists whose fragments have come down to us: they do not furnish us, it is true, with a history of Chaldaea such as it unfolded itself from age to age, but they teach us what the later Chaldaeans knew, or thought they knew, of that history. Still it is wise to treat them with some reserve, and not to forget that if they agree with each other in the main, they differ frequently in details. Thus the small dynasties, which are called the VIth and VIIth, include the same number of kings on both the tablets which establish their existence, but the number of years assigned to the names of the kings and the total years of each dynasty vary a little from one another:—

* The first document having claim to the title of Royal Canon was found among the tablets of the British Museum, and was published by G. Smith. The others were successively discovered by Pinches; some erroneous readings in them have been corrected by Fr. Delitzsch, and an exact edition has been published by Knudtzon. Smith's list is the fragment of a chronicle in which the VIth, VIIth, and VIIIth dynasties only are almost complete. One of Pinches's lists consists merely of a number of royal names not arranged in any consistent order, and containing their non-Semitic as well as their Semitic forms. The other two lists are actual canons, giving the names of the kings and the years of their reigns; unfortunately they are much mutilated, and the lacunae in them cannot yet be filled up. All of them have been translated by Sayce.



Is the difference in the calculations the fault of the scribes, who, in mechanically copying and recopying, ended by fatally altering the figures? Or is it to be explained by some circumstance of which we are ignorant—an association on the throne, of which the duration is at one time neglected with regard to one of the co-regents, and at another time with regard to the other; or was it owing to a question of legitimacy, by which, according to the decision arrived at, a reign was prolonged or abbreviated? Cotemporaneous monuments will some day, perhaps, enable us to solve the problem which the later Chaldaeans did not succeed in clearing up. While awaiting the means to restore a rigorously exact chronology, we must be content with the approximate information furnished by the tablets as to the succession of the Babylonian kings.

Actual history occupied but a small space in the lists—barely twenty centuries out of a whole of three hundred and sixty: beyond the historic period the imagination was given a free rein, and the few facts which were known disappeared almost completely under the accumulation of mythical narratives and popular stories. It was not that the documents were entirely wanting, for the Chaldaeans took a great interest in their past history, and made a diligent search for any memorials of it. Each time they succeeded in disinterring an inscription from the ruins of a town, they were accustomed to make-several copies of it, and to deposit them among the archives, where they would be open to the examination of their archaeologists.* When a prince undertook the rebuilding of a temple, he always made excavations under the first courses of the ancient structure in order to recover the documents which preserved the memory of its foundation: if he discovered them, he recorded on the new cylinders, in which he boasted of his own work, the name of the first builder, and sometimes the number of years which had elapsed since its erection.**

* We have a considerable number of examples of copies of ancient texts made in this manner. For instance, the dedication of a temple at Uruk by King Singashid, copied by the scribe Nabubalatsuikbi, son of Mizirai ("the Egyptian "), for the temple of Ezida; the legendary history of King Sargon of Agade, copied from the inscription on the base of his statue, of which there will be further mention (pp. 91- 93 of this History); a dedication of the King Khammurabi; the inscription of Agumkakrimi, which came from the library of Assurbanipal.

** Nabonidos, for instance, the last king of Babylon before the Persian conquest, has left us a memorial of his excavations. He found in this manner the cylinders of Shagashaltiburiash at Sippara, those of Khammurabi, and those of Naramsin.

We act in a similar way to-day, and our excavations, like those of the Chaldaeans, end in singularly disconnected results: the materials which the earth yields for the reconstruction of the first centuries consist almost entirely of mutilated records of local dynasties, isolated names of sovereigns, dedications of temples to gods, on sites no longer identifiable, of whose nature we know nothing, and too brief allusions to conquests or victories over vaguely designated nations.* The population was dense and life active in the plains of the Lower Euphrates. The cities in this region formed at their origin so many individual and, for the most part, petty states, whose kings and patron gods claimed to be independent of all the neighbouring kings and gods: one city, one god, one lord—this was the rule here as in the ancient feudal districts from which the nomes of Egypt arose. The strongest of these principalities imposed its laws upon the weakest: formed into unions of two or three under a single ruler, they came to constitute a dozen kingdoms of almost equal strength on the banks of the Euphrates. On the north we are acquainted with those of Agade, Babylon, Kuta, Kharsag-Kalama, and that of Kishu, which comprised a part of Mesopotamia and possibly the distant fortress of Harran: petty as these States were, their rulers attempted to conceal their weakness by assuming such titles as "Kings of the Four Houses of the World," "Kings of the Universe," "Kings of Shumir and Akkad." Northern Babylonia seems to have possessed a supremacy amongst them. We are probably wise in not giving too much credit to the fragmentary tablet which assigns to it a dynasty of kings, of which we have no confirmatory information from other sources—Amilgula, Shamashnazir, Amilsin, and several others: this list, however, places among these phantom rulers one individual at least, Shargina-Sharrukin, who has left us material evidences of his existence. This Sargon the Elder, whose complete name is Shargani-shar-ali, was the son of a certain Ittibel, who does not appear to have been king. At first his possessions were confined to the city of Agade and some undetermined portions of the environs of Babylon, but he soon succeeded in annexing Babylon itself, Sippara, Kishu, Uruk, Kuta, and Nipur: the contemporary records attest his conquest of Elam, Guti, and even of the far-off land of Syria, which was already known to him under the name of Amuru. His activity as a builder was in no way behind his warlike zeal. He built Ekur, the sanctuary of Bel in Nipur, and the great temple Eulbar in Agade, in honour of Anunit, the goddess presiding over the morning star. He erected in Babylon a palace which afterwards became a royal burying-place. He founded a new capital, a city which he peopled with families brought from Kishu and Babylon: for a long time after his day it bore the name which he bestowed upon it, Dur-Sharrukin. This sums up all the positive knowledge we have about him, and the later Chaldseans seem not to have been much better informed than ourselves.

* The earliest Assyriologists, H. Rawlinson, Oppert, considered the local kings as having been, for the most part, kings of all Chaldaea, and placed them in succession one after the other in the framework of the most ancient dynasties of Berossus. The merit of having established the existence of series of local dynasties, and of having given to Chaldaean history its modern form, belongs to G. Smith. Smith's idea was adopted by Menant, by Delitzsch-Murdter, by Tiele, by Winckler, and by all Assyriologists, with modifications suggested by the progress of decipherment.

They filled up the lacunae of his history with legends. As he seemed to them to have appeared suddenly on the scene, without any apparent connection with the king who preceded him, they assumed that he was a usurper of unknown origin, irregularly introduced by the favour of the gods into the lawful series of kings. An inscription engraved, it was said, on one of his statues, and afterwards, about the VIIth century B.C., copied and deposited in the library of Nineveh, related at length the circumstances of his mysterious birth. "Sharrukin, the mighty king, the king of Agade, am I. My mother was a princess; my father, I did not know him; the brother of my father lived in the mountains. My town was Azupirani, which is situated on the bank of the Euphrates. My mother, the princess, conceived me, and secretly gave birth to me: she placed me in a basket of reeds, she shut up the mouth of it with bitumen, she abandoned me to the river, which did not overwhelm me. The river bore me; it brought me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, received me in the goodness of his heart; Akki, the drawer of water, made me a gardener. As gardener, the goddess Ishtar loved me, and during forty-four years I held royal sway; I commanded the Black Heads,* and ruled them." This is no unusual origin for the founders of empires and dynasties; witness the cases of Cyrus and Bomulus.* Sargon, like Moses, and many other heroes of history or fable, is exposed to the waters: he owes his safety to a poor fellah who works his shadouf on the banks of the Euphrates to water the fields, and he passes his infancy in obscurity, if not in misery. Having reached the age of manhood, Ishtar falls in love with him as she did with his fellow-craftsman, the gardener Ishullanu, and he becomes king, we know not by what means.

* The phrase "Black Heads," nishi salmat hahhadi, has been taken in an ethnological sense as designating one of the races of Chaldaea, the Semitic; other Assyriologists consider it as denoting mankind in general. The latter meaning seems the more probable.

** Smith had already compared the infancy of Sargon with that of Moses; the comparison with Cyrus, Bacchus, and Romulus was made by Talbot. Traditions of the same kind are frequent in history or folk-tales.

The same inscription which reveals the romance of his youth, recounts the successes of his manhood, and boasts of the uniformly victorious issue of his warlike exploits. Owing to lacunae, the end of the account is in the main wanting, and we are thus prevented from following the development of his career, but other documents come to the rescue and claim to furnish its most important vicissitudes. He had reduced the cities of the Lower Euphrates, the island of Dilmun, Durilu, Elam, the country of Kazalla: he had invaded Syria, conquered Phoenicia, crossed the arm of the sea which separates Cyprus from the coast, and only returned to his palace after an absence of three years, and after having erected his statues on the Syrian coast. He had hardly settled down to rest when a rebellion broke out suddenly; the chiefs of Chaldaea formed a league against him, and blockaded him in Agade: Ishtar, exceptionally faithful to the end, obtains for him the victory, and he comes out of a crisis, in which he might have been utterly ruined, with a more secure position than ever. All these events are regarded as having occurred sometime about 3800 B.C., at a period when the VIth dynasty was flourishing in Egypt. Some of them have been proved to be true by recent discoveries, and the rest are not at all improbable in themselves, though the work in which they are recorded is a later astrological treatise. The writer was anxious to prove, by examples drawn from the chronicles, the use of portents of victory or defeat, of civic peace or rebellion—portents which he deduced from the configuration of the heavens on the various days of the month: by going back as far as Sargon of Agade for his instances, he must have at once increased the respect for himself on account of his knowledge of antiquity, and the difficulty which the common herd must have felt in verifying his assertions. His zeal in collecting examples was probably stimulated by the fact that some of the exploits which he attributes to the ancient Sargon had been recently accomplished by a king of the same name: the brilliant career of Sargon of Agade would seem to have been in his estimation something like an anticipation of the still more glorious life of the Sargon of Nineveh.* What better proof of the high veneration in which the learned men of Assyria held the memory of the ancient Chaldaean conqueror? Naramsin, who succeeded Sargon about 3750 B.C.** inherited his authority, and to some extent his renown.

* Hommel (Gescamede, p. 307) believes that the life of our Sargon was modelled, not on the Assyrian Sargon, but on a second Sargon, whom he places about 2000 B.C. Tiele refuses to accept the hypothesis, but his objections are not weighty, in my opinion; Hilprecht and Sayce accepted the authenticity of the facts in their details, and the recent discoveries have shown that they were right in so doing. There is a distant resemblance between the life of the legendary Sargon and the account of the victories of Ramses II. ending in a conspiracy on his return.

** The date of Naramsin is given us by the cylinder of Nabonidos, who is cited lower down. It was discovered by Pinches. Its authenticity is maintained by Oppert, by Latrille, by Tiele, by Hommel, who felt at first some hesitation, by Delitzsch-Murdter; it has been called in question, with hesitation, by Ed. Meyer, and more boldly by Winckler. There is at present no serious reason to question its accuracy, at least relatively, except the instinctive repugnance of modern critics to consider as legitimate, dates which carry them back further into the past than they are accustomed to go.

The astrological tablets assert that he attacked the city of Apirak, on the borders of Elam, killed the Sing, Rish-ramman, and led the people away into slavery. He conquered at least part, if not the whole of Elam, and one of the few monuments which have come down to us was raised at Sippara in commemoration of his prowess against the mountaineers of the Zagros. He is represented on it overpowering their chief: his warriors follow after him and charge up the hill, carrying everything before their steady onslaught. Another of his warlike expeditions is said to have had as its field of operations a district of Magan, which, in the view of the writer, undoubtedly represented the Sinaitic Peninsula and perhaps Egypt. This expedition against Magan no doubt took place, and one of the few monuments of Naramsin which have reached us refers to it. Other inscriptions tell us incidentally that Naramsin reigned over the "four Houses of the world," Babylon, Sippara, Nipur, and Lagash. Like his father, he had worked at the building of the Ekur of Nipur and the Bulbar of Agade; he erected, moreover, at his own cost, the temple of the Sun at Sippara.* The latter passed through many and varied vicissitudes. Restored, enlarged, ruined on several occasions, the date of its construction and the name of its founder were lost in the course of ages.

* The text giving us this information is that in which Nabonidos affirms that Naramsin, son of Sargon of Agado, had founded the temple of the Sun at Sippara, 3200 years before himself, which would give us 3750 B.C. for the reign of Naramsin.

The last independent King of Babylon, Nabonaid [Nabonidos], at length discovered the cylinders in which Naramsin, son of Sargon, had signified to posterity all that he had done towards the erection of a temple worthy of the deity to the god of Sippara: "for three thousand two hundred years not one of the kings had been able to find them." We have no means of judging what these edifices were like for which the Chaldaeans themselves showed such veneration; they have entirely disappeared, or, if anything remains of them, the excavations hitherto carried out have not revealed it. Many small objects, however, which have accidentally escaped destruction give us a fair idea of the artists who lived in Babylon at this time, and of their skill in handling the graving-tool and chisel. An alabaster vase with the name of Naramsin, and a mace-head of exquisitely veined marble, dedicated by Shargani-shar-ali to the sun-god of Sippara, are valued only on account of the beauty of the material and the rarity of the inscription; but a porphyry cylinder, which belonged to Ibnishar, scribe of the above-named Shargani, must be ranked among the masterpieces of Oriental engraving. It represents the hero Gilgames, kneeling and holding with both hands a spherically shaped vase, from which flow two copious jets forming a stream running through the country; an ox, armed with a pair of gigantic crescent-shaped horns, throws back its head to catch one of the jets as it falls. Everything in this little specimen is equally worthy of admiration—the purity of outline, the skilful and delicate cutting of the intaglio, the fidelity of the action, and the accuracy of form. A fragment of a bas-relief of the reign of Naramsin shows that the sculptors were not a bit behind the engravers of gems. This consists now only of a single figure, a god, who is standing on the right, wearing a conical head-dress and clothed in a hairy garment which leaves his right arm free. The legs are wanting, the left arm and the hair are for the most part broken away, while the features have also suffered; its distinguishing characteristic is a sublety of workmanship which is lacking in the artistic products of a later age. The outline stands out from the background with a rare delicacy, the details of the muscles being in no sense exaggerated: were it not for the costume and pointed beard, one would fancy it a specimen of Egyptian work of the best Memphite period.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Menant.

One is almost tempted to believe in the truth of the tradition which ascribes to Naramsin the conquest of Egypt, or of the neighbouring countries.



Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph published by Father Schiel.



Did Sargon and Naramsin live at so early a date as that assigned to them by Nabonidos? The scribes who assisted the kings of the second Babylonian empire in their archaeological researches had perhaps insufficient reasons for placing the date of these kings so far back in the misty past: should evidence of a serious character A constrain us to attribute to them a later origin, we ought not to be surprised. In the mean time our best course is to accept the opinion of the Chaldaeans, and to leave Sargon and Naramsin in the century assigned to them by Nabonidos, although from this point they look down as from a high eminence upon all the rest of Chaldaean antiquity. Excavations have brought to light several personages of a similar date, whether a little earlier, or a little later: Bingani-sharali, Man-ish-turba, and especially Alusharshid, who lived at Kishu and Nipur, and gained victories over Elam.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief from Lagash, now in the Louvre

After this glimpse of light on these shadowy kings darkness once more closes in upon us, and conceals from us the majority of the sovereigns who ruled afterwards in Babylon. The facts and names which can be referred with certainty to the following centuries belong not to Babylon, but to the southern States, Lagash, Uruk, Uru, Nishin, and Larsam. The national writers had neglected these principalities; we possess neither a resume of their chronicles nor a list of their dynasties, and the inscriptions which speak of their the arms of the city gods and princes are still very rare and kings of Lagash. Lagash, as far as our evidence goes, was, perhaps, the most illustrious of all these cities.* It occupied the heart of the country, and its site covered both sides of the Shatt-el-Hai; the Tigris separated it on the east from Anshan, the westernmost of the Elamite districts, with which it carried on a perpetual frontier war.

* We are indebted almost exclusively to the researches of M. de Sarzec, and his discoveries at Telloh, for what we know of it. The results of his excavations, acquired by the French government, are now in the Louvre. The description of the ruins, the text of the inscriptions, and an account of the statues and other objects found in the course of the work, have been published by Heuzey-Sakzec, Decouvertes en Chaldee. The name of the ancient town has been read Sirpurla, Zirgulla, etc.

All parts of the country were not equally fertile: the fruitful and well-cultivated district in the neighbourhood of the Shatt-el-Hai gave place to impoverished lands ending to the eastward, finally in swampy marshes, which with great difficulty furnished means of sustenance to a poor and thinly scattered population of fisher-folk.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a stone in the Louvre.

The capital, built on the left bank of the river, stretched out to the north-east and south-west a distance of some five miles. It was not so much a city as an agglomeration of large villages, each grouped around a temple or palace—Uruazagga, Gishgalla, G-irsu, Nina, and Lagash, which latter imposed its name upon the whole. A branch of the river Shatt-el-Hai protected it on the south, and supplied the village of Nina with water; no trace of an inclosing wall has been found, and the temples and palaces seem to have served as refuges in case of attack. It had as its arms, or totem, a double-headed eagle standing on a lion passant, or on two demi-lions placed back to back. Its chief god was called Ningirsu, that is, the lord of Girsu, where his temple stood: his companion Bau, and his associates Ninagal, Innanna and Ninsia, were the deities of the other divisions of the city. The princes were first called kings, but afterwards vicegerents—patesi—when they came under the suzerainty of a more powerful king, the King of Uruk or of Babylon.

The earlier history of this remarkable town is made up of the scanty memoirs of its rulers, together with those of the princes of Gishban—"the land of the Bow," of which Ishin seems to have been the principal town. A very ancient document states, that, at the instigation of Inlil, the god of Nipur, the local deities, Ningirsu and Kirsig, set up a boundary between the two cities. In the course of time, Meshilim, a king of Kishu, which, before the rise of Agade, was the chief town in those parts, extended his dominion over Lagash and erected his stele at its border; Ush, vicegerent of Gishban, however, removed it, and had to suffer defeat before he would recognize the new order of things. After the lapse of some years, of which we possess no records, we find the mention of a certain Urukagina, who assumes the title of king: he restored or enlarged several temples, and dug the canal which supplied the town of Nina with water. A few generations later we find the ruling authority in the hands of a certain Urnina, whose father Ninigaldun and grandfather Gurshar received no titles—a fact which proves that they could not have been reigning sovereigns. Urnina appears to have been of a peaceful and devout disposition, as the inscriptions contain frequent references to the edifices he had erected in honour of the gods, the sacred objects he had dedicated to them, and the timber for building purposes which he had brought from Magan, but there is no mention in them of any war. His son Akurgal was also a builder of temples, but his grandson Idingiranagin, who succeeded Akurgal, was a warlike and combative prince.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the bas-relief F2 in the Louvre.

It seems probable that, about that time, the kingdom of Gishban had become a really powerful state. It had triumphed not only over Babylonia proper, but over Kish, Uru, Uruk, and Larsam, while one of its sovereigns had actually established his rule in some parts of Northern Syria. Idingiranagin vanquished the troops of Gishban, and there is now in the Louvre a trophy which he dedicated in the temple of Ninglrsu on his return from the campaign.

* Hilpeecht, Bab. Expcd. of the Univ. of Pennsylvania, vol. i., 2nd part, p. 47 sqq.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief in the Louvre. The attendant standing behind the king has been obliterated, but we see clearly the contour of his shoulder, and his hands holding the reins. It is a large stele of close-grained white limestone, rounded at the top, and covered with scenes and inscriptions on both its faces. One of these faces treats only of religious subjects. Two warlike goddesses, crowned with plumed head-dresses and crescent-shaped horns, are placed before a heap of weapons and various other objects, which probably represent some of the booty collected in the campaign. It would appear that they accompany a tall figure of a god or king, possibly that of the deity Ningirsu, patron of Lagash and its kings. Ningirsu raises in one hand an ensign, of which the staff bears at the top the royal totem, the eagle with outspread wings laying hold by his talons of two half-lions back to back; with the other hand he brings a, club down heavily upon a group of prisoners, who struggle at his feet in the meshes of a large net.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the fragment of a bas-relief in the Louvre. This is the human sacrifice after the victory, such as we find it in Egypt—the offering to the national god of a tenth of the captives, who struggle in vain to escape from fate. On the other stele the battle is at its height. Idingiranagin, standing upright in his chariot, which is guided by an attendant, charges the enemy at the head of his troops, and the plain is covered with corpses cut down by his fierce blows: a flock of vultures accompany him, and peck at each other in their struggles over the arms, legs, and decapitated heads of the vanquished. Victory once secured, he retraces his steps to bestow funeral honours upon the dead.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the fragment of a bas-relief in the Louvre. The bodies raised regularly in layers form an enormous heap: priests or soldiers wearing loin-cloths mount to its top, where they pile the offerings and the earth which are to form the funerary mound. The sovereign, moreover, has, in honour of the dead, consigned to execution some of the prisoners, and deigns to kill with his own hand one of the principal chiefs of the enemy.

The design and execution of these scenes are singularly rude; men and beasts—indeed, all the figures—have exaggerated proportions, uncouth forms, awkward positions, and an uncertain and heavy gait. The war ended in a treaty concluded with Enakalli, vicegerent of Grishban, by which Lagash obtained considerable advantages. Idingiranagin replaced the stele of Meshilim, overthrown by one of Enakalli's predecessors, and dug a ditch from the Euphrates to the provinces of Guedln to serve henceforth as a boundary. He further levied a tribute of corn for the benefit of the goddess Nina and her consort Ningirsu, and applied the spoils of the campaign to the building of new sanctuaries for the patron-gods of his city.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief in the Louvre. Cf. another bas-relief of the same king, p. 244; and for the probable explanation of these pierced plaques, see p. 258 of the present work.

His reign was, on the whole, a glorious and successful one. He conquered the mountain district of Elam, rescued Uruk and Uru, which had both fallen into the hands of the people of Gishban, organized an expedition against the town of Az and killed its vicegerent, in addition to which he burnt Arsua, and devastated the district of Mishime. He next directed an attack against Zuran, king of Udban, and, by vanquishing this Prince on the field of battle, he extended his dominion over nearly the whole of Babylonia.

The prosperity of his dynasty was subjected to numerous and strange vicissitudes. Whether it was that its resources were too feeble to stand the exigencies and strain of war for any length of time, or that intestine strife had been the chief cause of its decline, we cannot say. Its kings married many wives and became surrounded with a numerous progeny: Urnina had at least four sons. They often entrusted to their children or their sons-in-law the government of the small towns which together made up the city: these represented so many temporary fiefs, of which the holders were distinguished by the title of "vicegerents." This dismemberment of the supreme authority in the interest of princes, who believed for the most part that they had stronger claims to the throne than its occupant, was attended with dangers to peace and to the permanence of the dynasty. The texts furnish us with evidence of the existence of at least half a dozen descendants of Akurgal—Inannatuma I., Intemena, his grandson Inannatuma II, all of whom seem to have been vigorous rulers who energetically maintained the supremacy of their city over the neighbouring estates. Inannatuma I., however, proved no match in the end against Urlamma, the vicegerent of Gishban, and lost part, at least, of the territory acquired by Idingiranagin, but his son Intemena defeated Urlamma on the banks of the Lumasirta Canal, and, having killed or deposed him, gave the vicegerency of Gishban to a certain Hi, priest of Ninab, who remained his loyal vassal to the end of his days. With his aid Intemena restored the stelae and walls which had been destroyed during the war; he also cleared out the old canals and dug new ones, the most important of which was apparently an arm of the Shatt-el-Hai, and ran from the Euphrates to the Tigris, through the very centre of the domains of Ghirsu.

Other kings and vicegerents of doubtful sequence were followed lastly by Urbau and his son Gudea. These were all piously devoted to Ningirsu in general, and in particular to the patron of their choice from among the divinities of the country—Papsukal, Dunziranna, and Ninagal. They restored and enriched the temples of these gods: they dedicated to them statues or oblation vases for the welfare of themselves and their families. It would seem, if we are to trust the accounts which they give of themselves, that their lives were passed in profound peace, without other care than that of fulfilling their duties to heaven and its ministers. Their actual condition, if we could examine it, would doubtless appear less agreeable and especially less equable; revolutions in the palace would not be wanting, nor struggles with the other peoples of Chaldaea, with Susiana and even more distant nations. When Agade rose into power in Northern Babylonia, they fell under its rule, and one of them, Lugal-ushum-gal, acknowledged himself a dependant of Sargon. On the decline of Agade, and when that city was superseded by Uru in the hegemony of Babylonia proper, the vicegerents of Lagash were transferred with the other great towns to the jurisdiction of Uru, and flourished under the supremacy of the new dynasty.

Grudea, son of Urbau, who, if not the most powerful of its princes, is at least the sovereign of whom we possess the greatest number of monuments, captured the town of Anshan in Elam, and this is probably not the only campaign in which he took part, for he speaks of his success in an incidental manner, and as if he were in a hurry to pass to more interesting subjects.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a stone in the Louvre.

That which seemed to him important in his reign, and which especially called forth the recognition of posterity, was the number of his pious foundations, distinguished as they were by beauty and magnificence. The gods themselves had inspired him in his devout undertakings, and had even revealed to him the plans which he was to carry out. An old man of venerable aspect appeared to him in a vision, and commanded him to build a temple: as he did not know with whom he had to do, Nina his mother informed him that it was his brother, the god Ningirsu. This having been made clear, a young woman furnished with style and writing tablet was presented to him—Nisaba, the sister of Nina; she made a drawing in his presence, and put before him the complete model of a building. He set to work on it con amore, and sent for materials to the most distant countries—to Magan, Amanus, the Lebanon, and into the mountains which separate the valley of the Upper Tigris from that of the Euphrates.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin

The sanctuaries which he decorated, and of which he felt so proud, are to-day mere heaps of bricks, now returned to their original clay; but many of the objects which he placed in them, and especially the statues, have traversed the centuries without serious damage before finding a resting-place in the Louvre. The sculptors of Lagash, after the time of Idingi-ranagin, had been instructed in a good school, and had learned their business. Their bas-reliefs are not so good as those of Naramsin; the execution of them is not so refined, the drawing less delicate, and the modelling of the parts not so well thought out. A good illustration of their work is the fragment of a square stele which represents a scene of offering or sacrifice. We see in the lower part of the picture a female singer, who is accompanied by a musician, playing on a lyre ornamented with the head of an ox, and a bull in the act of walking. In the upper part an individual advances, clad in a fringed mantle, and bearing in his right hand a kind of round paten, and in his left a short staff. An acolyte follows him, his arms brought up to his breast, while another individual marks, by clapping his hands, the rhythm of the ode which a singer like the one below is reciting. The fragment is much abraded, and its details, not being clearly exhibited, have rather to be guessed at; but the defaced aspect which time has produced is of some service to it, since it conceals in some respect the rudeness of its workmanship. The statues, on the other hand, bear evidence of a precision of chiselling and a skill beyond question. Not that there are no faults to be found in the work. They are squat, thick, and heavy in form, and seem oppressed by the weight of the woollen covering with which the Chaldeans enveloped themselves; when viewed closely, they excite at once the wonder and repulsion of an eye accustomed to the delicate grace, and at times somewhat slender form, which usually characterized the good statues of the ancient and middle empire of Egypt. But when we have got over the effect of first impressions, we can but admire the audacity with which the artists attacked their material. This is of hard dolerite, offering great resistance to the tool—harder, perhaps, than the diorite out of which the Memphite sculptor had to cut his Khephren: they succeeded in mastering it, and in handling it as freely as if it were a block of limestone or marble.



The surface of the breast and back, the muscular development of the shoulders and arms, the details of the hands and feet, all the nude portions, are treated at once with a boldness and attention to minutiae rarely met with in similar works. The pose is lacking in variety; the individual, whether male or female, is sometimes represented standing and sometimes sitting on a low seat, the legs brought together, the bust rising squarely from the hips, the hands crossed upon the breast, in a posture of submission or respectful adoration. The mantle passes over the left shoulder, leaving the right free, and is fastened on the right breast, the drapery displaying awkward and inartistic folds: the latter widens in the form of a funnel from top to bottom, being bell-shaped around the lower part of the body, and barely leaves the ankles exposed.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec.

All the large statues to be seen at the Louvre have lost their heads; fortunately we possess a few separate heads. Some are completely shaven, others wear a kind of turban affording shade to the forehead and eyes; among them all we see the same qualities and defects which we find in the bodies: a hardness of expression, heaviness, absence of vivacity, and yet withal a vigour of reproduction and an accurate knowledge of human anatomy. These are instances of what could be accomplished in a city of secondary rank; better things were doubtless produced in the great cities, such as Uru and Babylon. Chaldaean art, as we are able to catch a glimpse of it in the monuments of Lagash, had neither the litheness, nor animation, nor elegance of the Egyptian, but it was nevertheless not lacking in force, breadth, and originality. Urningirsu succeeded his father Gudea, to be followed rapidly by several successive vicegerents, ending, it would appear, in Gala-lama. Their inscriptions are short and insignificant, and show that they did not enjoy the same resources or the same favour which enabled Gudea to reign gloriously. The prosperity of Lagash decreased steadily under their administration, and they were all the humble vassals of the King of Uru, Dungi, son of Urbau; a fact which tends to make us regard Urbau as having been the suzerain upon whom Gudea himself was dependent. Uru, the only city among those of Lower Chaldaea which stands on the right bank of the Euphrates, was a small but strong place, and favourably situated for becoming one of the commercial and industrial centres in these distant ages. The Wady Eummein, not far distant, brought to it the riches of Central and Southern Arabia, gold, precious stones, gums, and odoriferous resins for the exigencies of worship. Another route, marked out by wells, traversed the desert to the land of the semi-fabulous Mashu, and from thence perhaps penetrated as far as Southern Syria and the Sinaitic Peninsula—Magan and Milukhkha on the shores of the Red Sea: this was not the easiest but it was the most direct route for those bound for Africa, and products of Egypt were no doubt carried along it in order to reach in the shortest time the markets of Uru. The Euphrates now runs nearly five miles to the north of the town, but from the regions bordering the Black Sea.



In ancient times it was not so distant, but passed almost by its gates. The cedars, cypresses, and pines of Amamis and the Lebanon,the limestones, marbles, and hard stones of Upper Syria, were brought down to it by boat; and probably also metals—iron, copper and lead.

The Shatt-el-Hai, moreover, poured its waters into the Euphrates almost opposite the city, and opened up to it commercial relations with the Upper and Middle Tigris. And this was not all; whilst some of its boatmen used its canals and rivers as highways, another section made their way to the waters of the Persian Gulf and traded with the ports on its coast. Eridu, the only city which could have barred their access to the sea, was a town given up to religion, and existed only for its temples and its gods. It was not long before it fell under the influence of its powerful neighbour, becoming the first port of call for vessels proceeding up the Euphrates.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Chesney.

In the time of the Greeks and Romans the Chaldaeans were accustomed to navigate the Tigris either in round flat-bottomed boats, of little draught—"kufas," in fact—or on rafts placed upon inflated skins, exactly similar in appearance and construction to the "keleks" of our own day. These keleks were as much at home on the sea as upon the river, and they may still be found in the Persian Gulf engaged in the coasting trade. Doubtless many of these were included among the vessels of Uru mentioned in the texts, but there were also among the latter those long large rowing-boats with curved stem and stern, Egyptian in their appearance, which are to be found roughly incised on some ancient cylinders. These primitive fleets were not disposed to risk the navigation of the open sea. They preferred to proceed slowly along the shore, hugging it in all cases, except when it was necessary to reach some group of neighbouring islands; many days of navigation were thus required to make a passage which one of our smallest sail-boats would effect in a few hours, and at the end of their longest voyages they were not very distant from their point of departure. It would be a great mistake to suppose them capable of sailing round Arabia and of fetching blocks of stone by sea from the Sinaitic Peninsula; such an expedition, which would have been dangerous even for Greek or Roman Galleys, would have been simply impossible for them. If they ever crossed the Strait of Ormuzd, it was an exceptional thing, their ordinary voyages being confined within the limits of the gulf. The merchants of Uru were accustomed to visit regularly the island of Dilmun, the land of Magan, the countries of Milukhkha and Gubin; from these places they brought cargoes of diorite for their sculptors, building-timber for their architects, perfumes and metals transported from Yemen by land, and possibly pearls from the Bahrein Islands. They encountered serious rivalry from the sailors of Dilmun and Magan, whose maritime tribes were then as now accustomed to scour the seas. The risk was great for those who set out on such expeditions, perhaps never to return, but the profit was considerable.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief from "Kouyunjik" (Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh, 2nd series, pi. 13; cf. Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie, pl. 43, No. 1.)

Uru, enriched by its commerce, was soon in a position to subjugate the petty neighbouring states—Uruk, Larsam, Lagash, and Nipur. Its territory formed a fairly extended sovereignty, whose lords entitled themselves kings of Shumir and Akkad, and ruled over all Southern Chaldaea for many centuries.

Several of these kings, the Lugalkigubnidudu and the Lugalkisalsi, of whom some monuments have been preserved to us, seem to have extended their influence beyond these limits prior to the time of Sargon the Elder; and we can date the earliest of them with tolerable probability. Urbau reigned some time about 2900 B.C. He was an energetic builder, and material traces of his activity are to be found everywhere throughout the country. The temple of the Sun at Larsam, the temple of Nina in Uruk, and the temples of Inlilla and Ninlilla in Nipur were indebted to him for their origin or restoration: he decorated or repaired all structures which were not of his own erection: in Uru itself the sanctuary of the moon-god owes its foundation to him, and the fortifications of the city were his work. Dungi, his son, was an indefatigable bricklayer, like his father: he completed the sanctuary of the moon-god, and constructed buildings in Uruk, Lagash, and Kutha. There is no indication in the inscriptions of his having been engaged in any civil struggle or in war with a foreign nation; we should make a serious mistake, however, if we concluded from this silence that peace was not disturbed in his time. The tie which bound together the petty states of which Uru was composed was of the slightest. The sovereign could barely claim as his own more than the capital and the district surrounding it; the other cities recognized his authority, paid him tribute, did homage to him in religious matters, and doubtless rendered him military service also, but each one of them nevertheless maintained its particular constitution and obeyed its hereditary lords. These lords, it is true, lost their title of king, which now belonged exclusively to their suzerain, and each one had to be content in his district with the simple designation of "vicegerent;" but having once fulfilled their feudal obligations, they had absolute power over their ancient domains, and were able to transmit to their progeny the inheritance they had received from their fathers. Gudea probably, and most certainly his successors, ruled in this way over Lagash, as a fief depending on the crown of Uru. After the manner of the Egyptian barons, the vassals of the kings of Chaldaea submitted to the control of their suzerain without resenting his authority as long as they felt the curbing influence of a strong hand: but on the least sign of feebleness in their master they reasserted themselves, and endeavoured to recover their independence. A reign of any length was sure to be disturbed by rebellions sometimes difficult to repress: if we are ignorant of any such, it is owing to the fact that inscriptions hitherto discovered are found upon objects upon which an account of a battle would hardly find a fitting place, such as bricks from a temple, votive cones or cylinders of terra-cotta, amulets or private seals. We are still in ignorance as to Dungi's successors, and the number of years during which this first dynasty was able to prolong its existence. We can but guess that its empire broke up by disintegration after a period of no long duration. Its cities for the most part became emancipated, and their rulers proclaimed themselves kings once more. We see that the kingdom of Amnanu, for instance, was established on the left bank of the Euphrates, with Uruk as its capital, and that three successive sovereigns at least—of whom Singashid seems to have been the most active—were able to hold their own there. Uru had still, however, sufficient prestige and wealth to make it the actual metropolis of the entire country. No one could become the legitimate lord of Shumir and Accad before he had been solemnly enthroned in the temple at Uru. For many centuries every ambitious kinglet in turn contended for its possession and made it his residence. The first of these, about 2500 B.C., were the lords of Nishin, Libitanunit, Gamiladar, Inedin, Bursin I., and Ismidagan: afterwards, about 2400 B.C., Gungunum of Nipur made himself master of it. The descendants of Gungunum, amongst others Bursin II., Gimilsin, Inesin, reigned gloriously for a few years. Their records show that they conquered not only a part of Elam, but part of Syria. They were dispossessed in their turn by a family belonging to Larsam, whose two chief representatives, as far as we know, were Nurramman and his son Sinidinnam (about 2300 B.C.). Naturally enough, Sinidinnam was a builder or repairer of temples, but he added to such work the clearing of the Shatt-el-Hai and the excavation of a new canal giving a more direct communication between the Shatt and the Tigris, and in thus controlling the water-system of the country became worthy of being considered one of the benefactors of Chaldaea.

We have here the mere dust of history, rather than history itself: here an isolated individual makes his appearance in the record of his name, to vanish when we attempt to lay hold of him; there, the stem of a dynasty which breaks abruptly off, pompous preambles, devout formulas, dedications of objects or buildings, here and there the account of some battle, or the indication of some foreign country with which relations of friendship or commerce were maintained—these are the scanty materials out of which to construct a connected narrative. Egypt has not much more to offer us in regard to many of her Pharaohs, but we have in her case at least the ascertained framework of her dynasties, in which each fact and each new name falls eventually, and after some uncertainty, into its proper place. The main outlines of the picture are drawn with sufficient exactitude to require no readjustment, the groups are for the most part in their fitting positions, the blank spaces or positions not properly occupied are gradually restricted, and filled in from day to day; the expected moment is in sight when, the arrangement of the whole being accomplished, it will be necessary only to fill in the details. In the case of Chaldaea the framework itself is wanting, and expedients must be resorted to in order to classify the elements entering into its composition. Naramsin is in his proper place, or nearly so; but as for Gudea, what interval separates him from Naramsin, and at what distance from Gudea are we to place the kings of Uru? The beginnings of Chaldaea have merely a provisional history: the facts in it are certain, but the connection of the facts with one another is too often a matter of speculation. The arrangement which is put forward at present can be regarded only as probable, but it would be difficult to propose a better until the excavations have furnished us with fresh material; it must be accepted merely as an attempt, without pledging to it our confidence on the one hand, or regarding it with scepticism on the other.



CHAPTER II—THE TEMPLES AND THE GODS OF CHALDAEA

THE CONSTRUCTION AND REVENUES OF THE TEMPLES—THE POPULAR GODS AND THE THEOLOGICAL TRIADS——THE DEAD AND HADES.

_Chaldaean cities: the resemblance of their ruins to natural mounds caused by their exclusive use of brick as a building material—Their city walls: the temples and local gods; reconstruction of their history by means of the stamped bricks of which they were built—The two types of ziggurat: the arrangement of the temple of Nannar at Uru.

The tribes of the Chaldaean gods—Genii hostile to men, their monstrous shapes; the south-west wind; friendly genii—The Seven, and their attacks on the moon-god; Gibil, the fire-god, overcomes them and their snares—The Sumerian gods; Ningirsu: the difficulty of defining them and of understanding the nature of them; they become merged in the Semitic deities.

Characteristics and dispositions of the Chaldaean gods—the goddesses, like women of the harem, are practically nonentities; Mylitta and her meretricious rites—The divine aristocracy and its principal representatives: their relations to the earth, oracles, speaking statues, household gods—The gods of each city do not exclude those of neighbouring cities: their alliances and their borrowings from one another—The sky-gods and the earth-gods, the sidereal gods: the moon and the sun.

The feudal gods: several among them unite to govern the world; the two triads of Eridu—The supreme triad: Anu the heaven; Bel the earth and his fusion with the Babylonian Merodach; Ea, the god of the waters—The second triad: Sin the moon and Shamash the sun; substitution of Bamman for Ishtar in this triad; the winds and the legend of Adapa, the attributes of Ramman—The addition of goddesses to these two triads; the insignificant position which they occupy.

The assembly of the gods governs the world: the bird Zu steals the tablets of destiny—Destinies are written in the heavens and determined by the movements of the stars; comets and their presiding deities, Nebo and Ishtai—The numerical value of the gods—The arrangement of the temples, the local priesthood, festivals, revenues of the gods and gifts made to them—Sacrifices, the expiation of crimes—Death and the future of the soul—Tombs and the cremation of the dead; the royal sepulchres and funerary rites—Hades and its sovereigns: Nergal, Allat, the descent of Ishtar into the infernal regions, and the possibility of a resurrection The invocation of the dead—The ascension of Etana._



CHAPTER II—THE TEMPLES AND THE GODS OF CHALDAEA

The construction and revenues of the temples—Popular gods and theological triads—The dead and Hades.

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses, even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and industrious people: on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be distinguished—mounds of stiff and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man.



In the estimation of the Chaldaean architects, stone was a material of secondary consideration: as it was necessary to bring it from a great distance and at considerable expense, they used it very sparingly, and then merely for lintels, uprights, thresholds, for hinges on which to hang their doors, for dressings in some of their state apartments, in cornices or sculptured friezes on the external walls of their buildings; and even then its employment suggested rather that of a band of embroidery carefully disposed on some garment to relieve the plainness of the material. Crude brick, burnt brick, enamelled brick, but always and everywhere brick was the principal element in their construction. The soil of the marshes or of the plains, separated from the pebbles and foreign substances which it contained, mixed with grass or chopped straw, moistened with water, and assiduously trodden underfoot, furnished the ancient builders with materials of incredible tenacity. This was moulded into thin square bricks, eight inches to a foot across, and three to four inches thick, but rarely larger: they were stamped on the flat side, by means of an incised wooden block, with the name of the reigning sovereign, and were then dried in the sun.* A layer of fine mortar or of bitumen was sometimes spread between the courses, or handfuls of reeds would be strewn at intervals between the brickwork to increase the cohesion: more frequently the crude bricks were piled one upon another, and their natural softness and moisture brought about their rapid agglutination.** As the building proceeded, the weight of the courses served to increase still further the adherence of the layers: the walls soon became consolidated into a compact mass, in which the horizontal strata were distinguishable only by the varied tints of the clay used to make the different relays of bricks.

* The making of bricks for the Assyrian monuments of the time of the Sargonids has been minutely described by Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie, vol. i. pp. 211-214. The methods of procedure were exactly the same as those used under the earliest king known, as has been proved by the examination of the bricks taken from the monuments of Uru and Lagash.

** This method of building was noticed by classical writers. The word "Bowarieh," borne by several ancient mounds in Chaldoa, signifies, properly speaking, a mat of reeds; it is applied only to such buildings as are apparently constructed with alternate layers of brick and dried reeds. The proportion of these layers differs in certain localities: in the ruins of the ancient temple of Belos at Babylon, now called the "Mujelibeh," the lines of straw and reeds run uninterruptedly between each course of bricks; in the ruins of Akkerkuf, they only occur at wider intervals—according to Niebuhr and Ives, every seventh or eighth course; according to Raymond, every seventh course, or sometimes every fifth or sixth course, but in these cases the layer of reeds becomes 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 inches wide. H. Rawlin-son thinks, on the other hand, that all the monuments in which we find layers of straw and reeds between the brick courses belong to the Parthian period.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a brick preserved in the Louvre. The bricks bearing historical inscriptions, which are sometimes met with, appear to have been mostly ex-voto offerings placed somewhere prominently, and not building materials hidden in the masonry.

Monuments constructed of such a plastic material required constant attention and frequent repairs, to keep them in good condition: after a few years of neglect they became quite disfigured, the houses suffered a partial dissolution in every storm, the streets were covered with a coating of fine mud, and the general outline of the buildings and habitations grew blurred and defaced. Whilst in Egypt the main features of the towns are still traceable above ground, and are so well preserved in places that, while excavating them, we are carried away from the present into the world of the past, the Chaldaean cities, on the contrary, are so overthrown and seem to have returned so thoroughly to the dust from which their founders raised them, that the most patient research and the most enlightened imagination can only imperfectly reconstitute their arrangement.

The towns were not enclosed within those square or rectangular enclosures with which the engineers of the Pharaohs fortified their strongholds. The ground-plan of Uru was an oval, that of Larsam formed almost a circle upon the soil, while Uruk and Eridu resembled in shape a sort of irregular trapezium. The curtain of the citadel looked down on the plain from a great height, so that the defenders were almost out of reach of the arrows or slings of the besiegers: the remains of the ramparts at Uruk at the present day are still forty to fifty feet high, and twenty or more feet in thickness at the top. Narrow turrets projected at intervals of every fifty feet along the face of the wall: the excavations have not been sufficiently pursued to permit of our seeing what system of defence was applied to the entrances. The area described by these cities was often very large, but the population in them was distributed very unequally; the temples in the different quarters formed centres around which were clustered the dwellings of the inhabitants, sometimes densely packed, and elsewhere thinly scattered. The largest and richest of these temples was usually reserved for the principal deity, whose edifices were being continually decorated by the ruling princes, and the extent of whose ruins still attracts the traveller. The walls, constructed and repaired with bricks stamped with the names of lords of the locality, contain in themselves alone an almost complete history. Did Urbau, we may ask, found the ziggurat of Nannar in Uru? We meet with his bricks at the base of the most ancient portions of the building, and we moreover learn, from cylinders unearthed not far from it, that "for Nannar, the powerful bull of Anu, the son of Bel, his King, Urbau, the brave hero, King of Uru, had built E-Timila, his favourite temple." The bricks of his son Dungi are found mixed with his own, while here and there other bricks belonging to subsequent kings, with cylinders, cones, and minor objects, strewn between the courses, mark restorations at various later periods. What is true of one Chaldaean city is equally true of all of them, and the dynasties of Uruk and of Lagash, like those of Uru, can be reconstructed from the revelations of their brickwork. The lords of heaven promised to the lords of the earth, as a reward of their piety, both glory and wealth in this life, and an eternal fame after death: they have, indeed, kept their word. The majority of the earliest Chaldaean heroes would be unknown to us, were it not for the witness of the ruined sanctuaries which they built, and that which they did in the service of their heavenly patrons has alone preserved their names from oblivion. Their most extravagant devotion, however, cost them less money and effort than that of the Pharaohs their contemporaries. While the latter had to bring from a distance, even from the remotest parts of the desert, the different kinds of stone which they considered worthy to form part of the decoration of the houses of their gods, the Chaldaean kings gathered up outside their very doors the principal material for their buildings: should they require any other accessories, they could obtain, at the worst, hard stone for their statues and thresholds in Magan and Milukhkha, and beams of cedar and cypress in the forests of the Amanus and the Upper Tigris. Under these conditions a temple was soon erected, and its construction did not demand centuries of continuous labour, like the great limestone and granite sanctuaries of Egypt: the same ruler who laid the first brick, almost always placed the final one, and succeeding generations had only to keep the building in ordinary repair, without altering its original plan. The work of construction was in almost every case carried out all at one time, designed and finished from the drawings of one architect, and bears traces but rarely of those deviations from the earlier plans which sometimes make the comprehension of the Theban temples so difficult a matter: if the state of decay of certain parts, or more often inadequate excavation, frequently prevent us from appreciating their details, we can at least reinstate their general outline with tolerable accuracy.