Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/362

 340 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALIXEA AND ASSYRIA. and his son, are transported after death into Mesopotamia. 1 According to Loftus the cemetery of Nedjef alone, that by which the mosque known as Meched-Ali is surrounded, receives the bodies of from five to eight thousand Persians every year. Now the journey between Nineveh and Calah and the plains of Lower Chaldaea was far easier than it is now considering especially the state of the roads -between Tauris, Ispahan, and Teheran, on the one hand and Nedjef on the other. The transit from Assyria to Chaldaea could be made, like that of the Egyptian mummy, entirely by water, that is to say, very cheaply, very easily, and very rapidly. We are brought up, however, by one objection. Although as a rule subject to the Assyrians, the Chaldaeans were from the eleventh to the seventh century before our era in a constant state of revolt against their northern neighbours ; they struggled hard for their independence and waged long and bloody wars with the masters of Nineveh. Can the Assyrian kings have dared to confide their mortal remains to sepulchres in the midst of a people who had shown themselves so hostile to their domination ? Must they not have trembled for the security of tombs surrounded by a rebellious and angry populace ? And the furious conflicts that we find narrated in the Assyrian inscriptions, must they not often, have interrupted the transport of bodies and compelled them to wait without sepulture for months and even years ? Further explorations and the decipherment of the texts will one day solve the problem. Meanwhile we must attempt to determine the nature of Chalda^o-Assyrian beliefs as to a future life. We shall get no help from Herodotus. Intending to describe the manners and customs of the Chaldseans in a special work that he either never wrote or that has been lost, 2 he treated Meso- potamia in much less ample fashion than Egypt, in his history. All that he leaves us on the subject we are now studying is this passing remark, " The Babylonians put their dead in honey, and their funerary lamentations are very like those of the Egyptians." 3 Happily we have the Chaldsean cemeteries and the sculptured monuments of Assyria to which we can turn for information. The 1 In his sixth and seventh chapters LOFTUS gives a very interesting account of his visits to the sanctuaries of Nedjef and Kerbela. ' The work he alludes to as his 'Ao-crupiot Xoyot (i. 184). 3 HERODOTUS, i. 198.