Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/365

 NOTIONS AS TO A FUTURE LIFI:. 343 funerary mounds, the aspect of the characters engraved upon the cylinders and the style of the things they contained, all go to prove their age. In similar tombs discovered by M. de Sarzec at Sirtella, in the same region, a tablet of stone and a bronze statuette, differing in no important particular from those deposited in founda- tion stones, were found. The texts engraved upon them leave no doubt as to their great antiquity. 1 It is then to the early Chaldsean monarchy that we must assign these tombs, which so clearly be- tray ideas and beliefs practically identical with those that find their freest expression in the mastabas of the ancient Egyptian Empire. In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, the human intellect arrived with the lapse of time at something beyond this childish and primitive belief. Men did not, however, repel it altogether as false and ridiculous ; they continued to cherish it at the bottom of their hearts, and to allow it to impose certain lines of action upon them which otherwise could hardly be explained or justified. As in Egypt, and in later years in Greece, a new and more abstract conception was imposed upon the first. Logically, the second theory was the negation of its predecessor, but where imagination and sentiment play the principal role, such contradictions are lost sight of. We have elsewhere 2 traced the process by which the imagina- tion was led to sketch out a new explanation of the mystery of death. As man's experience increased, and his faculty for obser- vation became more powerful, he had to make a greater mental effort before he could believe in the immortality of the body, and in a life prolonged to infinity in the darkness of the tomb. In order to satisfy the craving for perpetuity, a something was imagined, we can hardly say what, a shade, an imago, that detached itself from the body at the moment of death, and took itself off with the lightness of a bird, A great space, with no definite size, shape, or situation, in which these shades of the departed could meet each other and enjoy greater freedom than in the tomb, was added to the first conception. This less material belief was better adapted than the first to the moral instincts of humanity. A material and organic existence passed in the grave dealt out the 1 Les Fouilles de Chaldee, communication d'une Lettre de M. de Sarzec, par LEON HEUZF.Y. i (in the Revue archfalo&ique for November, 1881). 2 Art in Ancient Epvpf, vol. i. pp. 127 et seq.