Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/366

 344 A HISTORY OF ART ix CUALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. same fate to good and bad alike. On the other hand, nothing was more easy than to divide the kingdom of the shades into two compartments, into two distinct domains, and to place in one those whose conduct had been deserving of reward ; in the other, those whose crimes and vices had been insufficiently punished upon earth. It is not to the Chaldean sepulchres that we owe our know- ledge that the Semites of Mesopotamia followed in the footsteps of the Egyptians, when they found themselves in face of the problem of life and death ; it is to the literature of the Assyrians. Among those tablets of terra-cotta from the library of Assurbanipal that are now preserved in the British Museum, George Smith discovered, in 1873, a mythological document in which the descent of Istar to the infernal regions in search of her lover Tammouz is recounted. Of this he gives a first translation, which is already out of date. Since his discovery was announced, the most learned Assyriologists have made a study of the document, and now even those among them who most seldom think alike, are in agreement as to its meaning except in a few unimportant particulars. 1 No doubt remains as to the general significance of the piece ; we may even compare it with other documents from the same library in which there is much to confirm and complete its contents. Even if there were no evidence to the contrary, we might safely affirm that the first conception was not effaced from the minds of the Assyrians by the second. M. Halevy has translated an Assyrian text, whose meaning he thus epitomizes : " What be- comes of the individual deposited in a tomb ? A curious passage in one of the ' books ' from the library of Assurbanipal answers this question, indirectly, indeed, but without any ambiguity. After death the vital and indestructible principle, the incorporeal spirit, 1 M. OPPERT has translated this text in full in a work entitled : Llmmortalite de VAnie chez les Chaldcens (Annalcs de Philosophic chrctienne, vol. viii. 1884), and he has reproduced his version with a few modifications of detail in Fragments Mytho- logiques (Quantin, 1881, i8mo). M. HALVY has given long extracts from the same document in an article in the Revue dcs Etudes Jiiires (October-December, 1881), entitled : Les Inscriptions peintes de Citiuin, 2 ; he has returned to the same subject in an article in the Revue archeologiquc (July, 1882), I? Immortalitc de l } Awe chez les Penples s'emitiqites. We reproduce his translation as the most recent. Herr SCHRADER has devoted a whole book to the translation and explanation of this same myth (Die Hallenfahrt der Jsfar, Giessen, 1874).