Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/76

 56 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD/KA AND ASSYRIA. decorations, sometimes in engraved fragments of unknown origin. We may say the same of the different divine types. Some- times we find them in monumental sculpture, more often on those seals which we call cylinders. But how obscure, incomplete, and poor such documents are in comparison with the long pages of hieroglyphs in which the Pharaohs address their gods or make them speak for themselves ! How infinitely inferior in expression and significance to the vast pictures which cover the walls of the Theban temples and bring all the persons of the Egyptian pantheon before us in their turn ! What hope is there that excavations in ChaRla^a and Assyria will ever provide us with such remains as those groups of statues which fill our museums, in which the effigy of a single god is repeated hundreds of times with every variation of type, pose, and attribute given to it by the Egyptian theosophy ? On the one hand, what abundance, we may say what super-abundance ; on the other, what poverty, what gaping breaches in the chain of material history ! Among the gods and genii, whose names have come down to us, how few there are whose images we can surely point to ; and, again, what a small number of figures we have upon which we can put a name without fear of error ! To write the history of these beliefs is a difficult task, not only because the idols, as they would once have been called, are few, and the Chaldseo-Assyrian inscriptions historical and narrative rather than religious and dogmatic, but also because the inter- > O pretation of the texts, especially of the most ancient, is much less advanced than that of the hieroglyphs. When documents in the old language, or lit least written in the primitive ideo- graphic characters, are attacked, the process is one of divination rather than of translation in the strict sense of the word. Another difficulty has to be noticed ; classic literature does little or nothing to help us in filling up these voids and dissipating the obscurities they cause. The Greeks were guilty of many errors when they attempted to understand and describe foreign religions, but their relations with the Egyptians and Phoenicians were so pro- longed, and, towards the end, so intimate, that at last they did succeed in grasping some of the doctrine taught in the sanctuaries of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Byblos and Hierapolis. With their lively intellects they could hardly frequent the temples, examine the sacred images, and question the priests as to the national rites