Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/95

 THE CIIALLXKAN RELIGION. 75 thunder. He, Raman, it is, perhaps, who is figured in the bas-relief from Nimroud reproduced below (Figs. 13 and i/}.), 1 in which a god appears bearing an axe in his right hand, and, in his left, a kind of faggot, whose significance might have escaped us but for the light thrown upon it by classic sculpture. The latter no doubt borrowed a well-known form from the east, and the object in question is nothing less than the thunderbolt given by Greek artists to their Zeus. It was this adoration of the stars and planets that led by degrees to what we call polytheism. Man partitioned those terrible FIG. 13. Gods carried in procession ; from Layard's Monuments of Nineveh, first series, pi. 65. powers of nature of which he felt himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, between crowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whom he did his best to propitiate by gifts and to compel by magic. Little by little, intelligence per- fected that work of abstraction and simplification by which all races but those who have stuck fast in the conceptions of their infancy have arrived at a single conclusion. Without ceasing to believe in the existence of genii, they invented the gods, a race of beings far more powerful, not only than short-lived man, but even than the 1 Some Assyriologists believe this to represent Merodach.