Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/98

78 yet we are not in a position to put a name to each even of the figures that recur most frequently. In the case of Egypt there is no such difficulty : when we encounter the image of one of her gods upon the walls of a temple or in the cases of a museum, we can say without hesitation, " This is Osiris or Ptah," as the case may be, "Amen or Horus, Isis, Sekhet, or Hathor." It is not so with Chaldoea. Figures are there often found uninscribed, and even when an inscription is present it not seldom offers difficulties of interpretation which have not yet been cleared up ; for the divine names are usually ideograms. Only a few have been identified beyond all doubt, those namely of which we have Hebrew or Greek transcriptions, preserving for us the real Chaldaean original ; Ilou, Bel, Nisroch, Beltis, I star, are examples of this. Hence it results that Assyriologists often feel no little embar- rassment when they are asked to point out upon the monuments the figures even of those gods of whose names they are the least doubtful. The Assyrians and Chalclaeans, like other nations of antiquity, had what we should now call their figured mythology', but we are still imperfectly acquainted with it. Even for those whom we may call the most exalted personages of the Chaldaean Olympus, scholars have hardly succeeded in illustrating the texts by the monuments and explaining the monuments by the texts ; and we are yet far from being able to institute a perpetual and standard comparison as we have clone in the case of Egypt and still more in that of Greece, between the divine types as they appear in religious formulae and in the national poetry, and the same types when embodied by the imagination of the artist. A long time may elapse before a mythological gallery for Chaldaea, in which all the important members of the Mesopotamian pantheon shall take their places and be known by the names they bore in their own day, can be formed, but even now the principles upon which they were represented by art may be stated. The images of the various gods were built up in great part by the aid of combinations similar to those made use of in realizing the minor demons. A natural bent towards such a method of interpre- tation was perhaps inherited from the clays in which the naive adoration of all those animals which help or hurt mankind formed a part of the national worship ; again, certain animals were, by their shapes and constitution, better fitted than others to personify this or that quality which, in its fulness, was considered