Page:The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).djvu/266

 The thirteenth to sixteenth lines of the first column appear to mark out the ultimate boundaries of the empire of Izdubar, and the limits mark somewhere about the extent assigned to the kingdom of Nimrod by tradition. The northern boundary was Bitani by the Armenian mountains, the eastern boundary the mountain ranges which separated Assyria and Babylonia from Media, and the south was the Persian Gulf, beyond which nothing was known, and the Arabian desert, which also bounded part of the west. On the western boundary his dominions stretched along the region of the Euphrates, perhaps to Orfa, a city which has still traditions of Nimrod.

In the course of the answer Izdubar gives to Ishtar, he calls to mind the various amours of Ishtar, and I cannot avoid the impression that the author has here typified the universal power of love, extending over high and low, men and animals.

The subsequent lines show Ishtar obtaining from her father the creation of a bull called "the divine bull;" this animal I have supposed to be the winged bull so often depicted on Assyrian sculpture, but I am now inclined to think that this bull is represented without wings. The struggle with a bull, represented on the Babylonian cylinder, figured here, and numerous similar representations, seem to refer to this incident. There is no struggle with a winged bull on the Izdubar cylinders.

It would appear from the broken fragments of column IV. that Heabani laid hold of the bull by