17. The battle of Bel-Marduk and the Dragon was a favorite incident in the cycle of Chaldean tradition, if we judge from the number of representations we have of it on Babylonian cylinders, and even on Assyrian wall-sculptures. The texts which relate to it are, however, in a frightful state of mutilation, and only the last fragment, describing the final combat, can be read and translated with anything like completeness. With it ends the series treating of the Cosmogony or Beginnings of the World. But it may be completed by a few more legends of the same primitive character and preserved on detached tablets, in double text, as usual--Accadian and Assyrian. To these belongs a poem narrating the rebellion, already alluded to, (see p. 182,) of the seven evil spirits, originally the messengers and throne-bearers of the gods, and their war against the moon, the whole being evidently a fanciful rendering of an eclipse. "Those wicked gods, the rebel spirits," of whom one is likened to a leopard, and one to a serpent, and the rest to other animals--suggesting the fanciful shapes of storm-clouds--while one is said to be the raging south wind, began the attack "with evil tempest, baleful wind," and "from the foundations of the heavens like the lightning they darted." The lower region of the sky was reduced to its primeval chaos, and the gods sat in anxious council. The moon-god (Sin), the sun-god (Shamash), and the goddess Ishtar had been appointed to sway in close harmony the lower sky and to command the hosts of heaven; but when the moon-god was attacked by the seven spirits of evil, his companions basely forsook him, the sun-god retreating to his place and Ishtar taking refuge in the highest heaven (the heaven of Anu). Nebo is despatched to Ea, who sends his son Meridug with this instruction:--"Go, my son Meridug! The light of the sky, my son, even the moon-god, is grievously darkened in heaven, and in eclipse from heaven is vanishing. Those seven wicked gods, the serpents of death who fear not, are waging unequal war with the laboring moon." Meridug obeys his father's bidding, and overthrows the seven powers of darkness.[BB] [Illustration: 74.--BATTLE BETWEEN BEL AND THE DRAGON (TIAMAT). (Smith's "Chaldea.")]