on his throne[43.1]; and of a later date, the alabaster relief from Khorsabad showing a sacrifice to Marduk, a speaking witness to the stern solemnity of the Babylonian worship and to the strength of the faith in personal divinity.[43.2] That this faith was as real in the polytheistic Babylonian as in the monotheistic Israelite is evinced not merely by the monuments, but still more clearly and impressively by the Sumerian hymns and liturgies. Nevertheless the phenomena of animism coexist in all this region with those of developed theism. By the side of these high personal deities we find vague companies of divine powers such as the Igigi and the Anunnaki, who are conceived more or less as personal but without clearly imagined individuality, the former being perhaps definable as the daimones of heaven, the latter as the daimones of earth. Similarly, in the Hellenic system we note such nameless companies of divine agencies as the Ἐρινύες and Πραξιδίκαι, conceived independently of the concrete figures of the polytheism. But, further, in the Mesopotamian religion we must reckon seriously with lower products of polydaemonism than these, the demons of evil and disease who so dominated the imagination and much of the religious life of the private person that the chief object of the elaborate ritual was, as we shall see, to combat these. Only, as the curtain gradually rolls away from the remote past of this earliest home of human culture, it is not given us to see the gradual emergence of the divine personalities, or trace--as perhaps we may elsewhere--the {44} process from polydaimonism to theism. The gods, as far as we can discern, were always there, and at least it is not in the second millennium B.C. that me may hope to find the origins of theistic religion. As regards the other Semitic stocks, the cumulative evidence of early inscriptions, literary records, and legends is sufficient proof that the belief in high personal divinities was predominant in this millennium. It is not necessary to labour here at the details of the proof; the other lines of inquiry that I am soon going to follow will give sufficient illustration of this; and it is enough to allude to the wide prevalence of the designation of the high god as Baal or Bel, which can be traced from Assyria through Syria, in the Aramaean communities, in Canaan and Phoenicia, and in the Phoenician colonies: the Moabite Stone tells us of Chemosh; the earliest Carthaginian inscriptions of Baal-Hammon and Tanit; from our earliest witness for Arabian religion, Herodotus,[44.1] we learn that the Arabs named their two chief divinities, Orotal and Alilat, a god and a goddess, whom he identifies with Dionysos and Aphrodite Ourania.