There is some doubt in regard to the winged figures with eagles’ heads on the reliefs from Khorsabad, in the British Museum (pl. 38-40): they are represented holding pine-cones and a “cista mystica” on each side of the sacred tree, and might be _genii_ engaged in worship; but on one of the reliefs Assur-nasir-Pal is standing before one of them in attitude of adoration. But the most clear and definite evidence on this point is afforded by the legend and monuments of the god whom Berosos calls Oannes,[53.3] but whom modern Assyriology interprets as the ocean-born god Ea or Ae of Eridu, the god of all wisdom and science. According to Berosos, he had entirely a fish body, but a human head had grown under the head of the fish, human feet out of the fish’s tail, and he spoke with human voice: a statue of this type was still existing at Babylon according to this writer in the time of Alexander. Now the exact type is presented in the form that appears on various Babylonian cylinders; there is one that presents the fish-man-god standing before the tree of Life--receiving a ray perhaps from the sun above:[53.4] and half {54} his form from the girdle downwards is preserved on a bas-relief published by Layard,[54.1] showing him holding the bread of life in one hand and in the other a vase containing the water of life. Here, then, is theriomorphism struggling with anthropomorphism as we see it strikingly in the religious monuments of Egypt. But we have no need of the theory, dear to some anthropologists--that the earliest period of Mesopotamian religion was purely theriomorphic, when the deities were imagined and represented merely as animals, and that the human-shaped deities whom we find standing on lions in the Babylonian art had once been divine lions and nothing more, and had at a later period emerged from the animal into divine manhood. Theriomorphism and anthropomorphism can and generally do confusedly co-exist: neither in the lowest savagery or at the highest culture is there found a purely theriomorphic art or theriomorphic religion; on the other hand, severe anthropomorphism among the ancient religions is to be found only in the Hellenic, and we may add in the Judaic, though here with a quite different mode of expression and far more sternly controlled. In Mesopotamia we have nothing that points to a direct worship of animals,[54.2] but we discern that the anthropomorphism is unstable; {55} the religious artist mainly clung to it, except when he was embodying forms of terror, the destructive demons, and especially the powers of the lower world: for this purpose he selected the most portentous types of bestiality, such as we find on that bronze tablet, which used to be regarded as revealing an interesting glimpse into Babylonian eschatology: at least we may be sure that the lion-headed female above the horse in the canoe, at whose breasts two small lions are sucking, is the goddess of Hell.[55.1] It was probably through