The tribes of the Chaldaean gods--Genii hostile to men, their monstrous shapes; the south-west wind; friendly genii--The Seven, and their attacks on the moon-god; Gibil, the fire-god, overcomes them and their snares--The Sumerian gods; Ningirsu: the difficulty of defining them and of understanding the nature of them; they become merged in the Semitic deities. Characteristics and dispositions of the Chaldaean gods--the goddesses, like women of the harem, are practically nonentities; Mylitta and her meretricious rites--The divine aristocracy and its principal representatives: their relations to the earth, oracles, speaking statues, household gods--The gods of each city do not exclude those of neighbouring cities: their alliances and their borrowings from one another--The sky-gods and the earth-gods, the sidereal gods: the moon and the sun. The feudal gods: several among them unite to govern the world; the two triads of Eridu--The supreme triad: Anu the heaven; Bel the earth and his fusion with the Babylonian Merodach; Ea, the god of the waters--The second triad: Sin the moon and Shamash the sun; substitution of Bamman for Ishtar in this triad; the winds and the legend of Adapa, the attributes of Ramman--The addition of goddesses to these two triads; the insignificant position which they occupy. The assembly of the gods governs the world: the bird Zu steals the tablets of destiny--Destinies are written in the heavens and determined by the movements of the stars; comets and their presiding deities, Nebo and Ishtai--The numerical value of the gods--The arrangement of the temples, the local priesthood, festivals, revenues of the gods and gifts made to them--Sacrifices, the expiation of crimes--Death and the future of the soul--Tombs and the cremation of the dead; the royal sepulchres and funerary rites--Hades and its sovereigns: Nergal, Allat, the descent of Ishtar into the infernal regions, and the possibility of a resurrection The invocation of the dead--The ascension of Etana._ [Illustration: 124.jpg Chapter II] CHAPTER II--THE TEMPLES AND THE GODS OF CHALDAEA _The construction and revenues of the temples--Popular gods and theological triads--The dead and Hades_. The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses, even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and industrious people: on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be distinguished--mounds of stiff and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man. [Illustration: 126.jpg PLAN OF THE RUINS OF WAKKA]