It was not unnatural or unfitting that in a country which had been created and was yearly being created out of and at the expense of the sea, and in which the principal means of transit were the rivers and the canals, the fish as the lord of the waters should fulfil an important place in the mythological and religious conceptions entertained by the inhabitants of that country: thus it was that the god Ea of Eridu, one of the most famous and most important of the Babylonian gods, and the Oannes of the Greeks, who according to one account was the creator of the world, was represented in the form of a fish. But it is necessary to avoid falling into the danger of assuming that all the animals, birds, fish and trees, either figured on monuments or mentioned in the literature of antiquity, belonged to the fauna or flora of Mesopotamia at the time when these engravings and sculptures were executed; the only absolutely certain and equally obvious inference is that the existence of such fauna or flora was known, while the degree of familiarity of the artist with the specimen in question may, with a good deal of reservation and allowance for the crudeness of early art, be inferred from the comparative accuracy with which he has reproduced it, and also the frequency of its occurrence on contemporaneous works of art. With regard to the evidence of the literature, unfortunately in many cases there is some uncertainty as to the identification of the animals and plants alluded to, and furthermore, many of the animals represented pictorially on the monuments or alluded to in the literature form part of the tribute brought by subject states, the precise locality of which, to complicate matters yet further, is often uncertain. Sometimes, as in the case of the horse (cf. p. 15), the early ideographic form of writing teaches us something about the origin of the object mentioned, while the appearance of an animal or tree in early Mesopotamian art, and the existence of the same tree or animal in Mesopotamia to-day is good argument for including it among the ancient fauna and flora of the country. Again with exceptions it may be assumed that animals offered and accepted as tribute by the kings of Babylonia and Assyria were utilized in some way other than merely being afforded accommodation in a zoological gardens, in which connection we may perhaps fairly infer that kings of Assyria who accepted camels from vassal chiefs found use for them as a means of transit, though in the rough country of Assyria itself the camel would not be of great use any more than to-day, owing to the tendency of camels to slip on rough ground, and the consequently practical necessity of confining their use to flat sandy ground, such as is found in Babylonia, where they are seen by the thousand to-day. (_b_) SKETCH OF BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN HISTORY