to humanise the superhuman beings of Sumerian belief as that which had given a man’s head to the colossal bulls; where the divine being had become a god in the Semitic sense of the word, all traces of his bestial origin were swept away; where he remained as it were only on the margin of the divine world, the bestial element was thrust as far as possible out of sight, and combined with the features of a man. The cherub was allowed to retain his bull’s body or his eagle’s head, but it was on condition that he never rose to the rank of a god, and that human members were combined with his animal form. The secondary creatures of the divine world of the Babylonians thus resembled, in outward form, the gods of Egypt. But whereas in Egypt it was the gods themselves who joined the head of the beast to the body of the man, in Babylonia it was only the semi-divine spirits and monsters of the popular creed who were thus partly bestial and partly human. The official theology could not banish them altogether; they became accordingly the servants and followers of the gods, or else the rabble-host of Tiamât, the impersonation of chaos and sin. Like the devils and angels of medieval belief, they were included among the three hundred spirits of heaven and the six hundred spirits of earth.(278) The spirits of heaven formed “the hosts” of which the supreme deity was lord, and whom he led into battle against his foes; Nebo was the minister and lieutenant of Merodach and “the hosts of the heaven and earth,” therefore it was his duty to muster and drill.(279) The Anunna-ki or “spirits of earth” had their habitation in the subterranean world of Hades, where they sat on a throne of gold guarding the waters of life, while the Igigi or angels dwelt rather with the gods in the heaven of light and blissfulness. It was on this account that Assur-nazir-pal calls Nin-ip “the champion of the Igigi,” and that elsewhere the god receives the title of “chief of the angels.” But it was only in the later ages of Babylonian religion, when the Semitic conception of divinity had become predominant, that a distinction was made between the spirits of the earth and the air. It was only for the Semites that there were spirits of the underworld and angels of heaven; the Sumerian had known no difference between them; they were all alike Anunnas or spirits, and Nin-ip had been lord, not of the Igigi alone, but of the Anunna-ki as well.(280) He had, in fact, been one of them himself; he was the minister and attendant of En-lil, and it was never forgotten that, like the Anunna-ki, he was the “offspring of Ê-kur,” the name at once of the temple of Nippur and of the underground world of Hades. Sometimes he is said to have sprung from Ê-sarra, “the house of the (spirit)-hosts.” He had been a ghost in Nippur before he was transformed into a Semitic god.