While the celestial seat of Istar was beyond the reach of man, Istar herself sought Tammuz, the bridegroom of her youth, in the underground realm of Hades, in the hope that she might give him to drink of the waters of life which gushed up under the throne of the spirits of the earth, and so bring him back once more to life and light. The poem which told of her descent into Hades was sung at the yearly festival of Tammuz by the women, who wept for his untimely death. Like Baldyr, the youngest and most beautiful of the gods, he was cut off in the flower of his youth, and taken from the earth to another world. But while the myth embodied in the poem, and illustrated by numberless engraved seals, makes him descend into Hades, the older belief of Eridu, where he had once been a water-spirit,—“the son of the spirit of the deep,”—transferred him to the heaven above, where, along with Nin-gis-zida, “the lord of the upright post,” he served as warder of the celestial gate. In my Hibbert Lectures I have dealt so fully with the story of Tammuz in the various forms it assumed, as well as with the myth of Istar’s pursuit of him in the world below, that I need not dwell upon it now. All I need do is to insist upon the caution with which we should build upon it theories about the Babylonian’s conception of the other world, and the existence he expected to lead after death. The description of Hades with which the poem begins was borrowed from some older work. We meet with it again almost word for word in what is probably one of the books of the Epic of Gilgames. The fact illustrates the way in which the poets and epic-writers of Babylonia freely borrowed from older sources, and how the classical works of Chaldæa were built up out of earlier materials. Perhaps if reproached with plagiarism, their authors would have made the same answer as Vergil, that they had but picked out the pearls from the dunghill of their predecessors. At all events the description of Hades is striking, though it must be remembered that it represents only one of the many ideas that were entertained of it in Babylonia— “To the land from which there is no return, the home of [darkness], Istar, the daughter of Sin, [turned] her mind, yea, the daughter of Sin set her mind [to go]; to the house of gloom, the dwelling of Irkalla, to the house from which those who enter depart not, the road from whose path there is no return; to the house where they who enter are deprived of light; a place where dust is their nourishment, clay their food; the light they behold not, in thick darkness they dwell; they are clad like bats in a garb of wings; on door and bolt the dust is laid.”