VIII.—­The Temples and the Gods of Chaldaea

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of Egypt, by the magnificence of their ruins.  They are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be traced—­mounds of stiff greyish clay, containing the remains of the vast structures that were built of bricks set in mortar or bitumen.  Stone was not used as in Egypt.  While the Egyptian temple was spread superficially over a large area, the Chaldaean temple strove to attain as high an elevation as possible.  These “ziggurats” were composed of several immense cubes piled up on one another, and diminishing in size up to the small shrine by which they were crowned, and wherein the god himself was supposed to dwell.

The gods of the Euphrates, like those of the Nile, constituted a countless multitude of visible and invisible beings, distributed into tribes and empires throughout all the regions of the universe; but, whereas in Egypt they were, on the whole, friendly to man, in Chaldaea they for the most part pursued him with an implacable hatred, and only seemed to exist in order to destroy him.  Whether Semite or Sumerian, the gods, like those of Egypt, were not abstract personages, but each contained in himself one of the principal elements of which our universe is composed—­earth, air, sky, sun, moon and stars.  The state religion, which all the inhabitants of the same city were solemnly bound to observe, included some dozen gods, but the private devotion of individuals supplemented this cult by vast additions, each family possessing its own household gods.

Animals never became objects of worship as in Egypt; some of them, however, as the bull and the lion, were closely allied to the gods.  If the idea of uniting all these gods into a single supreme one ever crossed the mind of a Chaldaean theologian, it never spread to the people as a whole.  Among all the thousands of tablets or inscribed stones on which we find recorded prayers, we have as yet discovered no document containing the faintest allusion to a divine unity.  The temples were miniature reproductions of the arrangements of the universe.  The “ziggurat” represented in its form the mountain of the world, and the halls ranged at its feet resembled approximately the accessory parts of the world; the temple of Merodach at Babylon comprised them all up to the chambers of fate, where the sun received every morning the tablets of destiny.

Every individual was placed, from the very moment of his birth, under the protection of a god or goddess, of whom he was the servant, or rather the son.  These deities accompanied him by day and by night to guard him from the evil genii ready to attack him on every side.  The Chaldaeans had not such clear ideas as to what awaited them in the other world as the Egyptians possessed.