The Chaldaean hades is a dark country surrounded by seven high walls, and is approached by seven gates, each guarded by a pitiless warder.  Two deities rule within it—­Nergal, “the lord of the great city,” and Peltis-Allat, “the lady of the great land,” whither everything which has breathed in this world descends after death.  A legend relates that Allat reigned alone in hades and was invited by the gods to a feast which they had prepared in heaven.  Owing to her hatred of the light she refused, sending a message by her servant, Namtar, who acquitted himself, with such a bad grace, that Anu and Ea were incensed against his mistress, and commissioned Nergal to chastise her.  He went, and finding the gates of hell open, dragged the queen by her hair from the throne, and was about to decapitate her, but she mollified him by her prayers and saved her life by becoming his wife.

The nature of Nergal fitted him well to play the part of a prince of the departed; for he was the destroying sun of summer, and the genius of pestilence and battle.  His functions in heaven and earth took up so much of his time that he had little leisure to visit his nether kingdom, and he was consequently obliged to content himself with the role of providing subjects for it by dispatching thither the thousands of recruits which he gathered daily from the abodes of men or from the field of battle.

IX.—­Chaldaean Civilisation

The Chaldaean kings, unlike their contemporaries, the Pharaohs, rarely put forward any pretension to divinity.  They contented themselves with occupying an intermediate position between their subjects and the gods.  While the ordinary priest chose for himself a single deity as master, the priest-king exercised universal sacerdotal functions.  He officiated for Merodach here below, and the scrupulously minute devotions daily occupied many hours.  On great days of festival or sacrifice they laid aside all insignia of royalty and were clad as ordinary priests.

Women do not seem to have been honoured in the Euphratean regions as in Egypt, where the wives of the sovereign were invested with that semi-sacred character that led the women to be associated with the devotions of the man, and made them indispensable auxiliaries in all religious ceremonies.  Whereas the monuments on the banks of the Nile reveal to us princesses sharing the throne of their husbands, whom they embrace with a gesture of frank affection, in Chaldaea, the wives of the prince, his mother, sisters, daughters and even his slaves, remain absolutely invisible to posterity.  The harem in which they were shut up by force of custom rarely, if ever, opened its doors; the people seldom caught sight of them; and we could count on our fingers the number of these whom the inscriptions mention by name.