figure has the head of a lion with the ears of an ass, the most natural explanation seems to be that an evil genius is intended.  In another instance, where we see two monsters with heads like the statuette just mentioned, placed on human bodies, the legs of which terminate in eagles’ claws—­both of them armed with daggers and maces, and engaged in a struggle with one another—­we seem to have a symbolical representation of the tendency of evil to turn upon itself, and reduce itself to feebleness by internal quarrel and disorder.  A considerable number of instances occur in which a human figure, with the head of a hawk or eagle, threatens a winged human-headed lion—­the emblem of Nergal—­with a strap or mace.  In these we may have a spirit of evil assailing a god, or possibly one god opposing another—­the hawk-headed god or genius driving Nergal (i.e., War) beyond the Assyrian borders.

If we pass from the objects to the mode of worship in Assyria, we must notice at the outset the strongly idolatrous character of the religion.  Not only were images of the gods worshipped set up, as a matter of course, in every temple dedicated to their honor, but the gods were sometimes so identified with their images as to be multiplied in popular estimation when they had several famous temples, in each of which was a famous image.  Thus we hear of the Ishtar of Arbela, the Ishtar of Nineveh, and the Ishtar of Babylon, and find these goddesses invoked separately, as distinct divinities, by one and the same king in one and the same Inscription.  In other cases, without this multiplication, we observe expressions which imply a similar identification of the actual god with the mere image.  Tiglath-Pileser I., boasts that he has set Anu and Vul (i.e., their images) up in their places.  He identifies repeatedly the images which he carries off from foreign countries with the gods of those countries.  In a similar spirit Sennacherib asks, by the mouth of Rabshakeh, “Where are the gods of Hamath and of Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah?”—­and again unable to rise to the conception of a purely spiritual deity, supposes that, because Hezekiah has destroyed all the images throughout Judaea, he has left his people without any divine protection.  The carrying off of the idols from conquered countries, which we find universally practised, was not perhaps intended as a mere sign of the power of the conqueror, and of the superiority of his gods to those of his enemies; it was probably designed further to weaken those enemies by depriving them of their celestial protectors; and it may even have been viewed as strengthening of the conqueror by multiplying his divine guardians.  It was certainly usual to remove the images in a reverential manner; and it was the custom to deposit them in some of the principal temples of Assyria.  We may presume that there lay at the root of this practice a real belief in the super-natural power of the in images themselves, and a notion that, with the possession of the images, this power likewise changed sides and passed over from the conquered to the conquerors.