The long name which Gudea gave to the statue, “Unto — Gudea — the — builder — of — the — temple — hath — life-been-given,” is characteristic of the practice of the Sumerian patesis, who always gave long and symbolical names to statues, stelae, and sacred objects dedicated and set up in their temples.  The occasion on which the temple was built, and this statue erected within it, seems to have been the investiture of the god Ningishzida with special and peculiar powers, and it possibly inaugurated his introduction into the pantheon of Shirpurla.  Ningishzida is called in the inscription the son of Ninazu, who was the husband of the Queen of the Underworld.

In one of his aspects he was therefore probably a god of the underworld himself, and it is in this character that he was appointed by Ningirsu as guardian of the city’s foundations.  But “the hills and valleys” (i.e. the open country) were also put under his jurisdiction, so that in another aspect he was a god of vegetation.  It is therefore not improbable that, like the god Dumuzi, or Tammuz, he was supposed to descend into the underworld in winter, ascending to the surface of the earth with the earliest green shoots of vegetation in the spring.*

     * Cf.  Thureau-Dangin, Rev. d’Assyr., vol. vi. (1904), p. 24.

A most valuable contribution has recently been made to our knowledge of Sumerian religion and of the light in which these early rulers regarded the cult and worship of their gods, by the complete interpretation of the long texts inscribed upon the famous cylinders of Gudea, the patesi of Shirpurla, which have been preserved for many years in the Louvre.  These two great cylinders of baked clay were discovered by the late M. de Sarzec so long ago as the year 1877, during the first period of his diggings at Telloh, and, although the general nature of their contents has long been recognized, no complete translation of the texts inscribed upon them had been published until a few months ago.  M. Thureau-Dangin, who has made the early Sumerian texts his special study, has devoted himself to their interpretation for some years past, and he has just issued the first part of his monograph upon them.  In view of the importance of the texts and of the light they throw upon the religious beliefs and practices of the early Sumerians, a somewhat detailed account of their contents may here be given.

The occasion on which the cylinders were made was the rebuilding by Gudea of E-ninnu, the great temple of the god Ningirsu, in the city of Shirpurla.  The two cylinders supplement one another, one of them having been inscribed while the work of construction was still in progress, the other after the completion of the temple, when the god Ningirsu had been installed within his shrine with due pomp and ceremony.  It would appear that Southern Babylonia had been suffering from a prolonged drought, and that the water in the rivers and canals had fallen, so that the crops had