my sins are many, great are my misdeeds!—­O my god, my sins are many, great my misdeeds!—­O my goddess, my sins are many, great my misdeeds!—­I have committed faults and I knew them not; I have committed sin and I knew it not; I have fed upon misdeeds and I knew them not; I have walked in omissions and I knew them not.—­The lord, in the anger of his heart, he has stricken me,—­the god, in the wrath of his heart, has abandoned me,—­Ishtar is enraged against me, and has treated me harshly!—­I make an effort, and no one offers me a hand,—­I weep, and no one comes to me,—­I cry aloud, and no one hears me:—­I sink under affliction, I am overwhelmed, I can no longer raise up my head,—­I turn to my merciful god to call upon him, and I groan!...  Lord reject not thy servant,—­and if he is hurled into the roaring waters, stretch to him thy hand;—­the sins I have committed, have mercy upon them,—­the misdeeds I have committed, scatter them to the winds—­and my numerous faults, tear them to pieces like a garment.”  Sin in the eyes of the Chaldaean was not, as with us, an infirmity of the soul; it assaulted the body like an actual virus, and the fear of physical suffering or death engendered by it, inspired these complaints with a note of sincerity which cannot be mistaken.

Every individual is placed, from the moment of his birth, under the protection of a god and goddess, of whom he is the servant, or rather the son, and whom he never addresses otherwise than as his god and his goddess.  These deities accompany him night and day, not so much to protect him from visible dangers, as to guard him from the invisible beings which ceaselessly hover round him, and attack him on every side.  If he is devout, piously disposed towards his divine patrons and the deities of his country, if he observes the prescribed rites, recites the prayers, performs the sacrifices—­in a word, if he acts rightly—­their aid is never lacking; they bestow upon him a numerous posterity, a happy old age, prolonged to the term fixed by fate, when he must resign himself to close his eyes for ever to the light of day.  If, on the contrary, he is wicked, violent, one whose word cannot be trusted, “his god cuts him down like a reed,” extirpates his race, shortens his days, delivers him over to demons who possess themselves of his body and afflict it with sicknesses before finally despatching him.  Penitence is of avail against the evil of sin, and serves to re-establish a right course of life, but its efficacy is not permanent, and the moment at last arrives in which death, getting the upper hand, carries its victim away.  The Chaldaeans had not such clear ideas as to what awaited them in the other world as the Egyptians possessed:  whilst the tomb, the mummy, the perpetuity of the funeral revenues, and the safety of the double, were the engrossing subjects in Egypt, the Chaldaean texts are almost entirely silent as to the condition of the soul, and the living seem to have had no further