earth which has carried him off; it is not the field of battle which has carried him off, it is the earth which has carried him off!” Gilgames dragged himself along from temple to temple, repeating his complaint before Bel and before Sin, and at length threw himself at the feet of the god of the Dead, Nergal:  “’Burst open the sepulchral cavern, open the ground, that the spirit of Eabani may issue from the soil like a blast of wind.’  As soon as Nergal the valiant heard him, he burst open the sepulchral vault, he opened the earth, he caused the spirit of Eabani to issue from the earth like a blast of wind.”  Gilgames interrogates him, and asks him with anxiety what the state of the dead may be:  “’Tell, my friend, tell, my friend, open the earth and what thou seest tell it.’—­’I cannot tell it thee, my friend, I cannot tell it thee; if I should open the earth before thee, if I were to tell to thee that which I have seen, terror would overthrow thee, thou wouldest faint away, thou wouldest weep.’—­’Terror will overthrow me, I shall faint away, I shall weep, but tell it to me.’” And the ghost depicts for him the sorrows of the abode and the miseries of the shades.  Those only enjoy some happiness who have fallen with arms in their hands, and who have been solemnly buried after the fight; the manes neglected by their relatives succumb to hunger and thirst.* “On a sleeping couch he lies, drinking pure water, he who has been killed in battle.  ’Thou hast seen him?’—­’I have seen him; his father and his mother support his head, and his wife bends over him wailing.’  ’But he whose body remains forgotten in the fields,—­thou hast seen him?’—­’I have seen him; his soul has no rest at all in the earth.’  ’He whose soul no one cares for,—­thou hast seen him?’—­’I have seen him; the dregs of the cup, the remains of a repast, that which is thrown among the refuse of the street, that is what he has to nourish him.’” This poem did not proceed in its entirety, or at one time, from the imagination of a single individual.  Each episode of it answers to some separate legend concerning Gilgames, or the origin of Uruk the well-protected:  the greater part preserves under a later form an air of extreme antiquity, and, if the events dealt with have not a precise bearing on the life of a king, they paint in a lively way the vicissitudes of the life of the people.** These lions, leopards, or gigantic uruses with which Grilgames and his faithful Eabani carry on so fierce a warfare, are not, as is sometimes said, mythological animals.

* Cf. vol. i. pp. 160, 161 of this History for analogous ideas among the Egyptians as to the condition of the dead who were neglected by their relatives:  the Egyptian double had to live on the same refuse as the Chaldaean soul.

** G. Smith, identifying Gilgames with Nimrod, believes, on the other hand, that Nimrod was a real king, who reigned in Mesopotamia about 2250 B.C.; the poem contains, according to him,