The assembly of the gods governs the world:  the bird Zu steals the tablets of destiny—­Destinies are written in the heavens and determined by the movements of the stars; comets and their presiding deities, Nebo and Ishtai—­The numerical value of the gods—­The arrangement of the temples, the local priesthood, festivals, revenues of the gods and gifts made to them—­Sacrifices, the expiation of crimes—­Death and the future of the soul—­Tombs and the cremation of the dead; the royal sepulchres and funerary rites—­Hades and its sovereigns:  Nergal, Allat, the descent of Ishtar into the infernal regions, and the possibility of a resurrection The invocation of the dead—­The ascension of Etana._

[Illustration:  124.jpg Chapter II]

CHAPTER II—­THE TEMPLES AND THE GODS OF CHALDAEA

The construction and revenues of the temples—­Popular gods and theological triads—­The dead and Hades.

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses, even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and industrious people:  on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be distinguished—­mounds of stiff and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man.

[Illustration:  126.jpg PLAN OF THE RUINS OF WAKKA]

In the estimation of the Chaldaean architects, stone was a material of secondary consideration:  as it was necessary to bring it from a great distance and at considerable expense, they used it very sparingly, and then merely for lintels, uprights, thresholds, for hinges on which to hang their doors, for dressings in some of their state apartments, in cornices or sculptured friezes on the external walls of their buildings; and even then its employment suggested rather that of a band of embroidery carefully disposed on some garment to relieve the plainness of the material.  Crude brick, burnt brick, enamelled brick, but always and everywhere brick was the principal element in their construction.  The soil of the marshes or of the plains, separated from the pebbles and foreign substances which it contained, mixed with grass or chopped straw, moistened with water, and assiduously trodden underfoot, furnished the ancient builders with materials of incredible tenacity.  This was moulded into thin square bricks, eight inches to a foot across, and three to four inches thick, but rarely larger:  they were stamped on the flat side, by means of an incised wooden block, with the name of the reigning sovereign, and were then dried in the sun.* A layer of fine mortar or of bitumen was sometimes spread between the courses, or handfuls of reeds would be strewn at intervals between the brickwork to increase the cohesion:  more frequently the crude bricks were piled one upon another, and their natural softness and moisture brought about their rapid agglutination.** As the building proceeded, the weight of the courses served to increase still further the adherence of the layers:  the walls soon became consolidated into a compact mass, in which the horizontal strata were distinguishable only by the varied tints of the clay used to make the different relays of bricks.