to the Greeks and modified by them, may still be read on our astronomical charts.  The constellations, immovable, or actuated by a slow motion, in longitude only, contain the problems of the future, but they are not sufficient of themselves alone to furnish man with the solution of these problems.  The heavenly bodies capable of explaining them, the real interpreters of destiny, were at first the two divinities who rule the empires of night and day—­the moon and the sun; afterwards there took part in this work of explanation the five planets which we call Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury, or rather the five gods who actuate them, and who have controlled their course from the moment of creation—­Merodach, Ishtar, Ninib, Nergal, and Nebo.  The planets seemed to traverse the heavens in every direction, to cross their own and each other’s paths, and to approach the fixed stars or recede from them; and the species of rhythmical dance in which they are carried unceasingly across the celestial spaces revealed to men, if they examined it attentively, the irresistible march of their own destinies, as surely as if they had made themselves master of the fatal tablets of Shamash, and could spell them out line by line.

The Chaldaens were disposed to regard the planets as perverse sheep who had escaped from the fold of the stars to wander wilfully in search of pasture.* At first they were considered to be so many sovereign deities, without other function than that of running through the heavens and furnishing there predictions of the future; afterwards two of them descended to the earth, and received upon it the homage of men* —­Ishtar from the inhabitants of the city of Dilbat, and Nebo* from those of Borsippa.  Nebo assumed the role of a soothsayer and a prophet.  He knew and foresaw everything, and was ready to give his advice upon any subject:  he was the inventor of the method of making clay tablets, and of writing upon them.  Ishtar was a combination of contradictory characteristics.****

* Their generic name, read as “lubat,” in Sumero-Accadian, “bibbu” in Semitic speech (Fr. Lenormant, Essai de Commentaire de Berose, pp. 370, 371), denoted a quadruped, the species of which Lenormant was not able to define; Jensen (Die Kosmologie, pp. 95-99) identified it with the sheep and the ram.  At the end of the account of the creation, Merodach-Jupiter is compared with a shepherd who feeds the flock of the gods on the pastures of heaven (cf. p. 15 of the present work).

** The site of Dilbat is unknown:  it has been sought in the neighbourhood of Kishu and Babylon (Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies? p. 219); it is probable that it was in the suburbs of Sippara.  The name given to the goddess was transcribed AeXckit (Hesychius, sub voce), and signifies the herald, the messenger of the day.

*** The role of Nebo was determined by the early Assyriologists (Rawlin-son, On