Chapter 3

_THE CONSTRUCTION AND REVENUES OF THE TEMPLES--THE POPULAR GODS AND THE THEOLOGICAL TRIADS----THE DEAD AND HADES_.

_Chaldaean cities: the resemblance of their ruins to natural mounds caused by their exclusive use of brick as a building material--Their city walls: the temples and local gods; reconstruction of their history by means of the stamped bricks of which they were built--The two types of ziggurat: the arrangement of the temple of Nannar at Uru.

The tribes of the Chaldaean gods--Genii hostile to men, their monstrous shapes; the south-west wind; friendly genii--The Seven, and their attacks on the moon-god; Gibil, the fire-god, overcomes them and their snares--The Sumerian gods; Ningirsu: the difficulty of defining them and of understanding the nature of them; they become merged in the Semitic deities.

Characteristics and dispositions of the Chaldaean gods--the goddesses, like women of the harem, are practically nonentities; Mylitta and her meretricious rites--The divine aristocracy and its principal representatives: their relations to the earth, oracles, speaking statues, household gods--The gods of each city do not exclude those of neighbouring cities: their alliances and their borrowings from one another--The sky-gods and the earth-gods, the sidereal gods: the moon and the sun.

The feudal gods: several among them unite to govern the world; the two triads of Eridu--The supreme triad: Anu the heaven; Bel the earth and his fusion with the Babylonian Merodach; Ea, the god of the waters--The second triad: Sin the moon and Shamash the sun; substitution of Bamman for Ishtar in this triad; the winds and the legend of Adapa, the attributes of Ramman--The addition of goddesses to these two triads; the insignificant position which they occupy.

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._