ss to these people. They also early learned to make
inscriptions for permanent record in a crude way and to construct
buildings made of brick.

The Akkadians brought with them a religious system which is shown in a
collection of prayers and sacred texts found recorded in the ruins at
the great library at Nineveh. Their religion seemed to be a complex of
animism and nature-worship. To them the universe was peopled with
spirits who occupied different spheres and performed different
services. Scores of evil spirits working in groups of seven controlled
the earth and man. Besides these there were numberless demons which
assailed man in countless forms, which worked daily and hourly to do
him harm, to control his spirit, to bring confusion to his work, to
steal the child from the father's knee, to drive the son from the
father's house, or to withhold from the wife the blessings of children.
They brought evil days. They brought ill-luck and misfortune. Nothing
could prevent their destructiveness. These spirits, falling like rain
from the skies to the earth, could leap from house to house,
penetrating the doors like serpents. Their dwelling-places were
scattered in {156} the marshes by the sea, where sickly pestilence
arose, and in the deserts, where the hot winds drifted the sands.
Sickness and disease were represented by the demons of pestilence and
of fever, which bring destruction upon man. It was a religion of
fatalism, which held that man was ever attacked by unseen enemies
against whom there was no means of defense. There was little hope in
life and none after death. There was no immortality and no eternal
life. These spirits were supposed to be under the control of sorcerers
and magicians or priests, resembling somewhat the medicine men of the
wild tribes of North America, who had power to compel them, and to
inflict death or disaster upon the objects of their censure and wrath.
Thus, these primitive peoples of early Chaldea were terrorized by the
spirits of the earth and by the wickedness of those who manipulated the
spirits.

The only bright side of this picture was the creation of other spirits
conceived to be essentially good and beneficial, and to whom prayers
were directed for protection and help. Such beings were superior to
all evil spirits, provided their support could be invoked. So the
spirit of heaven and the spirit of earth both appealed to the
imagination of these primitive people, who th