h, which
forms the lower part of it, or floor, is something like an overturned
boat in appearance, and hollow underneath, not like one of the narrow
skiffs in use among other races, but a kufa, or kind of semicircular
boat such as the tribes of the Lower Euphrates have made use of from
earliest antiquity down to our own times.

* The description of the Egyptian world will be found in
vol. i. p. 21 of the present work. So far the only
systematic attempt to reconstruct the Chaldaean world, since
Lenormant, has been made by Jensen, who, after examining all
the elements which went to compose it, one after another,
sums up in a few pages, and reproduces in a plate, the
principal results of his inquiry. It will be seen at a
glance how much I have taken from his work, and in what
respects the drawing here reproduced differs from his.

[Illustration: 012.jpg THE WORLD AS CONCEIVED BY THE CHALDAEANS]

The earth rises gradually from the extremities to the centre, like a
great mountain, of which the snow-region, where the Euphrates finds its
source, approximately marks the summit. It was at first supposed to be
divided into seven zones, placed one on the top of the other along its
sides, like the stories of a temple; later on it was divided into four
"houses," each of which, like the "houses" of Egypt, corresponded with
one of the four cardinal points, and was under the rule of particular
gods. Near the foot of the mountain, the edges of the so-called boat
curve abruptly outwards, and surround the earth with a continuous wall
of uniform height having no opening. The waters accumulated in the
hollow thus formed, as in a ditch; it was a narrow and mysterious sea,
an ocean stream, which no living man might cross save with permission
from on high, and whose waves rigorously separated the domain of men
from the regions reserved to the gods. The heavens rose above the
"mountain of the world" like a boldly formed dome, the circumference
of which rested on the top of the wall in the same way as the upper
structures of a house rest on its foundations. Merodach wrought it out
of a hard resisting metal which shone brilliantly during the day in
the rays of the sun, and at night appeared only as a dark blue surface,
strewn irregularly with luminous stars. He left it quite solid in the
southern regions, but tunnelled it in the north, by contriving within
it a huge cavern which communicated with ex