ivate devotion of individuals supplemented the State
religion by furnishing worshippers for most of the neglected divinities,
and thus compensated for what was lacking in the official public worship
of the community.

* Animal forms are almost always restricted either to the
genii, the constellations, or the secondary forms of the
greater divinities: Ea, however, is represented by a man
with a fish's tail, or as a man clothed with a fish-skin,
which would appear to indicate that at the outset he was
considered to be an actual fish.

** The images of these gods acted as amulets, and the fact
of their presence alone repelled the evil spirits. At
Khorsabad they were found buried under the threshold of the
city gates. A bilingual tablet in the British Museum has
preserved for us the formula of consecration which was
supposed to invest these protecting statuettes with divine
powers.

If the idea of uniting all these divine beings into a single supreme
one, who would combine within himself all their elements and the whole
of their powers, ever for a moment crossed the mind of some Chaldaean
theologian, it never spread to the people as a whole. Among all the
thousands of tablets or inscribed stones on which we find recorded
prayers and magical formulas, we have as yet discovered no document
treating of the existence of a supreme god, or even containing the
faintest allusion to a divine unity. We meet indeed with many passages
in which this or that divinity boasts of his power, eloquently
depreciating that of his rivals, and ending his discourse with the
injunction to worship him alone: "Man who shall come after, trust
in Nebo, trust in no other god!" The very expressions which are used,
commanding future races to abandon the rest of the immortals in
favour of Nebo, prove that even those who prided themselves on being
worshippers of one god realized how far they were from believing in the
unity of God. They strenuously asserted that the idol of their choice
was far superior to many others, but it never occurred to them to
proclaim that he had absorbed them all into himself, and that he
remained alone in his glory, contemplating the world, his creature. Side
by side with those who expressed this belief in Nebo, an inhabitant
of Babylon would say as much and more of Merodach, the patron of
his birthplace, without, however, ceasing to believe in the actual
indep