y. It is not possible as
yet, without drawing largely on the imagination, to portray in any
completeness the private life even of the Assyrian nobles, much less
that of the common people. All that can be done is to gather up the
fragments which time has spared; to arrange them in something like
order, and present them faithfully to the general reader, who, it is
hoped, will feel a certain degree of interest in them severally, as
matters of archeology, and who will probably further find that he
obtains from them in combination a fair notion of the general character
and condition of the race, of its mingled barbarism and civilization,
knowledge and ignorance, art and rudeness, luxury and simplicity of
habits. The novelist and even the essayist may commendably eke out the
scantiness of facts by a free indulgence in the wide field of
supposition and conjecture: but the historian is not entitled to stray
into this enchanted ground. He must be content to remain within the tame
and narrow circle of established fact. Where his materials are abundant.
he is entitled to draw graphic sketches of the general condition of the
people; but where they are scanty, as in the present instance, he must
be content to forego such pleasant pictures, in which the coloring and
the filling-up would necessarily be derived, not from authentic data,
but from his own fancy.

CHAPTER VIII.

RELIGION.

"The graven image, and the molten image."--NAHUM i. 14

The religion of the Assyrians so nearly resembled--at least in its
external aspect, in which alone we can contemplate it--the religion of
the primitive Chaldaeans, that it will be unnecessary, after the full
treatment which that subject received in an earlier portion of this
work, to do much more than notice in the present place certain
peculiarities by which it would appear that the cult of Assyria was
distinguished from that of the neighboring and closely connected
country. With the exception that the first god in the Babylonian
Pantheon was replaced by a distinct and thoroughly national deity in the
Pantheon of Assyria, and that certain deities whose position was
prominent in the one occupied a subordinate position in the other, the
two religious systems may be pronounced, not similar merely but
identical. Each of them, without any real monotheism, commences with the
same preeminence of a single deity, which is followed by the same
groupings of identically the same divinities; and