together yearly on the occasion of the great Marduk festival belongs
likewise, and as a matter of course, to the period when Marduk's sway
was undisputed.

The ideas that were thus attached to the papakhu in E-Sagila are a
valuable indication of the sanctity attached to that part of the temple
where the god sat enthroned. In a general way, what holds good of
Marduk's papakhu applies to every sacred chamber in a temple, and no
doubt views were once current of the papakhu of Bel at Nippur and of the
'holy of holies' in E-Babbara[1365] and elsewhere that formed in some
measure, a parallel to what the Marduk priests told of their favorite
sanctuary.

Coming back now to the large hall which led into the papakhu, the
absence of bas-reliefs in this hall in the case of the Assyrian temples
excavated by Layard, suggests that the walls of this hall were not lined
with sculptured slabs, as was the case in the large rooms of the
palaces; and we may conclude that in Babylonian temples, likewise, the
decoration of the walls was confined as a general thing to enameled
bricks, interspersed, perhaps, with metallic panels, and that
mythological scenes--such as the contest with Tiamat or Gilgamesh's
adventures--were only occasionally portrayed. An aim which, as the
rulers themselves tell us in their inscriptions, they always kept in
view was to make both the exterior and interior of the temples
resplendent with brilliant coloring--"brilliant as the sun." At the
entrances to the Assyrian temples stood lions, chiseled out of soft
limestone or the harder alabaster. At Telloh various fragments of large
lion heads were found,[1366] so that there is every reason not only to
trace this custom to Babylonia, but to carry it back to a very early
period. Besides the lion, a favorite religious symbol, as we have
seen,[1367] was the bull, and, since Nebuchadnezzar speaks of retaining
the "bull" statue of the old temple to Nana (or Ishtar) at Erech, we may
suppose that the representation of colossal bulls at the entrances to
the temples also belongs to the characteristic features of Babylonian
religious architecture. The lion, it will be recalled, is more
particularly the symbol of Nergal, but he appears originally, like the
bull, to have been a symbol of other gods as well--perhaps, indeed, of
the gods in general. Similarly, the eagle, which becomes the special
symbol of Ashur, appears prominently on the monuments of Entemena[1368]
and other ancien