s
life. This will not appear surprising, if it be remembered that of the
more than one hundred mounds that have been identified in the region of
the Tigris and Euphrates as containing remains of buried cities, only a
small proportion have been explored, and of these scarcely more than a
half dozen with an approach to completeness. The soil of Mesopotamia
unquestionably holds still greater treasures than those which it has
already yielded. The links uniting the most ancient period--at present,
_c._ 4000 B.C.--to the final destruction of the Babylonian empire by
Cyrus, in the middle of the sixth century B.C., are far from being
complete. For entire centuries we are wholly in the dark, and for others
only a few skeleton facts are known; and until these gaps shall have
been filled, our knowledge of the religion of the Babylonians and
Assyrians must necessarily remain incomplete. Not as incomplete, indeed,
as their history, for religious rites are not subject to many changes,
and the progress of religious ideas does not keep pace with the constant
changes in the political kaleidoscope of a country; but, it is evident
that no exhaustive treatment of the religion can be given until the
material shall have become adequate to the subject.

III.

Before proceeding to the division of the subject in hand, some
explanation is called for of the method by which the literary material
found beneath the soil has been made intelligible.

The characters on the clay tablets and cylinders, on the limestone
slabs, on statues, on altars, on stone monuments, are generally known as
cuneiform, because of their wedge-shaped appearance, though it may be
noted at once that in their oldest form the characters are linear rather
than wedge-shaped, presenting the more or less clearly defined outlines
of objects from which they appear to be derived. At the time when these
cuneiform inscriptions began to be found in Mesopotamia, the language
which these characters expressed was still totally unknown. Long
previous to the beginning of Botta's labors, inscriptions also showing
the cuneiform characters had been found at Persepolis on various
monuments of the ruins and tombs still existing at that place. The first
notice of these inscriptions was brought to Europe by a famous Italian
traveler, Pietro della Valle, in the beginning of the seventeenth
century. For a long time it was doubted whether the characters
represented anything more than mere ornament