ance it receives from the capabilities of the
materials at hand. Plastic creations, from their very nature, must always
be inferior to the thought they are meant to express; by no means can they
go beyond it. This truth is nowhere more striking than in the art of
Greece. Fortunately we are there able to see how a single theme is treated,
in the first place, in poetry,--the interpreter of the popular
beliefs,--and afterwards in art; we can discover how Phidias and
Praxiteles, to speak only of sculptors, treated the types created by Homer
and Hesiod. In the case of Chaldaea we have no such opportunity. She has
left us neither monuments of sacerdotal theology like those we have
inherited in such countless numbers from Egypt, nor the brilliant imagery
in which the odes and epics of the Greeks sketched the personalities of
the gods. But even in Chaldaea art was closely united with religion, and, in
spite of the difficulty of the task, the historian of art must endeavour to
pierce the shadows that obscure the question, and discover the bond of
union between the two.

Thanks to the more recently deciphered texts, we do know something of the
religious rites and beliefs of the oldest nation that inhabited Mesopotamia
and left its trace in history. Whether we call them Accads or Sumirs, or by
both names at once, we know that to them the whole universe was peopled by
a vast crowd of spirits, some dwelling in the depths of the earth, some in
the sea, while others floated on the wind and lighted in the sky the fires
of the day and night.[84]

As, among men, some are good and some bad, so among these spirits some were
beneficent and others the reverse, while a third class was helpful or
mischievous according as it was propitiated by offerings or irritated by
neglect. The great thing was to know how to command the services of the
spirits when they were required. The employment of certain gestures,
sounds, and articulate words had a mysterious but irresistible effect upon
these invisible beings. How the effect was produced no one asked, but that
it was produced no one doubted. The highest of the sciences was magic, for
it held the threads by which the denizens of the invisible world were
controlled; the master of the earth was the sorcerer who could compel them
to obey him by a nod, a form of words, or an incantation. We can form some
idea of the practical results of such a system from what we know of the
manners and social condition o