s in their sacred statues.
This we know both from the texts and the figured monuments. But it was not
only in the budding art of a primitive population that such combinations
were employed, and it was not only the inferior genii that were
represented in such singular fashion. When, by the development of religion,
the capricious and unruly multitude of spirits had been placed under the
supremacy of a small number of superior beings, these, whom we may call the
sovereign gods, were often figured with the heads of lions or eagles (see
Fig. 8). Before any of these images had been found we already knew from
Berosus what the deity was like by whom the first germs of art and letters
had been sown upon the earth. "He had the whole body of a fish, but beneath
his fish's head he had another head [that of a man], while human feet
appeared below his fish's tail. He had also the voice of a man, and his
images are yet to be found."[89] More than one sculptural type has been
found answering to this description (see Fig. 9).

[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Anou or Dagon. Nimroud. Layard, _Discoveries_, p.
350.]

Why did art, in creating divine types, give such prominence to features
borrowed from the lower animals? Was it impelled by mere inability to
distinguish, by varieties of feature, form and attitude, between the
different gods created by the imagination? Or must we look upon the
attribution to this or that deity, of forms borrowed from the bull, the
lion, or the eagle, as a deliberate act of symbolism, meant to suggest that
the gods in question had the qualities of the animals of which their
persons were partly made up? In order to arrive at a just conclusion we
must, of course, take account both of the resistance of the material and of
the facilities which a transparent system of allegory would give to the
artist in the working out of his thought; we must also admit perhaps that
the national intelligence had been prepared to look for and admire such
combinations. It may have been predisposed towards them by the habits of
admiration for the patient strength of the draught-ox and the destructive
vigour of the eagle and the lion contracted during a long series of years.

Both historical analogy and the examination of sculptured types lead us to
think that the tribes of Mesopotamia passed through the same religious
phases as those of the Nile valley, but it would appear that the most
primitive beliefs were less long-lived in Chaldaea tha