rpanit, a
goddess mother who protected unborn infants and presided at births; Nabou
and Nana; Assur and Istar; Dumouzi and Istar. Precise details as to the
status of these divinities are still wanting. Several among them seem to
have been at one time endowed with a distinct individuality, and at other
periods to have been almost indistinguishable from some other deity. They
were without the distinct features and attributes of the inhabitants of
Olympus, but we are left in no doubt as to the binary divisions of which we
have been speaking.

The attraction of desire and the union of the sexes leads to the birth of
the child; with the appearance of the latter the family is complete, and,
with it, the type upon which the triple classification of the gods was
founded. But even when we attempt to trace the composition of a single
group and to assign his proper place to each of its members, the
embarrassment is great. We find a single god sometimes filling, to all
appearance, the _role_ of husband and father, and sometimes that of the
son; or a single goddess acting at different times as the wife and daughter
of one and the same god. Some of these apparent contradictions must be
referred to the want of certainty in our interpretation of the
inscriptions, some to the floating quality of the conceptions to which they
relate. It may never, perhaps, be possible to make out a complete list, or
one which shall not be obnoxious to criticism on other grounds; moreover,
the historian of art has no need to enter into any such discussion, or to
give the details of a nomenclature as to which Assyriologists themselves
have many doubts. It suffices that he should point out the multiplicity of
couples and triads, the extreme diversity of deities, and thus indicate a
reason for the very peculiar aspect of the cylinders and engraved stones of
Chaldaea, for the complex forms of the gods, and for the multitude of varied
symbols which encumber the fields of her sculptured reliefs. Some of the
figures that crowd these narrow surfaces are so fantastic that they
astonish the eye as much as they pique the curiosity (see Fig. 17).

[Illustration: FIG. 17.--A Chaldaean Cylinder: from Menant's _La Bible et
les Cylindres Chaldeens_.]

The number of divine types and the consequent difficulties of
classification are increased, as in Egypt, by the fact that every important
town had its local deities, deities who were its own peculiar gods. In the
course o