military expeditions, and lends them assistance in the chase. His emblem
is the human-headed winged lion seen at the entrance of royal palaces.
Ista (Venus) was the goddess of beauty, presiding over the loves of both
men and animals, and was worshipped with unchaste rites. Nebo (Mercury)
had the charge over learning and culture,--the god of wisdom, who
"teaches and instructs."

There were other deities in the Assyrian and Babylonian pantheon whom I
need not name, since they played a comparatively unimportant part in
human affairs, like the inferior deities of the Romans, presiding over
dreams, over feasts, over marriage, and the like.

The Phoenicians, like the Assyrians, had their goddesses. Astoreth, or
Astarte, represented the great female productive principle, as Baal did
the male. It was originally a name for the energy of God, on a par with
Baal. In one of her aspects she represented the moon; but more commonly
she was the representative of the female principle in Nature, and was
connected more or less with voluptuous rites,--the equivalent of
Aphrodite, or Venus. Tanith also was a noted female deity, and was
worshipped at Carthage and Cyprus by the Phoenician settlers. The name
is associated, according to Gesenius, with the Egyptian goddess Nut, and
with the Grecian Artemis the huntress.

An important thing to be observed of these various deities is that they
do not uniformly represent the same power. Thus Baal, the Phoenician
sun-god, was made by the Greeks and Romans equivalent to Zeus, or
Jupiter, the god of thunder and storms. Apollo, the sun-god of the
Greeks, was not so powerful as Zeus, the god of the atmosphere; while in
Assyria and Phoenicia the sun-god was the greater deity. In Babylonia,
Shamas was a sun-god as well as Bel; and Bel again was the god of the