The gods of the Euphrates, like those of the Nile, constituted a
countless multitude of visible and invisible beings, distributed into
tribes and empires throughout all the regions of the universe; but,
whereas in Egypt they were, on the whole, friendly to man, in Chaldæa
they for the most part pursued him with an implacable hatred, and only
seemed to exist in order to destroy him. Whether Semite or Sumerian, the
gods, like those of Egypt, were not abstract personages, but each
contained in himself one of the principal elements of which our universe
is composed--earth, air, sky, sun, moon and stars. The state religion,
which all the inhabitants of the same city were solemnly bound to
observe, included some dozen gods, but the private devotion of
individuals supplemented this cult by vast additions, each family
possessing its own household gods.

Animals never became objects of worship as in Egypt; some of them,
however, as the bull and the lion, were closely allied to the gods. If
the idea of uniting all these gods into a single supreme one ever
crossed the mind of a Chaldæan theologian, it never spread to the people
as a whole. Among all the thousands of tablets or inscribed stones on
which we find recorded prayers, we have as yet discovered no document
containing the faintest allusion to a divine unity. The temples were
miniature reproductions of the arrangements of the universe. The
"ziggurat" represented in its form the mountain of the world, and the
halls ranged at its feet resembled approximately the accessory parts of
the world; the temple of Merodach at Babylon comprised them all up to
the chambers of fate, where the sun received every morning the tablets
of destiny.

Every individual was placed, from the very moment of his birth, under