_IX.--Chaldæan Civilisation_


The Chaldæan kings, unlike their contemporaries, the Pharaohs, rarely
put forward any pretension to divinity. They contented themselves with
occupying an intermediate position between their subjects and the gods.
While the ordinary priest chose for himself a single deity as master,
the priest-king exercised universal sacerdotal functions. He officiated
for Merodach here below, and the scrupulously minute devotions daily
occupied many hours. On great days of festival or sacrifice they laid
aside all insignia of royalty and were clad as ordinary priests.

Women do not seem to have been honoured in the Euphratean regions as in
Egypt, where the wives of the sovereign were invested with that
semi-sacred character that led the women to be associated with the
devotions of the man, and made them indispensable auxiliaries in all
religious ceremonies. Whereas the monuments on the banks of the Nile
reveal to us princesses sharing the throne of their husbands, whom they
embrace with a gesture of frank affection, in Chaldæa, the wives of the
prince, his mother, sisters, daughters and even his slaves, remain
absolutely invisible to posterity. The harem in which they were shut up
by force of custom rarely, if ever, opened its doors; the people seldom
caught sight of them; and we could count on our fingers the number of
these whom the inscriptions mention by name.

Life was not so pleasant in Chaldæa as in Egypt. The innumerable
promissory notes, the receipted accounts, the contracts of sale and
purchase--these cunningly drawn-up deeds which have been deciphered by
the hundred, reveal to us a people greedy of gain, exacting, litigious,
and almost exclusively absorbed in material concerns. The climate, too,