Greece and Babylon

by Lewis Richard Farnell

^[52.4] Vide Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 67 (Mitth. aus dem Orient. Sammlung. zu Berlin, Heft xi. p. 23).

^[52.5] Monuments of Nineveh, i. p. 65 (Roscher, op. cit., ii. p. 2350).

^[52.6] P. 43.

^[52.7] Roscher, op. cit., vol. iv. p. 29.

^[53.1] Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 254-255.

^[53.2] Schrader, Keil. Bibl., ii. p. 141.

^[53.3] Frag. Hist. Graec., ii. p. 496. Frag. 1, 3.

^[53.4] Nineveh and Babylon, pl. vi. (Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 580).

^[54.1] Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, fig. 2. Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 580.

^[54.2] In the Amer. Journ. Archael., 1887, pp. 59-60, Frothingham cites examples from Assyrian cylinders of birds on pillars or altar with worshippers approaching: one of these shows us a seated god in front of the bird (pl. vii. 1); on another, a warrior approaches a tabernacle, within which is a horse’s head on an altar, and near it a bird on a column (pl. vii. 2; cf. the boundary-stone of Nebuchadnezzar I., published by Miss Harrison, Trans. Congr. Hist. Rel., 1908, vol. ii. p. 158); we find also a winged genius adoring an altar on which is a cock. But cocks and other birds were sacrificial animals in Babylonian ritual, and might be interpreted in all these cases as mere temporary embodiments of the divinity’s power; the human-shaped divinity is once represented by the side of the bird, and might always have been imagined as present though unseen.