The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

324 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

and of the Chinese storm-bird,“which, in flying, obscures the
sun, and of whose quills the water-tuns are made.”
In many cases, however, the original forms of the Babylonian
divinities survived only in the animals upon whose backs
they were depicted as standing, or with whom the gem-cutter
associated them on seals.^276 Now and again an attempt was
made to combine them with the human figure. Thus Ea is
at times represented as clothed in the skin of a fish, a fitting
symbol of the relation between the newer and older religions of
Babylonia and the antagonistic views of the godhead entertained
[354] by the races that dwelt there. At other times the animal form
is relegated to that great company of demons and inferior spirits
amongst whom room was found for the multitudinous ghosts of
Sumerian belief. Where it is not altogether excluded from the
world of gods and men, it exists only as the humble retainer
of one of the human gods. As Merodach was accompanied by
his four divine dogs, so Ea was attended by sacred bulls. They
guarded the approach to the“field”and“house of Eden,”like
the colossal figures, with bull-like bodies and the heads of men,
that guarded the gates of the palace or temple. They were, in
fact, the cherubim who forbade approach to the tree of life (or
knowledge),—that sacred palm which an old Babylonian hymn
tells us was planted beside the pathway of Ea in Eridu, where
the god had his house in the centre of the earth, pouring from
his hands the waters of fertility that flowed down in the twofold
streams of the Tigris and Euphrates.^277 In later art, however, the
bull-like form disappeared, and the guardians of the sacred tree
were represented in human shape, but with the heads of eagles.

(^276) Thus the monkey is associated with Nu-gidda,“the dwarf,”who in his turn
accompanies the moon-god.
(^277) The last line of this hymn (WAI.iv. 15. 52 sqq.), of which I have given a
translation in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 238, has been discovered by Dr. Pinches,
and published by him in theJournal of Transactions of the Victoria Institute,
xxix. p. 44.