280 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Lenormant, due specially to the Semites 1 , but neither the 

 Chaldaeans nor the Egyptians ever evolved the conception of an 

 absolutely supreme being. The supreme god, whose existence 

 the early Assyriologists thought they had discovered (H. and G. 

 Rawlinson), was as much a being of their own invention as the 

 supreme god imagined by Egyptologists to occupy the highest 

 position in the Egyptian pantheon (/^.) 2 . Indeed much of the 

 Chaldaean system passed into a condition hardly to be distinguished 

 from the fetishism of the African negro. "The spirit of the god 

 inspired whatever seemed good to him, and frequently entered 

 into objects where we should least have expected to find it. It 

 animated stones, particularly such as fall from heaven, also trees, 

 as, for example, the tree of Eridhu, which uttered oracles. Such 

 objects, when it was once ascertained that they were imbued with 

 the divine spirit, were placed upon the altar and worshipped with 

 as much veneration as were the statues themselves. Animals, 

 however, never became objects of habitual worship as in Egypt 3 ." 

 As in all primitive beliefs, morality is found still entirely 

 dissociated from religion. Thus in Aralu, the Chaldaean Hades, 



Esar-haddon begins: "The Kimmerian in the mountains has set fire in the 

 land of Ellip," i.e. the land where Ekbatana was afterwards founded, which is 

 now shown to have already been occupied by the Kimmerian or Manda 

 hordes. It follows that Kimmerians, Mandas, Medes with their modern 

 Kurd and Bakhtiari representatives, were all one people, who were almost 

 certainly of Aryan speech, if not actually of proto-Aryan stock. 



1 La Magie chez les Chaldeens, p. 144 sq. ; quoted by Maspero, Daivn of 

 Civ. p. 644. 



2 As the idea of a primitive universal revelation, from which that of a 

 supreme being cannot be separated, seems to be at least suggested as possible 

 by Mr A. Lang in The Making of Religion (1898), it maybe again pointed 

 out that such a sublime notion is immeasurably beyond the power of early 

 man, whose cranial capacity did not greatly exceed that of the Javanese 

 precursor (see diagram p. 6). The monotheistic conception could never have 

 been the starting point, and was in fact arrived at in quite late times by a 

 continuous process of elimination. In his Mythologie des Slaves et des Finnois 

 (Re~j. Mens. de FEcole tfAnthrop. 1897, p. -225 sq.), M. A. Lefevre shows 

 that even Bog, supposed to be the Deus of the proto-Slavs, and the dualism 

 represented by Cernobog and Belbog, are all later developments of the Slav 

 pantheon. 



3 Daivn of Civilization, p. 642. 



