386 FISH IN OFFERINGS, AUGURIES, ETC. 
from the grave (sometimes cited as an instance of necromancy), 
“the place where was the worm that devoured, and where all 
was cloaked in dust.’”’! The Hymn of the Descent of Ishtar 
into Hell goes farther : 
* To the land whence none return, the place of darkness, 
To the house wherein he who enters is excluded from the light, 
To the place where dust is their bread and mud their food.’’2 
The very curious bronze of the Le Clerq collection in Paris, 
in which ichthyic garments and gods of the under-world, 
Aralli, occur, must be my excuse for this too lengthy and almost 
fishless digression on the Babylonian dead. It shows several 
figures, two clad in garments of the form of a fish, with their 
scales very visible. 
Two explanations of the bronze have been offered. The 
first; hitherto generally accepted, suggests that the figures 
are representations of the gods of the under-world, or of the 
dead waiting on a sick person, together with some demons of 
the under-world and two priests wearing fishlike raiment. 
My friend Professor Langdon has furnished me with another 
explanation, more detailed and more interesting. 
This so-called representation of a scene in the lower world 
from a bronze talisman has been misunderstood. The obverse 
has three registers. In the upper register are depicted the seven 
devils, all with animal heads, in attitude of ferocious attack 
upon a human soul. The middle register represents a sick man 
who is supposed to be possessed by the seven devils. He lies 
upon a bed. At his head and feet stand two priests each 
arrayed to appear like fish: these are symbolic of Ea, god of the 
sea and patron of all magic. They clothed themselves in a 
1 Gilgamesh here learns how infinitely better is ‘the condition of those to 
whom the rites of burial have been paid, compared with that of those who 
have been unburied. R. F. Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Litevature 
(New York, rg90r), 363 ff. 
? The Hebrew conception of Sheol coincides in regarding it as ‘a land whence 
none return,” Job vil. 9-10; as “‘a place of darkness,” Job x. 21-22; 
as a place of “‘ dust,” Psalm xxx. 9, and Job xvii. 16. 
3 Priests dressed as fish or with some fish-like raiments often attend the 
Sacred Tree (see Ward, op. cit., Nos. 687, 688,689). These are held by some to 
be genii of the deep. In Ward, No. 690, two fish-men are guarding the Tree of 
Life. 
