CHAPTER XIII. 
SHAMASH, THE RISING SUN. 
No class of cylinders better illustrates the poetic imagination of a primitive 
people than those which give us the representation of the Sun-god Shamash emerg- 
ing from the gates of morning and rising over the Eastern mountains. They are 
those in which George Smith fancied that he saw the building of the Tower of 
Babel, and which Ménant supposed to represent the gates of the underworld open- 
ing to receive the dead. Of these cylinders there are twenty or more in the collec- 
tions, and those of importance are here figured. 
This scene was first fully explained and discussed, with figures of all the then 
known examples, by me in the American Journal of Archzology, vol. 111, 1887, 
pp. 50-56, “The Rising Sun on Babylonian Cylinders.” But antecedently, in a 
paper not then known to me, M. Heuzey, to whose quick intelligence we owe more 
by way of interpreting the scenes in the ancient art than to all other scholars since 
Ménant, had recognized (in a paper, “Le Stéle des Vautours,”’ in the Gazette 
Archéologique, 1884, pp. 198, 200, and reprinted in his “Origines,”’ pp. 760-778) 
that the same had been generally misconceived, and that it had a “caractére 
sidéral,”’ and that the gates had to do with “the morning and evening, the summer 
and winter, the east and the west.” In his “Mythes Chaldéenes,” 1895, Heuzey 
developed this explanation. 
We shall see, in fig. 291, a standing god of this general type receiving the 
captured bird-man brought to him for judgment and punishment, and shall there 
recognize him as identical with the seated Shamash who usually thus acts as “judge 
of gods and men.”’ In this chapter we recognize him by his foot usually raised on 
a mountain, or on the conventional symbol for a mountain. He wears a divine 
tiara, with horns, two or more, and a long garment open in front, from which his 
bare leg protrudes as he lifts it upon the mountain. As characteristic an example 
as any is seen in fig. 244. Here we see the two gates, each with a porter, the Sun- 
god with rays from his shoulders, his foot lifted high on the mountain, and his usual 
notched sword in his hand. ‘The gates are of the early style, with door-posts resting 
in sockets, like the many stone sockets preserved and inscribed with names of the 
early kings. ‘There are perhaps two leaves to the gate, opening outward and swing- 
ing on a vertical post which is set in the lower socket and is held in a ring or in 
some other way at the top. Above the gate, in this case, is an ornament in the 
form of a lion. These lions remind us of the two lions over the Hittite portal at 
Marash. The apparent curvature of the sides of the gates is due to the concave 
surface of the cylinder. The gates are conceived of as of wood, with cross-bars 
of bronze, as in the gates of Balawat. In these cylinders there are usually two 
gates and two porters. It is not at all clear that they represent, as suggested, two 
leaves of one portal; and still less is it probable that they represent two different 
gates, one of the morning and one of the evening. It is quite as likely that they are 
doubled simply for the sake of symmetry and represent but a single gate and a 
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