THE SUN-GOD AND THE BIRD-MAN. 103 
turns his head back toward the worshiper introduced. ‘The next figure marches 
forward holding in one hand a long spear, apparently, and a smaller club or jave- 
lin over his shoulder. Then follows the bird-man pushed forward by the fourth 
figure, who holds him by the head and the body. 
One other cylinder (fig. 292) gives a similar scene AC 
of a bird-man brought before the standing Shamash. 
Here his foot is not raised so high, but he 1s enveloped 
in streams and wears his two-horned cap. The bird- 
man is pushed forward by the second of the two ofh- 
cers, but the first is not a bifrons. Last of all is a worshiper with the goat as an 
offering. This is an old cylinder, but somewhat later than the preceding. 
These are the only two cases I know of in which we see the bird-man led to a 
standing god; in all other cases he is seated. But we must conclude that the seated 
god is the same Shamash, as we shall have abundant evidence to prove when we 
come to study the seated god in the next chapter. 
Another cylinder (fig. 293) from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum 
gives us an example of the most common form of this scene, that with the seated 
‘god; but it is unusual in that it represents the god 
as being seated within a boat, which we must 
imagine as sailing through the heavens. ‘This was a 
simpler and more natural way of conceiving the quiet 
passage of the sun along the sky than the Greek 
notion of a chariot drawn by horses. But also the 
literary sources tell us that the sun was conceived 
23 as sailing in a boat. In the epic of Gilgamesh the 
hero desires to cross the ocean to find his deceased friend Eabani. At the shore of 
the sea he finds the maiden Sabitu, who forbids his passage. He pleads with her to 
allow him to pass and find his friend Eabani, “who has become dust.” She tells him: 


O Gilgamesh, there has never been a ferry, 
And no one has ever crossed the ocean. 
Shamash, the hero, has crossed it; but except Shamash who can cross it ? 
Difficult is the passage, very difficult the path. 
Impassable the waters of death guarded by a bolt. 
Jastrow, “Religions,” p. 491. 
Whether it was the passage of the sun by night as he sinks into the western 
ocean, or by day also through the heavens, that was in the mind of the Chaldean 
poet may not be clear, but at least the Sun-god made his passage in a boat. 
There will be a temptation to connect the conception of the sun thus riding 
in a boat as having a common ethnic origin with the well-known and much developed 
Egyptian conception of the sun as thus borne by a boat. The Egyptians gave the 
sun two boats, one in which Ra was borne by day and another in which he was 
borne by night. We have pictures of the boat, and of Ra’s companions, and of 
the oars at the stern of the boat, and of the rope with which it was drawn, reminding 
us of the rope which moved the disk of the sun in the remarkable bas-relief of 
Abu-habba, where the sun’s daily journey through the heavens is not by a boat. 
But in a country of canals like Egypt and Babylonia, where nearly all carriage 
was by water, it would be as natural to think of the sun as thus borne as it would 
