The Chaldæns were disposed to regard the planets as perverse sheep who had escaped from the fold of the stars to wander wilfully in search of pasture.* At first they were considered to be so many sovereign deities, without other function than that of running through the heavens and furnishing there predictions of the future; afterwards two of them descended to the earth, and received upon it the homage of men* --Ishtar from the inhabitants of the city of Dilbat, and Nebo* from those of Borsippa. Nebo assumed the _rôle_ of a soothsayer and a prophet. He knew and foresaw everything, and was ready to give his advice upon any subject: he was the inventor of the method of making clay tablets, and of writing upon them. Ishtar was a combination of contradictory characteristics.****
* Their generic name, read as "lubat," in Sumero-Accadian, "bibbu" in Semitic speech (Fr. Lenormant, _Essai de Commentaire de Bérose_, pp. 370, 371), denoted a quadruped, the species of which Lenormant was not able to define; Jensen (_Die Kosmologie_, pp. 95-99) identified it with the sheep and the ram. At the end of the account of the creation, Merodach-Jupiter is compared with a shepherd who feeds the flock of the gods on the pastures of heaven (cf. p. 15 of the present work).
** The site of Dilbat is unknown: it has been sought in the neighbourhood of Kishu and Babylon (Delitzsch, _Wo lag das Paradies?_ p. 219); it is probable that it was in the suburbs of Sippara. The name given to the goddess was transcribed AeXckit (Hesychius, _sub voce_), and signifies the herald, the messenger of the day.
*** The rôle of Nebo was determined by the early Assyriologists (Rawlin-son, _On the Religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians_, pp. 523-52G; Oppeet, _Expédition en Mésopotamie_, vol. ii. p. 257; Lenormant, _Essai de Commentaire de Bérose_, pp. 114-116). He owed his functions partly to his alliance with other gods (Sayce, _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, pp. 118, 119).
**** See the chapter devoted by Sayce to the consideration of Ishtar in his Religion of the Ancient Babylonians (IV. Tammuz and Ishtar, p. 221, et seq.), and the observations made by Jeremias on the subject in the sequel of his Izdubar-Nimrod (Ishtar-Astarte im Izdubar-Epos), pp. 56-66.