---

Records of the Past, 2nd Series, Vol. IV

By A. H. Sayce

---

Introduction-Votive Inscriptions

The following inscription is on a stone lion found at the entrance of a temple at the foot of the pyramid at Nimrud, and now in the British Museum. It is an invocation to Beltis, the female counterpart or shadow of Bel, and forms an introduction to one of the frequent versions of the standard inscription of Assur-natsir-pal. In line 7 Ishtar, though she appears to be invoked as a separate goddess, is probably to be regarded as an equivalent or personification of Beltis. However, the process by which she assumed the titles, and eventually absorbed the personality of the latter, was a gradual one, and its final stage becomes visible only in inscriptions of the second Assyrian period, particularly in those of Assurbanipal. 1

The inscription has been published in the second volume of "The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia," plate 66, No. I. Lines 7 to 9 have been translated by Zimmern in Babylonische Busspsalmen,

p. 22, and notes on two other isolated passages will be found on pp. 197 and 256 of Jensen's Kosmologie der Babylonier; but it seems that no complete translation has hitherto been published.

The lines as they are given in W. A. I., ii. do not represent the arrangement of the original, but I follow them for convenience of reference.

Footnotes
90:1 See Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 273.