THE SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF THE EAST
VOLUME I
B A B Y L O N I A A N D A S S Y R I A
In Translations by
MORRIS JASTROW, JR., LL.D., Librarian and Professor of Semitic
Languages in the University of Pennsylvania; REV. A. H. SAYCE,
LL.D., Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University;
ROBERT W. ROGERS, LL.D., Professor of Hebrew in Drew Theological
Seminary; GEORGE A. BARTON, LL.D., President of the American
Oriental Society and Professor of Semitic in Bryn Mawr College;
LEONARD W. KING, F.S.A., Assistant in Assyrian Antiquities in the
British Museum; STEPHEN LANGDON, PH.D., Professor of Assyriology
at Oxford University; ARNO POEBEL, PH.D., formerly of the University
of Pennsylvania Museum; and other noted Babylonian scholars.
With a Brief Bibliography by
PROF. MORRIS JASTROW, JR., LL.D.
With an Historical Survey and Descriptions by
PROF. CHARLES F. HORNE, PH.D.
PARKE, AUSTIN, AND LIPSCOMB, INC.
NEW YORK LONDON
In Translations by
MORRIS JASTROW, JR., LL.D., Librarian and Professor of Semitic
Languages in the University of Pennsylvania; REV. A. H. SAYCE,
LL.D., Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University;
ROBERT W. ROGERS, LL.D., Professor of Hebrew in Drew Theological
Seminary; GEORGE A. BARTON, LL.D., President of the American
Oriental Society and Professor of Semitic in Bryn Mawr College;
LEONARD W. KING, F.S.A., Assistant in Assyrian Antiquities in the
British Museum; STEPHEN LANGDON, PH.D., Professor of Assyriology
at Oxford University; ARNO POEBEL, PH.D., formerly of the University
of Pennsylvania Museum; and other noted Babylonian scholars.
With a Brief Bibliography by
PROF. MORRIS JASTROW, JR., LL.D.
With an Historical Survey and Descriptions by
PROF. CHARLES F. HORNE, PH.D.
PARKE, AUSTIN, AND LIPSCOMB, INC.
NEW YORK LONDON
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WORK
IN speaking of the Sacred Books of the East, that great
American sage and teacher, Emerson, called them that
"class of books which are the best : I mean the Bibles of
the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express
for each the supreme result of their experience. . . . All
these books are the majestic expression of the universal conscience.
They are for the closet, and to be read on the bended
knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken
with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow
of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship
should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen,
heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by
letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable
into every tongue and form of life. We call them
Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only
optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are
as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only
these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a
time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible."
Emerson spoke with but a shadow of our present knowledge
of the East. Mighty books unknown to him have since
been recovered by modern scientific search. Yet the reader
may well take Emerson's words as a hint of how profoundly
EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE, even when only the barest
fragments of it were known, began at once to shape the
thought of our foremost men.
EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE
We ask therefore of the reader a moment's consideration
of the sources of the earliest human thought and books. In
what far distant epoch man first began to think for himself,
we do not know. Those half-brutish minds of some longforgotten
" stone age" have left no trace of the vague first" Why ?
" with which they began mankind's eternal struggle
to pierce the infinite. Feeble indeed must have been
these earliest efforts of men to reach beyond immediate
physical sensation, to understand themselves and the world
around them, and the spiritual world which they felt expanding
above them and beyond. So completely blank is the
abyss of ignorance which our climbing forefathers have left
behind them that, up to a century or so ago, mankind had
scarcely a grain of knowledge of what had happened in the
world three thousand years before.
Back of the Greek wars sung by Homer, we had almost no
guide to earlier ages except in our Scriptures, the Old
Testament account of the creation, so brief and so often misinterpreted
and misunderstood. Beyond this one mighty
Book of the past, with its attention centered on the Hebrew
race, we possessed only a few loose references in old Greek
authors, who mentioned Babylon and Egypt as fading lands
of the past, in which the Greeks took little interest.
The nineteenth century changed this widely. The world
of three thousand years ago is now almost as clear to us as
yesterday's world. Moreover, we can look back twice as
far, six thousand years perhaps, and know more of that distant
date than our fathers knew of Homer's time. Even beyond
six thousand years we have now well-defined glimpses
of an earlier age, of races at least semi-civilized in an antiquity
for which we have no measuring terms of years.
THE, RECENT REDISCOVERY OF THE PAST
Whence has come this tremendous unfolding of the
leaves of the past? It is one of the chief triumphs ever
gained by human intellect. With wonderful patience and
ability, our scientists have sought and compared and studied
over all the scattered fragments of antiquity which they have
found throughout Asia and North Africa. Not only Egypt
and Babylonia, but India, China, Persia, and a score of
other regions have contributed, sometimes a few words, sometimes
whole wonderful mysterious literatures, to enlarge
our knowledge of man's older days and older thoughts.
We may have little cause to boast of any higher wisdom than
our fathers, or any deeper spiritual insight, but we have at
least established a far broader base of knowledge, both
physical and intellectual, from which to uplift our eyes and
thoughts and look beyond.
While our knowledge of the physical laws of the world
may continue to increase, there is little likelihood that we
shall ever again enlarge our mental horizon by such stupendous
finds as have come to us with the sacred books of
the Hindus, the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians, and all these
other marvels of the past. Hence it is well to pause and
take more careful account of our recovered treasure, to place
side by side the richest gems of this
" wisdom of the East,"
and so add all their wealth of knowledge to our own.
THE PRESENT SERIES
That is what the present series of volumes seeks to do.
From each of the great centers of Oriental thought, it gathers
the chief writings. Only the greatest works are given.
These are offered with brief explanations of their value and
their origin. Minor points of note and comment have been
avoided, the purpose being to let the reader study the ancient
books themselves, rather than our modern discussion of them.
The volumes offer, first, the oldest discovered documents
of each ancient civilization, so that the reader may see for
himself what vague stirrings of thought first came to men.
Sometimes these earliest fragments embody religious ideas
from days far, far older than the Divine revelations to
Moses. Sometimes they deal with the moral rather than
the spiritual world, proverbs which show how man had resolved
to deal with man, thousands of years before Christ's
great command, "Love one another." Sometimes they are
boasts of a vain conqueror; sometimes songs of joy; more
often cries of terror. But in each case they are the earliest
visions which open to us the human heart.
Following these most ancient recovered fragments, our
series gives for each race its great religious book, its Bible,
Koran, or whatever else it has held most sacred as the gift
of God to man. For, never a race rose to civilization, but
it seems to have regarded some portion of its thought as being
divine. Some one of its writings was declared an inspiration
which had come to man from a higher source than he.
Then is given the chief or oldest historical writing
of each race, its most valued poems, its travels, a specimen
of its drama, if it ever developed drama, its chief romance,
and something of its simpler household tales. Thus the effort
is made to let the reader see for himself the best of all
the literature of the East. Thus he can follow Oriental wisdom
from its beginning.
A SUMMARIZED HISTORY OF EASTERN LITERATURE
As far as possible the books of each nation have been not
only kept by themselves, but arranged chronologically.
Thus each of our volumes is also a history of a nation's
literature. Read first the brief introductory sketch to each,
telling what the nation's course has been in literature, what
its chief books and writers, and what the progress of its
thought. Guided by this general knowledge, turn then to
whatever class of works most please you in the body of the
volumes. Read the strangely differing romances of the
varied races, their quaintly worded travels, their boastful
histories. Or balance, one against the other, the varied human
passions of their poems. Or, best of all, compare their
Sacred Books, and gather how, amid all the thousand diversities
of man's physical growth and culture, his spiritual
thought remains ever in its elements the same, because it is
guided by some Wisdom older, stronger, and more all-enveloping
than human intellect.
Introduction
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WORK
IN speaking of the Sacred Books of the East, that great
American sage and teacher, Emerson, called them that
"class of books which are the best : I mean the Bibles of
the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express
for each the supreme result of their experience. . . . All
these books are the majestic expression of the universal conscience.
They are for the closet, and to be read on the bended
knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken
with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow
of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship
should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen,
heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by
letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable
into every tongue and form of life. We call them
Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only
optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are
as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only
these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a
time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible."
Emerson spoke with but a shadow of our present knowledge
of the East. Mighty books unknown to him have since
been recovered by modern scientific search. Yet the reader
may well take Emerson's words as a hint of how profoundly
EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE, even when only the barest
fragments of it were known, began at once to shape the
thought of our foremost men.
EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE
We ask therefore of the reader a moment's consideration
of the sources of the earliest human thought and books. In
what far distant epoch man first began to think for himself,
we do not know. Those half-brutish minds of some longforgotten
" stone age" have left no trace of the vague first" Why ?
" with which they began mankind's eternal struggle
to pierce the infinite. Feeble indeed must have been
these earliest efforts of men to reach beyond immediate
physical sensation, to understand themselves and the world
around them, and the spiritual world which they felt expanding
above them and beyond. So completely blank is the
abyss of ignorance which our climbing forefathers have left
behind them that, up to a century or so ago, mankind had
scarcely a grain of knowledge of what had happened in the
world three thousand years before.
Back of the Greek wars sung by Homer, we had almost no
guide to earlier ages except in our Scriptures, the Old
Testament account of the creation, so brief and so often misinterpreted
and misunderstood. Beyond this one mighty
Book of the past, with its attention centered on the Hebrew
race, we possessed only a few loose references in old Greek
authors, who mentioned Babylon and Egypt as fading lands
of the past, in which the Greeks took little interest.
The nineteenth century changed this widely. The world
of three thousand years ago is now almost as clear to us as
yesterday's world. Moreover, we can look back twice as
far, six thousand years perhaps, and know more of that distant
date than our fathers knew of Homer's time. Even beyond
six thousand years we have now well-defined glimpses
of an earlier age, of races at least semi-civilized in an antiquity
for which we have no measuring terms of years.
THE, RECENT REDISCOVERY OF THE PAST
Whence has come this tremendous unfolding of the
leaves of the past? It is one of the chief triumphs ever
gained by human intellect. With wonderful patience and
ability, our scientists have sought and compared and studied
over all the scattered fragments of antiquity which they have
found throughout Asia and North Africa. Not only Egypt
and Babylonia, but India, China, Persia, and a score of
other regions have contributed, sometimes a few words, sometimes
whole wonderful mysterious literatures, to enlarge
our knowledge of man's older days and older thoughts.
We may have little cause to boast of any higher wisdom than
our fathers, or any deeper spiritual insight, but we have at
least established a far broader base of knowledge, both
physical and intellectual, from which to uplift our eyes and
thoughts and look beyond.
While our knowledge of the physical laws of the world
may continue to increase, there is little likelihood that we
shall ever again enlarge our mental horizon by such stupendous
finds as have come to us with the sacred books of
the Hindus, the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians, and all these
other marvels of the past. Hence it is well to pause and
take more careful account of our recovered treasure, to place
side by side the richest gems of this
" wisdom of the East,"
and so add all their wealth of knowledge to our own.
THE PRESENT SERIES
That is what the present series of volumes seeks to do.
From each of the great centers of Oriental thought, it gathers
the chief writings. Only the greatest works are given.
These are offered with brief explanations of their value and
their origin. Minor points of note and comment have been
avoided, the purpose being to let the reader study the ancient
books themselves, rather than our modern discussion of them.
The volumes offer, first, the oldest discovered documents
of each ancient civilization, so that the reader may see for
himself what vague stirrings of thought first came to men.
Sometimes these earliest fragments embody religious ideas
from days far, far older than the Divine revelations to
Moses. Sometimes they deal with the moral rather than
the spiritual world, proverbs which show how man had resolved
to deal with man, thousands of years before Christ's
great command, "Love one another." Sometimes they are
boasts of a vain conqueror; sometimes songs of joy; more
often cries of terror. But in each case they are the earliest
visions which open to us the human heart.
Following these most ancient recovered fragments, our
series gives for each race its great religious book, its Bible,
Koran, or whatever else it has held most sacred as the gift
of God to man. For, never a race rose to civilization, but
it seems to have regarded some portion of its thought as being
divine. Some one of its writings was declared an inspiration
which had come to man from a higher source than he.
Then is given the chief or oldest historical writing
of each race, its most valued poems, its travels, a specimen
of its drama, if it ever developed drama, its chief romance,
and something of its simpler household tales. Thus the effort
is made to let the reader see for himself the best of all
the literature of the East. Thus he can follow Oriental wisdom
from its beginning.
A SUMMARIZED HISTORY OF EASTERN LITERATURE
As far as possible the books of each nation have been not
only kept by themselves, but arranged chronologically.
Thus each of our volumes is also a history of a nation's
literature. Read first the brief introductory sketch to each,
telling what the nation's course has been in literature, what
its chief books and writers, and what the progress of its
thought. Guided by this general knowledge, turn then to
whatever class of works most please you in the body of the
volumes. Read the strangely differing romances of the
varied races, their quaintly worded travels, their boastful
histories. Or balance, one against the other, the varied human
passions of their poems. Or, best of all, compare their
Sacred Books, and gather how, amid all the thousand diversities
of man's physical growth and culture, his spiritual
thought remains ever in its elements the same, because it is
guided by some Wisdom older, stronger, and more all-enveloping
than human intellect.
CHARLES F. HORNE.
.Introduction
THE REMARKABLE REDISCOVERY OF EARTH'S EARLY
CIVILIZATION AND OF THE GROWTH OF
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN MAN
THE ancient Asiatic land of Babylonia, the fertile valley of
the great Euphrates river, has a double interest, sufficient to arouse the eager attention of every modern reader. In the first place this valley was the home of the oldest civilization
that has survived in any intelligible form, and in its literature we may study the earliest upward steps of the
thought and intelligence of our human race. In the second place, the Hebrew people were Babylonians, who left the land some two thousand years before Christ, under the guidance of their patriarch Abraham. Hence much as the Hebrew religion was afterward uplifted by the teachings of Moses, of Jesus, and of many a lesser spiritual leader, yet the human beginnings of both Jewish and Christian faiths are founded on Babylonian thought and knowledge. Our religious beliefs of to-day are still interwoven with many a strand that can be traced back to its Babylonian source. Still a third, though lighter, cause for interest in the old Babylonian texts lies in the newness and oddity and curiosity of their recent rediscovery after they had lain buried for many ages, and were apparently lost to the world forever.
The antiquity of Babylonia is so great, the destruction of its many powerful cities was so complete, that even in the are distant days of Greece and Rome men were beginning to forget Babylon and to make the mistake of referring to Egypt as the earliest home of civilization. So complete became the oblivion of the older land that, a century ago, our modern world knew nothing of Babylonia or of its later rival
Assyria, except for the chance references to them in the Hebrew Scriptures and a few comments preserved in old Greek authors. The pictures of Babylonia in the Bible were
of the original paradise, the flood, and then of a great power under a savage king Mmrod, or under later tyrants, such as Sennacherib and Nebuchadrezzar. The Greek comments were all based on one source a history by a Babylonian priest, Berosus, written about the time of Alexander the Great. These surviving fragments from Berosus are given here at the opening of our volume, that the reader may combine them with the well-known Bible story and so begin by seeing Babylonia as all the world saw it a century ago, a land of somber mystery, of desolation incurred as a direct curse for sin, of darkness lightened only by the fantastic legends of Berosus.
The reopening to our vision of the strange, true world of this most ancient land began about seventy years ago. Scientific explorers unearthed the ruins of some of its forgotten cities, and found wall-carvings and tablets inscribed in the old Assyrian language. At first no man could read the unknown
script, and it is one of the proudest triumphs of scientific ingenuity that by patient labor our scholars managed at last to interpret the ancient signs, and reread the language
which had been obliterated for over two thousand years.
Spurred on by this remarkable success, our scientists have explored the whole Euphrates valley and delved into many a buried city. Briefly outlined, the knowledge we have gained is this. Five thousand years ago there stood in the Babylonian valley many strong cities encircled by mighty
defensive walls of brick, and inhabited by men of considerable intellectual power. These people wrote, and meditated, and invented arts, and had priests and kings and carpenters, and lived in that mutual dependence and division of the labors of life which we call civilization. Moreover, these grim and ancient city walls were some of them built high upon the ruins of yet older fortified towns, dating back into centuries that we can not count. At the very bottom of one of these huge mounds of ruin, overlaid by the debris of city upon city, our explorers have come at last upon the remnants of a mere simple fishermen's village. How long is.it since those fisher folk spread their crude nets against the still unceasing flow of the great Euphrates river ? No man can say, but the explorers reckon that the village may perhaps
date back twelve thousand years. Despite this doubling and doubling again of the length of our modern vision into the past, no scientist would to-day say positively that these strange, brick-built cities of Babylonia represent man's original civilization, his first rise above the savage state. They represent only the first of which we have clear trace. Searchers have caught vague glimpses of other civilizations perhaps even older, in central Asia. And in the seaport city of Eridu, one of the very oldest of Babylonian
centers of culture, the chief religious legend was of the god, Ea, who had in long past years come from the sea, and taught the people all they knew. This may well imply
the arrival of a chance wanderer from some far land wherein
the dawn of knowledge had begun yet earlier.
THE LIBRARY OF ASHUR-BANIPAL
Most of our knowledge of the literature and religion of
Babylonia has come to us from our discovery of the library
of the Assyrian king, Ashur-banipal. This monarch reigned
at a comparatively recent date, about 650 B.C. ; but he was
himself an interested student of the past, that past which he
could trace as far behind him as we, a century ago, could
trace our past. So King Ashur-banipal set his learned men
to transcribing all the literature of the older days, writing it
down in his capital city of Nineveh, on the little tablets, or
bricks of clay, which were his books. Into these clay tablets
the scribes stamped the queer little wedge-shaped fig
ures, which we now call the " cuneiform "
(cone-shaped) language.
This peculiar-looking library, in which the books
themselves were bricks, was afterward destroyed with the
destruction of the city; but we have found some twenty
thousand of the tablets which, despite fire and flood and time,
can still be read wholly or in part. There have been other
writings found in other places, many books of brick; but
no others have given us such value as the great library of Ashur-banipal.
THE FOUR SUCCESSIVE CIVILIZATIONS OF BABYLONIA
From all these garnered writings we have learned that
there were at least four, if not more, successive and very different
civilizations built up in the Babylonian valley. The
first clearly visible civilization, which flourished long before
the mighty city of Babylon arose, was that of the Sumerian
people. They lived at the southern end of the valley, near
the mouth of the Euphrates river, or along the sea-coast of
the Persian Gulf. These Sumerians seem to have been of
different stock from either of the two races of men that have
since dominated the world the Aryan ancestors of Europe
and America, and the great Semitic stock from which sprang
the Arabs, Babylonians, and Hebrews. The Sumerians were
more like the smooth-faced, round-headed men of central
Asia, the Chinese or Tartars. So, perchance, both Aryans
and Semites have been but the bearers of a borrowed torch
of culture. The first light of thought, of progress, may
have been set aflame among the Sumerians, or even, as the
tale of Ea suggests, in some still earlier race of men.
North of Sumer, higher up the Euphrates, there began,
in an age perhaps five thousand years before Christ, the
growth of other cities. These were built by a more barbaric
people, of different language and race, who at first
looked up to the Sumerians and borrowed much from them.
This rougher northern land was called Akkad ; and its people,
the Akkadians, were chiefly of Semitic stock, wanderers
probably from Syria or from the nearby desert of Arabia.
Gradually the fiercer, more numerous men of Akkad came
to dominate those of Sumer. And then, not later than twenty-five
hundred years before Christ for we come now to
days and events upon which we can set a date, though scholars
are not yet positive within narrow limits there swept
over Akkad a new Semitic invasion. With this the rule of
the city of Babylon began, a new city speaking a new language,
though similar to the Akkadian.
Babylon first became powerful under a famous conqueror,
King Sargon, whom later ages adopted as the founder of
the great city. Then, several centuries later (about 2000
B.C.), a second soldier and great ruler in the ways of peace,
Hammurapi, raised the city to such a height of power and
splendor as fixed forever its name and its ascendancy over
the entire Euphrates valley.
It was in Hammurapi's day, if not before under Sargon,
that Babylon's power and influence began to spread beyond
the Euphrates valley. Her people gained their first knowledge
of the rival civilization of Egypt. This was probably
less ancient than that of the Sumerians ; but Egypt had not
been so harried by devastating war as was the easily accessible
valley of the Euphrates ; and we shall find in Egypt a
more rapid progress in all the arts with the exception of
the one dread art of war. While Hammurapi and his Baby
lonians fought, the men of Egypt thought. Thus Egypt's
intellectual and religious development makes her ancient literature
in some ways more worthy of study than that of Babylon,
though Egypt never reached the opulence nor the cosmopolitan
spirit of the shrewd Babylonians. The latter became
the merchant princes, the commercial travelers, of the world.
There still remains a fourth Euphrates empire to be noted.
The Assyrians, who dwelt in what had been originally a sort
of rough frontier colony of Babylon, gradually grew in warlike
power, until they threw off the yoke of Babylon, conquered
the parent city, and became in their turn the military
rulers of the entire valley. Babylon, however, continued
even in Assyrian days to dominate the region as its chief
center of religion and culture. Sometimes Babylon fought
for independence ; at others it submitted and was boastfully
displayed as the proudest jewel of the Assyrian crown.
THE OLDEST LITERATURE AND THE GROWTH OF THOUGHT
Turn now to the literary remains of these four successive
ages. Many of the tablets of the Assyrian Ashur-banipal
are written in two parallel columns. They give the text
in his own tongue and also in the ancient Akkadian, or Sumerian.
Sometimes a third column gives the same record
in the later Akkadian, or Babylonian language. Hence we
learn that the old Akkadian tongue had been retained for
thousands of years, much as Latin has been in our own day,
as a sort of religious language. Later, Babylonian and Assyrian
resembled it, were born from it, as our Italian and
French are born from Latin. The priests of Babylon sang
their religious chants in the ancient Akkadian. We might
even compare our day and theirs yet further ; for just as we
find our ultimate religious sources not in the Latin, but in
the still more ancient Hebrew, so Babylon looked back beyond
Akkad and found its first religious source in the Sumerian tongue.
In the present volume, therefore, you will find, first of
all, the surviving fragments of the pre-Babylonian days.
First come the Sumerian texts, the oldest and most valuable
survivals of that earliest human tongue, a language that had
been dead for centuries before Hebrew or Greek or Latin was first born.
Next comes the old Akkadian section. The religious
chants and hymns in Akkadian are quite numerous among
the later libraries; but we can not be sure whether they
preserve genuine early Akkadian thought or were composed
in the old tongue by Babylonian priests, much as the poet
Milton and many another modern scholar wrote Latin hymns,
long after Latin had disappeared from common use. In addition
to this book Akkadian, however, our explorers have
found numerous carved inscriptions of old Akkadian and
even Sumerian date. Moreover, when we deal with late Assyrian
transcripts we must remember that Assyrian legend
and religious faith always look back to the older originals.
Neither Assyria nor Babylon seems to have added much to
the stock of thought which each inherited. The progress
of ideas, through all those many centuries that we can trace,
was almost inconceivably slow. An Assyrian would have
told you, like many a modern pessimist, that there was nothing
new under the sun, that every possible thing had been
thought and said, and said again, thousands of years before his time.
We have lived to know that the Assyrian was wrong. We
can see now how even his own civilization bore within it the
seeds of a tremendously expanding tree of knowledge and
divine inspiration. To realize this, to see how from Babylonian
sources were to burst forth the great Hebrew religious
thought, and also the great Greek scientific thought, one need
only follow earnestly the literature presented in this and the succeeding volumes.
Let the reader begin by noting here the faith and the degree
of intelligence, as well as the social and religious customs,
that find expression in our Sumerian and Akkadian
texts, those immeasurably old and oldest treasure-houses of
human ideas. There are proverbs, some of them closely
paralleling our modern sayings. There are spells to ward
off evil, such as our age has almost, but not quite, outgrown.
There are pompous boasts of conquests by forgotten kings,
whose very names are now unreadable. There are laws also,
to protect property and life, savage retaliatory laws such as
we should expect at the beginning; and there are other laws
such as we should not have expected, arranging small details
of business. Instead of a single patriarch or ruler deciding
all matters off-hand by a rough personal sense of justice,
there was already a complex social code, seeking to fix broad
impersonal relationships of equal standing for all men. As
for the religious chants, they speak of good powers and evil
powers, gods and demons ; but these show no large religious
thought. Their imagined deities were little more than men.
Each city had at first its own god, and sometimes he could
not even protect his special city, so his people did not think
of" him as very powerful. It was quite natural that some
other city, having a god a little stronger, should fight against him.
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CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA
INTRODUCTION
The Remarkable Re-discovery of
Earth's Early Civilization and of the Growth
of Religious Thought in Man
THE FIRST CIVILIZATION
I. THE TALES OF BABYLON THAT SURVIVED ITS FALL
Fragments of the Historian Berosus (300 B.C.) . 19
II. EARTH'S OLDEST LANGUAGE: THE SUMERIAN
The Locust Charm, Earth's Oldest Text (4000 B.C. or older) 34
A King Buys Land (3200 B.C.) 36
The Royal Inscriptions of Lagash (3000-2500 B.C.) 41
The Dream of Gudea (2500 B.C.) 55
The Destruction of Uruk (2100 B.C.) ... 59
The Oldest Creation Story (2500 B.C.?) ... 60
Charms against Evil Spirits 71
A Hymn to the Storm-God ........ 73
III. TEXTS IN THE AKKADIAN, OR OLDEST SEMITIC TONGUE
A Fragmentary Temple Record (3200 B.C.?) . 79
Agricultural Precepts 80
Philosophy of an Unknown King 85
Chronicles of the First World-Conquerors (2675 B.C.) .87
THE GREAT AGE OF BABYLONIA (2100-1100 B.C.)
IV. THE WRITINGS OF HAMMURAPI (2081 B.C.)
Inscriptions and Letters 109
The First Complete Law Code 114
V. THE CREATION EPIC
VI. THE EPIC OF GlLGAMESH AND THE GODDESS ISHTAR
VII. OTHER RELIGIOUS LEGENDS
Adapa, and the Food of Life 225
The Seven Evil Spirits 233
Charms against the Seven Spirits . . . . 234
Descent of the Goddess Ishtar to the Netherworld .235
VIII. MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL TEXTS .... 243
Babylonian Proverbs 246
A Moralist's Counsel 248
The Babylonian " Ten Commandments ". . 249
A Penitential Psalm ........ 251
The Babylonian "Job" . . . . . . .253
IX. THE TEL-EL-AMARNA LETTERS (1400 B.C.) . . 261
THE GREAT AGE OF ASSYRIA (889-626 B.C.)
X. RECORDS OF THE CONQUERING KINGS .... 355
The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser .... 360
The Nimrod Inscription 373
Inscription of Sargon II 381
Sennacherib's Boast 396
XI. PRAYERS AND MAGIC INCANTATIONS . . . . 413
THE NEO-BABYLONIAN AGE (625-539 B.C.)
XII. NEBUCHADREZZAR AND BELSHAZZAR .... 435
Inscription of Nebuchadrezzar 439
Business Documents of Belshazzar .... 457
The Fall of Babylon: Inscription of Cyrus,
the Aryan Conqueror 460
BIBLIOGRAPHY 463
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ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME I
The Present and the Past Frontispiece
The Oldest Writing in the World . 34
Marduk Destroys the Dragon Tiamat ...... 160
The Walls of Babylon and Temple of Babel . . . . S56
A Human Sacrifice to Baal ......... 320
The Assyrians Assaulting a City 400
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