was a reformer, upraised apparently by a revolt of the poor. Following down the line of the kings of Lagash, we come at last to Gudea, who, about 2500 B.C., is content once more to call himself merely a priest-king. The inscriptions of Gudea are the first to extend beyond the very barren outlines of his predecessors. There is a moral tone in all he says. His very noted inscriptions boast not only of conquering and building, but of dealing out justice, enforcing law, and sheltering the weak. Two of Gudea's prayers have also come down to us. They are parts of a remarkable narrative written down, upon a clay cylinder, apparently by the king's own order. The tale is now known as "Gudea's Dream," and is by far the most striking literary piece preserved from the old Sumerian. From it we can begin to form a clear conception of the religious thought of Babylonia. Next we come upon a still more important fragment, the oldest of the several Babylonian versions of the creation. We can not date this exactly; but it is Sumerian, and while our present text comes from Nippur, the story is clearly the retelling of a much more ancient tale from a time when Lagash surely, and Nippur perhaps, were unknown. Neither of them is mentioned as one of the originally created cities, though the translator thinks Nippur must have been named in some lost fragment. The oldest place is given to Eridu, the ancient sea-coast city of Berosus's legend of the fish-god. As this old text is so important, and also unfortunately so badly broken, we print with it the explanation of its contents by its recent discoverer. Two other versions of the creation-legend are also given; but these are Sumerian texts preserved from Ashur-banipal's library, and may have been modified by later ideas. One of them, indeed, bodily substitutes Marduk, the great god of Babylon, for some earlier god, as being the chief creator. Hence, these texts do not hold the same positive antiquity as the preceding. The "Charms against Evil Spirits," with which this section closes, are also the transcribed Sumerian of a later age. The old charms were presumably kept in their Sumerian form from a belief that the mere words themselves had a power over evil spirits, just as astrology still seeks in Hebrew or in Arabic the "ineffable name" of magical command. Hence this section, which began with superstition, must also close with it. The venerable Sumerian tongue, after an active employment of uncounted thousands of years, faded in its final usage into a mere hocus-pocus of enchantment. VOL. I.-3. 1 The tablet records the means taken to rid various tracts of land of a plague of locusts and caterpillars. The last line, "he made it bright," refers to the ceremonial purification of the field. 2 The Sumerian words are given here because their great antiquity lends them a special interest. This and the following translation are reprinted, by permission, from the translation by Prof. G. A. Barton in Vol. IX of the University of Pennsylvania publications of the Babylonian section. 3 Column I, case 2, contains two new pictographs: the sun entering its subterranean passage, and a locust. Column I, the edge, presents a new and difficult sign. It is a kind of helmet with a cape at the back, in the manner of a modern Arab kafiych. Two signs were previously known which had descended from a somewhat similar head-dress, though neither of them indicated so complex a picture. I have interpreted this new picture by one of these. 4 Column I, 5, contains the most complete picture of a bird and egg yet found. The oldest form previously known lacked the bill of the bird, so graphically pictured here. |