Babylonian and Assyrian Literature

Project Gutenberg's Babylonian and Assyrian Literature, by
Anonymous
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Babylonian and Assyrian Literature
Author: Anonymous
Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10887]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andy Schmitt and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE
COMPRISING THE EPIC OF IZDUBAR, HYMNS, TABLETS,
AND CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY EPIPHANIUS
WILSON, A.M.
REVISED EDITION
1901
SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
The great nation which dwelt in the seventh century before our era on
the banks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in

the plastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians
sometimes wrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden
tablets, or papyrus brought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive
letters of a Phoenician character. But when they wished to preserve
their written documents, they employed clay tablets, and a stylus whose
bevelled point made an impression like a narrow elongated wedge, or
arrow-head. By a combination of these wedges, letters and words were
formed by the skilled and practised scribe, who would thus rapidly turn
off a vast amount of "copy." All works of history, poetry, and law were
thus written in the cuneiform or old Chaldean characters, and on a
substance which could withstand the ravages of time, fire, or water.
Hence we have authentic monuments of Assyrian literature in their
original form, unglossed, unaltered, and ungarbled, and in this respect
Chaldean records are actually superior to those of the Greeks, the
Hebrews, or the Romans.
The literature of the Chaldeans is very varied in its forms. The hymns
to the gods form an important department, and were doubtless
employed in public worship. They are by no means lacking in sublimity
of expression, and while quite unmetrical they are proportioned and
emphasized, like Hebrew poetry, by means of parallelism. In other
respects they resemble the productions of Jewish psalmists, and yet
they date as far back as the third millennium before Christ. They seem
to have been transcribed in the shape in which we at present have them
in the reign of Assurbanipal, who was a great patron of letters, and in
whose reign libraries were formed in the principal cities. The Assyrian
renaissance of the seventeenth century B.C. witnessed great activity
among scribes and book collectors: modern scholars are deeply
indebted to this golden age of letters in Babylonia for many precious
and imperishable monuments. It is, however, only within recent years
that these works of hoar antiquity have passed from the secluded cell of
the specialist and have come within reach of the general reader, or even
of the student of literature. For many centuries the cuneiform writing
was literally a dead letter to the learned world. The clue to the
understanding of this alphabet was originally discovered in 1850 by
Colonel Rawlinson, and described by him in a paper read before the
Royal Society. Hence the knowledge of Assyrian literature is, so far as

Europe is concerned, scarcely more than half a century old.
Among the most valuable of historic records to be found among the
monuments of any nation are inscriptions, set up on public buildings, in
palaces, and in temples. The Greek and Latin inscriptions discovered at
various points on the shores of the Mediterranean have been of
priceless value in determining certain questions of philology, as well as
in throwing new light on the events of history. Many secrets of
language have been revealed, many perplexities of history disentangled,
by the words engraven on stone or metal, which the scholar discovers
amid the dust of ruined temples, or on the cippus of a tomb. The form
of one Greek letter, perhaps even its existence, would never have been
guessed but for its discovery in an inscription. If inscriptions are of the
highest critical importance and historic interest, in languages which are
represented by a voluminous and familiar literature, how much more
precious must they be when they record what happened in the remotest
dawn of history, surviving among the ruins of a vast empire whose
people have vanished from the face of the earth?
Hence the cuneiform inscriptions are of the utmost interest and value,
and present the greatest possible attractions to the curious and
intelligent reader. They record the deeds and conquests of mighty kings,
the Napoleons and Hannibals of primeval time. They throw a vivid
light on the splendid sculptures of Nineveh; they give a new interest