The Interdependence of Literature | Page 4

a textbook, it is intended to awaken interest in the subject of the interdependence of the literatures of all ages and peoples; and with the hope that a larger and more exhaustive account of a very fascinating subject may some day be published.
Chicago, Ill., June, 1916.
CONTENTS. Ancient Babylonian and Early Hebrew Sanskrit Persian Egyptian Greek Roman Heroic Poetry Scandinavian Slavonic Gothic Chivalrous and Romantic The Drama Arabian Spanish Portuguese French Italian Dutch German Latin Literature and the Reformation Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Philosophy English
ANCIENT BABYLONIAN AND EARLY HEBREW.
From the misty ages of bygone centuries to the present day there has been a gradual interlinking of the literatures of different countries. From the Orient to the Occident, from Europe to America, this slow weaving of the thoughts, tastes and beliefs of people of widely different races has been going on, and forms, indeed, a history by itself.
The forerunner and prophet of subsequent Christian literature is the Hebrew. It is not, however, the first complete written literature, as it was supposed to be until a few years ago.
The oldest Semitic texts reach back to the time of Anemurabi, who was contemporaneous with Abraham, five hundred years before Moses. These Semites possessed a literature and script which they largely borrowed from the older non-Semitic races in the localities where the posterity of Thare and Abraham settled.
Recent researches in Assyria, Egypt and Babylonia has brought this older literature and civilization to light; a literature from which the Hebrews themselves largely drew. Three thousand years before Abraham emigrated from Chaldea there were sacred poems in the East not unlike the psalms of David, as well as heroic poetry describing the creation, and written in nearly the same order as the Pentateuch of Moses.
The story of the Deluge, and other incidents recorded in the Old Testament, together with numerous legends, were known and treasured by the Ancients as sacred traditions from the earliest ages of the world.
We learn from St. Paul that "Moses was skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians." He must therefore have been familiar not only with the ancient poems and sacred writings, but also with the scientific, historical, legal and didactic literature of the times, from which, no doubt, he borrowed all that was best in the Mosiac Code that he drew up for the Chosen People of God. This old literature Moses confirmed and purified, even as Christ at a later period, confirmed and elevated all that was best in the Hebrew belief. Hence from these Oriental scholars we learn that the Hebrew was only one of several languages which enjoyed at different times a development of the highest culture and polish, although the teaching of the old Rabbis was that the Bible was the first set of historical and religious books to be written. Such was the current belief for many ages; and while this view of the Scriptures is now known to be untrue, they are, in fact, the most ancient and complete writings now in existence, although the discovery in Jerusalem, thirty-five or forty years ago, of the inscriptions of Siloe, take us back about eight hundred years before Christ; but these Siloeian inscriptions are not complete examples of literature.
"The Ancient culture of the East," says Professor A. H. Sayce, "was pre-eminently a literary one. We have learned that long before the day of Moses, or even Abraham, there were books and libraries, readers and writers; that schools existed in which all the arts and sciences of the day were taught, and that even a postal service had been organized from one end of Western Asia to the other. The world into which the Hebrew patriarchs were born, and of which the book of Genesis tells us, was permeated with a literary culture whose roots went back to an antiquity of which, but a short time ago, we could not have dreamed. There were books in Egypt and Babylonia long before the Pentateuch was written; the Mosaic age was in fact an age of a widely extended literary activity, and the Pentateuch was one of the latest fruits of long centuries of literary growth."
There is no doubt that these discoveries of modern times have been a distinct gain to Christianity, as well as to the older Hebrew literature, for it confirms (if confirmation is needed), the history of the creation, to find it was believed by the ancient peoples, whom we have seen were a learned and cultivated race.
In the present day the great College of St. Etienne in Jerusalem, founded by the Dominicans expressly for the study of the Scriptures, carries on a never ending and widely extended perusal of the subject. Parties of students are taken over the Holy Places to study the inscriptions and evidences of Christianity, and the most learned and brilliant members