t upon
one remarkable lacuna in the religious literature of every Sumerian city
which has been excavated. Prayers of the private cults are almost entirely
nonexistent. Later Babylonian religion is rich in penitential psalms
written in Sumerian for use in private devotions. These are known by the
rubric _ersaggunga_, or prayers to appease the heart. Only one has been
found in the Nippur collection,(22) and none at all have been recovered
elsewhere. Seals of Sumerians showing them in the act of saying their
private prayers abound from the earliest period. Most of these seals
represent the worshipper saluting a deity with a kiss thrown with the
hand. The attitude was described as _su-illa_, or "Lifting of the Hand."
Semitic prayers of the lifting of the hand abound in the religion of
Babylonia and Assyria. Here they are prayers employed in the incantation
ritual. We know from the great catalogue of Sumerian liturgical literature
compiled by the Assyrians that the Sumerians had a large number of prayers
of the lifting of the hand.(23) In Sumerian religion these were apparently
purely private prayers unconnected with the rituals of atonement. At any
rate the Nippur collections in Constantinople and Philadelphia contain a
large number of incantation services for the atonement of sinners and the
afflicted. These resemble and are the originals of the Assyrian
incantation texts of the type _utukku limnuti_, and contain no prayers
either by priest (_kisub_ in later terminology is the rubric of priest's
prayers in incantations) or by penitent (_su-il-la's_). The absence of
prayers of private devotion in the temple library of Nippur is absolutely
inexplicable. Does it mean that the Sumerians were so deficient in
providing for the religious cure of the individual? Their emphasis of the
social solidarity of religion is truly in remarkable contrast to the
religious individualism of the Semite. But the Sumerian historical
inscriptions often contain remarkable prayers of individuals. The seals
emphasize the act of private devotion. The catalogue of their prayers
states that they possessed a good literature for private devotions. When
one considers the evidence which induces to assume that they possessed
such a literature, its total absence in every Sumerian collection is an
enigma which the writer fails to explain.

In the introduction to part two of this volume(24) the writer has
emphasized the peculiarly rich collection of tablets in t