hat is, it will
appear that the civilization of the world has proceeded from a single
centre. But though we are yet far from having reached the very
beginnings of culture, we know that they lie farther back than the
wildest dreams of half a century ago would have imagined. Established
kingdoms existed in Babylonia in the fourth millennium before the
beginning of our era; royal inscriptions have been found which are with
great probability assigned to about the year 3800 B.C. These are, it is
true, of the simplest description, consisting of a few sentences of
praise to a deity or brief notices of a campaign or of the building of a
temple; but they show that the art of writing was known, and that the
custom existed of recording events of the national history. We may
thence infer the existence of a settled civilization and of some sort of
literary productiveness.

The Babylonian-Assyrian writings with which we are acquainted may be
divided into the two classes of prose and poetry. The former class
consists of royal inscriptions (relating to military campaigns and the
construction of temples), chronological tables (eponym canons), legal
documents (sales, suits, etc.), grammatical tables (paradigms and
vocabularies), lists of omens and lucky and unlucky days, and letters
and reports passing between kings and governors; the latter class
includes cosmogonic poems, an epic poem in twelve books, detached
mythical narratives, magic formulas and incantations, and prayers to
deities (belonging to the ritual service of the temples). The prose
pieces, with scarcely an exception, belong to the historical period, and
may be dated with something like accuracy. The same thing is true of a
part of the poetical material, particularly the prayers; but the
cosmogonic and other mythical poems appear to go back, at least so far
as their material is concerned, to a very remote antiquity, and it is
difficult to assign them a definite date.

Whether this oldest poetical material belongs to the Semitic Babylonians
or to a non-Semitic (Sumerian-Accadian) people is a question not yet
definitely decided. The material which comes into consideration for the
solution of this problem is mainly linguistic. Along with the
inscriptions, which are obviously in the Semitic-Babylonian language,
are found others composed of words apparently strange. These are held by
some scholars to represent a priestly, cryptographic writing, by others
to be true Semitic wor