nd rubs the skin without oiling
it." "When sickness is incurable and hunger unappeasable, silver and
gold cannot restore health nor appease hunger." "As the oven waxes old,
so the foe tires of enmity." "The life of yesterday goes on every day."
"When the seed is not good, no sprout comes forth."

The poetical form of all these pieces is characterized by that
parallelism of members with which we are familiar in the poetry of the
Old Testament. It is rhythmical, but apparently not metrical: the
harmonious flow of syllables in any one line, with more or less beats or
cadences, is obvious; but it does not appear that syllables were
combined into feet, or that there was any fixed rule for the number of
syllables or beats in a line. So also strophic divisions may be
observed, such divisions naturally resulting from the nature of all
narratives. Sometimes the strophe seems to contain four lines, sometimes
more. No strophic rule has yet been established; but it seems not
unlikely that when the longer poetical pieces shall have been more
definitely fixed in form, certain principles of poetical composition
will present themselves. The thought of the mythical pieces and the
prayers and hymns is elevated and imaginative. Some of this poetry
appears to have belonged to a period earlier than 2000 B.C. Yet the
Babylonians constructed no epic poem like the (Iliad,) or at any rate
none such has yet been found. Their genius rather expressed itself in
brief or fragmentary pieces, like the Hebrews and the Arabs.

The Babylonian prose literature consists almost entirely of short
chronicles and annals. Royal inscriptions have been found covering the
period from 3000 B.C. to 539 B.C. There are eponym canons, statistical
lists, diplomatic letters, military reports; but none of these rise to
the dignity of history. Several connected books of chronicles have
indeed been found; there is a synchronistic book of annals of Babylonia
and Assyria, there is a long Assyrian chronicle, and there are
annalistic fragments. But there is no digested historical narrative,
which gives a clear picture of the general civil and political
situation, or any analysis of the characters of kings, generals, and
governors, or any inquiry into causes of events. It is possible that
narratives having a better claim to the name of history may yet be
discovered, resembling those of the Biblical Book of Kings; yet the Book
of Kings is scarcely history--neither the Jews nor t