dictions, consultation of oracles, observations made by the
royal astrologers, standing orders, accounts of income and expenditure,
even the reports of physicians in regard to the health of members of the
royal family or of the royal household: these documents reveal to us the
whole machinery of government in actual operation, and we almost seem
to witness the secret mechanism by which the kingdom was maintained in
activity. Other tablets contain authentic copies of works which were
looked upon as classics in the sanctuaries of the Euphrates. Probably,
when Babylon was sacked, Sennacherib had ordered the books which
lay piled up in E-Sagilla and the other buildings of the city to
be collected and carried away to Nineveh along with the statues and
property of the gods. They had been placed in the treasury, and there
they remained until Esarhaddon re-established the kingdom of Karduniash,
and Assur-bani-pal was forced to deliver up the statue of Marduk and
restore to the sanctuaries, now rebuilt, all the wealth of which his
grandfather had robbed them: but before sending back the tablets, he
ordered copies to be made of them, and his secretaries set to work to
transcribe for his use such of these works as they considered worthy of
reproduction. The majority of them were treatises compiled by the most
celebrated adepts in the sciences for which Chaldaea had been famous
from time immemorial; they included collections of omens, celestial and
terrestrial, in which the mystical meaning of each phenomenon and
its influence on the destinies of the world was explained by examples
borrowed from the Annals of world-renowned conquerors, such as Naramsin
and Sargon of Agade; then there were formulae for exorcising evil spirits
from the bodies of the possessed, and against phantoms, vampires, and
ghosts, the recognised causes of all disease; prayers and psalms, which
had to be repeated before the gods in order to obtain pardon for sin;
and histories of divinities and kings from the time of the creation down
to the latest date. Among these latter were several versions of the epic
of Grilgames, the story of Etana, of Adapa, and many others; and we
may hope to possess all that the Assyrians knew of the old Chaldaean
literature in the seventh century B.C., as soon as the excavators have
unearthed from the mound at Kouyunjik all the tablets, complete or
fragmentary, which still lie hidden there. Even from the shreds of
information which they