ve the stories
for future generations, while a minor factor that may have entered into
consideration would be the pedagogical one of adding to the material for
study that might engage the attention and thoughts of the young
aspirants to sacred and secular lore. While the ultimate aim of learning
in Babylonia remained for all times a practical one, namely, the ability
to act as a scribe or to serve in the cult, to render judicial decisions
or to observe the movements of the stars, to interpret the signs of
nature and the like, it was inevitable that through the intellectual
activity thus evoked there would arise a spirit of a love of learning
for learning's sake, and at all events a fondness for literary pursuits
independent of any purely practical purposes served by such pursuits.

In this way we may account for the rise of the several divisions of the
religious literature of Babylonia. Before turning to a detailed
exposition of each of these divisions, it only remains to emphasize the
minor part taken in all these literary labors by the Assyrians. The
traditions embodied in the cosmological productions, the epics and
legends of Babylonia, are no doubt as much the property of the Assyrians
as of their southern cousins, just as the conceptions underlying the
incantation texts and the hymns and prayers and omens, though produced
in the south, are on the whole identical with those current in the
north. Whatever differences we have discovered between the phases of the
Babylonian-Assyrian religion, as manifested in the north and in the
south, are not of a character to affect the questions and views involved
in the religious literature. The stamp given to the literary products in
this field, taken as a whole, is distinctly Babylonian. It is the spirit
of the south that breathes through almost all the religious texts that
have as yet been discovered. Only in some of the prayers and oracles and
omens that are inserted in the historical inscriptions of Assyrian
kings, or have been transmitted independently, do we recognize the work
of Assyrian _literati_, imbued with a spirit peculiar to Assyria.
Perhaps, too, in the final shape given to the tales connected with the
creation of the gods and of men we may detect an Assyrian influence on
Babylonian thought, some concession made at a period of Assyrian
supremacy to certain religious conceptions peculiar to the north. But
such influences are of an indirect character, and we may accep