er hand, there are indications in the language which
warrant us in not passing below 2000 B.C. as the period when many of the
incantation texts received their present form, and the editions were
completed from which many centuries afterwards the Assyrian scribes
prepared their copies for their royal masters.

There is, of course, no reason for assuming that all our texts should be
of one age, or that the copying and, in part, the editing should not
have gone on continually. Necessity for further copies would arise with
the steady growth of the temples. Priests would be engaged in making
copies for themselves, either for their edification as a pious work, or
for real use; and accordingly, in fixing upon any date for the texts,
one can hardly do more than assign certain broad limits within which the
texts, so far as their present contents are concerned, may have been
completed. The _copies_ themselves may of course belong to a much later
period without, for that reason, being more recent productions.

Attention must also be directed to the so-called 'bilingual' form, in
which many of the incantation texts are edited; each line being first
written in the ideographic style, and then followed by a transliteration
into the phonetic style.[342] The use of the ideographic style is a
survival of the ancient period when all texts were written in this
manner, and the conservatism attaching to all things religious accounts
for the continuation of the ideographic style in the religious rituals
down to the latest period, beyond the time when even according to those
who see in the ideographic style a language distinct from Babylonian,
this supposed non-Semitic tongue was no longer spoken by the people, and
merely artificially maintained, like the Latin of the Middle Ages. The
frequent lack of correspondence in minor points between the ideographic
style and the phonetic transliteration shows that the latter was
intended merely as a version, as a guide and aid to the understanding of
the 'conservative' method of writing. It was not necessary for a
transliteration to be accurate, whereas, in the case of a translation,
the greatest care would naturally be taken to preserve the original
sacred text with all nicety and accuracy, since upon accuracy and nicety
the whole efficacy of the formulas rested. The redaction of the
incantation texts in the double style must not be regarded as a
necessary indication of high antiquity, but only as a pr