Assyria close may be regarded as prayers. We are also justified in
assuming that the offering of sacrifices, which formed at all times an
essential feature of the cult, both in Babylonia and Assyria, was always
accompanied by some form of prayer addressed to some deity or to a group
of deities. In view of all this, no sharp chronological line, any more
than a logical one, can be drawn marking off the incantation formulas
from the hymns and prayers pure and simple. The conceptions formed of
the gods in the incantation texts are precisely those which we have
found to be characteristic of them in the period when this phase of the
religion reached its highest development. Ea is the protector of
humanity, Shamash the lord of justice; and, if certain ideas that in the
prayers are attached to the gods--as wisdom to Sin--are absent from the
incantations, it may be regarded rather as an accident than as an
indication of any difference of conception. The pantheon too, barring
the omission of certain gods, is the same that we find it to be in the
historical texts, and the order in which the gods are enumerated
corresponds quite closely with the rank accorded to them in the
inscriptions of the kings. What variations there are are not
sufficiently pronounced to warrant any conclusions. All this points, as
has been emphasized several times, to the subsequent remodeling of the
texts in question. It is true that we find more traces of earlier and
purely mythological notions in the incantations than in the hymns and
prayers, but such notions are by no means foreign to the latter. Even in
those religious productions of Babylonia which represent the flower of
religious thought, we meet with views that reflect a most primitive mode
of thought. The proper view, therefore, to take of the prayers and hymns
is to regard them as twin productions to the magical texts, due to the
same conceptions of the power of the gods, an emanation of the same
religious spirit, and produced at the same time that the incantation
rituals enjoyed popular favor and esteem, and without in any way
interfering with the practice of the rites that these rituals involved.

This position does not of course preclude that among the prayers and
hymns that have been preserved there are some betraying a loftier
spirit, a higher level of religious thought, and more pronounced ethical
tendencies than others. Indeed, the one important result of the
dissociation of the address to