d at the penitent's side, instructing him
what to say, and emphasizing the confessions of the penitent by an
assurance to the deity of the sincerity of the penitent, coupled with a
fervent request that the prayer for 'appeasement,' which involved all
that we mean by forgiveness, be graciously answered.

It is unfortunate that the text of none of the penitential psalms is
perfectly preserved. We must, therefore, content ourselves in our
illustrations with more or less imperfect extracts. It is to be noted,
too, that often the exact meaning of the lines escapes us, owing to the
obscurity of terms employed or to the gaps in the texts themselves. With
few exceptions the psalms appear in the double style characteristic of
so large a section of the religious literature of the Babylonians, the
'ideographic' composition being accompanied by a phonetic
transliteration. The fact, however, that we have at least one text (IVR.
59, no. 2) in the phonetic style alone, is sufficient to show that no
_special_ weight is to be attached to the supposed 'bilingual' character
of the others. This double style is not a feature that need be taken
into account in determining the age of this class of compositions. The
historical references in some of them have prompted Zimmern to give his
partial assent to the opinion which would assign them, or some of them,
to the age of Hammurabi. Beyond such references, which are not as clear
as they might be, we have no data through which their age can be
determined; but so far as the ideas which they convey and the religious
spirit manifested in them are concerned, there is no reason why they
should not be assigned to as early a period as some of the incantation
texts. It is characteristic of the Babylonian, as, in a measure, of all
religions, that the old and the new go hand in hand; that more advanced
conceptions, so far from setting aside primitive ones, can live and
thrive in the same atmosphere with the latter. We may, therefore, assume
that penitential psalms existed as early as 2000 B.C. Whether any of
these that have been preserved go back to that period is another
question. One gains the impression from a careful study of them that
most of these, if not all, belong to a somewhat later period, nearer to
the first millennium than to the second millennium before our era. The
Assyrians adopted these psalms, as they did the other features of the
religious literature of the Babylonians, and enriched the