t necessary to bear in mind what the
previous chapters have aimed to make clear, that religion furnished the
stimulus for the unfolding of intellectual life, and that the literary
and scientific productions represent the work of men primarily
interested in religion. The significance attached as omens to heavenly
phenomena led by degrees to the elaborate astronomical system outlined
in the previous chapter. But the astronomers of Babylonia were priests,
and indeed the same priests who compiled the hymns and incantations.
What is true of astronomy applies to medicine, so far as medicine had an
existence independent of incantations, and also to law. The physician
was a priest, as was the judge and likewise the scribe.

It is natural, therefore, to find that what may be called the great
national epic of the Babylonians was of a religious character. The
interpretation given to the traditions of the past was religious. The
distant past blended with the phenomena of nature in such a way as to
form a strange combination of poetry and realism. But thanks to this
combination, which is essentially a process of the popular mind, the
production that we are about to consider brings us much closer to the
popular phases of the Babylonian religion than does the cosmology or the
zodiacal system.

After all, a nation is much more interested in its heroes and in its own
beginnings, than in the beginnings of things in general. Some
speculation regarding the origin of the universe is perhaps inevitable
the moment that the spirit of inquiry arises, but these speculations are
soon entrusted into the hands of a minority,--the thinkers, the priests,
the astronomers,--who elaborate a system that gradually separates itself
from popular thought and exercises little influence upon the development
of religious ideas among the masses.

The Book of Genesis passes rapidly over the creation of stars, plants,
and animals, as though anxious to reach the history of man, and when it
comes to the traditions regarding the ancestors of the Hebrews, the
details are dwelt upon at length and pictured with a loving hand.
Similarly among the Babylonians, there is a freshness about the story of
the adventures of a great hero of the past that presents a contrast to
the rather abstruse speculations embodied in the creation epic. In this
story, in which a variety of ancient traditions have been combined,
there is comparatively little trace of the scholastic spirit, an