Project Gutenberg's Babylonian and Assyrian Literature, by Anonymous

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Title: Babylonian and Assyrian Literature

Author: Anonymous

Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10887]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE

COMPRISING THE EPIC OF IZDUBAR, HYMNS, TABLETS, AND CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY EPIPHANIUS WILSON, A.M.

REVISED EDITION

1901

SPECIAL INTRODUCTION

The great nation which dwelt in the seventh century before our era on the
banks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in the
plastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians sometimes
wrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden tablets, or papyrus
brought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive letters of a Phoenician
character. But when they wished to preserve their written documents, they
employed clay tablets, and a stylus whose bevelled point made an
impression like a narrow elongated wedge, or arrow-head. By a combination
of these wedges, letters and words were formed by the skilled and
practised scribe, who would thus rapidly turn off a vast amount of "copy."
All works of history, poetry, and law were thus written in the cuneiform
or old Chaldean characters, and on a substance which could withstand the
ravages of time, fire, or water. Hence we have authentic monuments of
Assyrian literature in their original form, unglossed, unaltered, and
ungarbled, and in this respect Chaldean records are actually superior to
those of the Greeks, the Hebrews, or the Romans.

The literature of the Chaldeans is very varied in its forms. The hymns to
the gods form an important department, and were doubtless employed in
public worship. They are by no means lacking in sublimity of expression,
and while quite unmetrical they are proportioned and emphasized, like
Hebrew poetry, by means of parallelism. In other respects they resemble
the productions of Jewish psalmists, and yet they date as far bac