ACCADIAN-BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE

BY CRAWFORD H. TOY

Recent discoveries have carried the beginnings of civilization farther and farther back into the remote past.  Scholars are not agreed as to what region can lay claim to the greatest literary antiquity.  The oldest historical records are found in Egypt and Babylonia, and each of these lands has its advocates, who claim for it priority in culture.  The data now at our command are not sufficient for the decision of this question.  It may be doubted whether any one spot on the globe will ever be shown to have precedence in time over all others,—­whether, that is, it will appear that the civilization of the world has proceeded from a single centre.  But though we are yet far from having reached the very beginnings of culture, we know that they lie farther back than the wildest dreams of half a century ago would have imagined.  Established kingdoms existed in Babylonia in the fourth millennium before the beginning of our era; royal inscriptions have been found which are with great probability assigned to about the year 3800 B.C.  These are, it is true, of the simplest description, consisting of a few sentences of praise to a deity or brief notices of a campaign or of the building of a temple; but they show that the art of writing was known, and that the custom existed of recording events of the national history.  We may thence infer the existence of a settled civilization and of some sort of literary productiveness.

The Babylonian-Assyrian writings with which we are acquainted may be divided into the two classes of prose and poetry.  The former class consists of royal inscriptions (relating to military campaigns and the construction of temples), chronological tables (eponym canons), legal documents (sales, suits, etc.), grammatical tables (paradigms and vocabularies), lists of omens and lucky and unlucky days, and letters and reports passing between kings and governors; the latter class includes cosmogonic poems, an epic poem in twelve books, detached mythical narratives, magic formulas and incantations, and prayers to deities (belonging to the ritual service of the temples).  The prose pieces, with scarcely an exception, belong to the historical period, and may be dated with something like accuracy.  The same thing is true of a part of the poetical material, particularly the prayers; but the cosmogonic and other mythical poems appear to go back, at least so far as their material is concerned, to a very remote antiquity, and it is difficult to assign them a definite date.