literary material has been “speeded up”.  A staff of skilled workmen has been employed on the laborious task of cleaning the broken tablets and fitting the fragments together.  At the same time the help of several Assyriologists was welcomed in the further task of running over and sorting the collections as they were prepared for study.  Professor Clay, Professor Barton, Dr. Langdon, Dr. Edward Chiera, and Dr. Arno Poebel have all participated in the work.  But the lion’s share has fallen to the last-named scholar, who was given leave of absence by John Hopkins University in order to take up a temporary appointment at the Pennsylvania Museum.  The result of his labours was published by the Museum at the end of 1914.(1) The texts thus made available for study are of very varied interest.  A great body of them are grammatical and represent compilations made by Semitic scribes of the period of Hammurabi’s dynasty for their study of the old Sumerian tongue.  Containing, as most of them do, Semitic renderings of the Sumerian words and expressions collected, they are as great a help to us in our study of Sumerian language as they were to their compilers; in particular they have thrown much new light on the paradigms of the demonstrative and personal pronouns and on Sumerian verbal forms.  But literary texts are also included in the recent publications.

     (1) Poebel, Historical Texts and Historical and
     Grammatical Texts (Univ. of Penns.  Mus.  Publ., Bab.  Sect.,
     Vol.  IV, No. 1, and Vol.  V), Philadelphia, 1914.

When the Pennsylvania Museum sent out its first expedition, lively hopes were entertained that the site selected would yield material of interest from the biblical standpoint.  The city of Nippur, as we have seen, was one of the most sacred and most ancient religious centres in the country, and Enlil, its city-god, was the head of the Babylonian pantheon.  On such a site it seemed likely that we might find versions of the Babylonian legends which were current at the dawn of history before the city of Babylonia and its Semitic inhabitants came upon the scene.  This expectation has proved to be not unfounded, for the literary texts include the Sumerian Deluge Version and Creation myth to which I referred at the beginning of the lecture.  Other texts of almost equal interest consist of early though fragmentary lists of historical and semi-mythical rulers.  They prove that Berossus and the later Babylonians depended on material of quite early origin in compiling their dynasties of semi-mythical kings.  In them we obtain a glimpse of ages more remote than any on which excavation in Babylonia has yet thrown light, and for the first time we have recovered genuine native tradition of early date with regard to the cradle of Babylonian culture.  Before we approach the Sumerian legends themselves, it will be as well to-day to trace back in this tradition the gradual merging of history into legend and myth, comparing at the same time the ancient Egyptian’s picture of his own remote past.  We will also ascertain whether any new light is thrown by our inquiry upon Hebrew traditions concerning the earliest history of the human race and the origins of civilization.