The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Series A: Cuneiform Texts

Abstract

ONE of the most interesting peoples of the ancient world was the Sumerian race, which founded the great civilisation of Babylonia. The cuneiform writing of western Asia was their invention, and the religious system of Babylon, which had so great an influence upon the Hebrew cult from which Christianity sprang, was originally theirs. Among the spoils of the American expedition to Nippur, in southern Babylonia, which are now being published under the editorship of Prof. Hilprecht, were a large number of the usual clay tablets inscribed with Sumerian hymns to the god Ninib. These are now translated and described by Herr Hugo Radau. That he has done his work well there can be no question, though we may not agree with all the conclusions he draws from his material. The non-Semitic Sumerian language, entirely different from the tongue of the Semitic Babylonians who borrowed the culture, including the script and religion, of the Sumerians, offers peculiar difficulties to the translator, and others may not always agree with the interpretation which Herr Radau gives to individual words and phrases of his texts; but the general sense of the originals is clear enough. Of the religious tone of these hymns, the best idea is to be derived from a perusal of them. We scarcely agree with the exaggerated estimates which their translator, perhaps pardonably, is often led into with regard to them, and his “macrocosmology” and “microcosmology” seem far-fetched. But of the main facts as expounded by him there is no doubt.