The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

384 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

the public cult. Indeed, the penitential psalm sometimes very
nearly approaches the incantation in character. On the one side,
it is difficult to distinguish from the psalm a confession like that
from which I quoted just now, and which nevertheless forms
part of a magical ritual; on the other side, the psalm itself at
times degenerates into the language of magic. Babylonia never
shook off the influence of those collections of incantations which
constituted its first sacred book, and gave it its first conception
of a divinely-inspired literature; up to the last the descendants of
the old medicine-man occupied a recognised place in the priestly
hierarchy, and the“Chanter”and“Augur”stood on the same
footing as the“prophet”and the“priest.”
Perhaps it was the same influence which demanded that the
language of the penitential psalm should be the extinct Sumerian.
[419] That some of the psalms went back to Sumerian times and were
composed by Sumerians in their own tongue, I have little doubt;
but it seems also unquestionable that many of the psalms which
have come down to us were of Semitic origin, the Sumerian
version attached to them being really a translation of the original
Semitic text. At all events, penitential psalms were written in
later times in Assyria, whose authors either did not care or did
not know how to provide them with a Sumerian text. It may
be that they did not possess the same sacred authority as the
older psalms, but, like the latter, they were used in the public
services of the northern kingdom with the authorisation of the
king. The king in Assyria, it must be remembered, exercised
the influence that was wielded by the priesthood in the southern
kingdom. The Assyrian psalms, in fact, were like our modern
hymns; the sanctity that surrounded the older penitential psalms
of Babylonia was indeed denied them, but they better suited the
newer age and the character of the Assyrian people, and there
was no omnipotent priesthood to forbid their introduction into
the public cult. They stood, it is true, outside the sacred canon of
Babylonia, in the sense that no dogmas of religion could be built