Lecture I. Introductory. 233
and imperfect, the gaps in it are too numerous, to make anything
of the sort possible. Our knowledge of the religious beliefs of
Babylonia and Assyria is at best only piecemeal. Now and again
we have inscriptions which illustrate the belief of a particular
epoch or of a particular class, or which throw light on a particular
side of the official or popular religions; but such rays of light are
intermittent, and they penetrate the darkness only to be succeeded
by a deeper obscurity than before. All we can hope to do is to
discover the leading conceptions which underlay the religion of
Babylonia in its various forms, to determine and distinguish the
chief elements that went to create it, and to picture those aspects
of it on which our documentary materials cast the most light. But
anything like a systematic description of Babylonian religion will
for many years to come be altogether out of the question; it must
wait until the buried libraries of Chaldæa have been excavated,
and all their contents studied. We are but at the beginning of
discoveries, and the belief that our present conclusions are final
is the belief of ignorance.
As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, the first endeavour of
the student of ancient Babylonian religion must be to distinguish
between the Semitic and non-Semitic elements embodied in it.
And before we can do this we must also distinguish between the
Semitic and non-Semitic elements in our sources of information.
This was the principal task to which I applied myself, and the
failure to recognise the necessity of it has been the main cause of
the little progress that has been made in the study of the subject.
Since I wrote the means for undertaking the task with success [254]
have been multiplied; thanks to the excavations of the French
and American explorers, the pre-Semitic world of Babylonia has
been opened out to us in a way of which we could not have
dreamed; and numberless texts have been found which belong
to the early days of Sumerian or non-Semitic culture. We are
no longer confined to the editions of Sumerian texts made in
later times by Semitic scribes; we now have before us the actual