234 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniainscriptions which were engraved when Sumerian princes still
ruled the land, and the Sumerian language was still spoken by
their subjects. We can read in them the names of the gods they
worshipped, and the prayers which they offered to the spirits of
heaven. The materials are at last at hand for determining in some
measure what is Sumerian and what is Semitic, and what again
may be regarded as a mixture or amalgamation of both.
But though the materials are at hand, it will be long before they
can all be examined, much less thoroughly criticised. I cannot
emphasise too strongly the provisional and imperfect character
of our present knowledge of Babylonian literature. Thousands of
tablets are lying in the museums of Europe and America, which
it will take years of hard work on the part of many students
to copy and read. At Tello,^202 M. de Sarzec found a library
of more than 30,000 tablets, which go back to the days of the
priest-king Gudea; and the great temple of Bel at Nippur in
Northern Babylonia has yielded five times as many more to the
American excavators. Other excavations by natives or Turkish
officials have at the same time brought to light multitudinous
tablets from other ancient sites,—from Jokha, near the Shatt
[255] el-Hai, and from the ruins of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa.
It is true that a large proportion of these tablets are contracts
and similar business documents, but they contain much that is of
importance not only for the social history of Babylonia, but for
its religious history as well. Meanwhile the vast number of texts
which have come from the mounds of Nineveh and Sippara is
still but imperfectly known; it is only within the last three years
that the catalogue of the Kouyunjik collection of tablets, which
have been in the British Museum for almost half a century, has
been at last completed in five portly volumes; and there still
remain the numberless tablets from Babylonia which line the
Museum shelves. And even of what has been catalogued there
(^202) Also written Tello%, on the assumption that the second syllable represents
lo%,“a tablet.”But the native pronunciation is Tello.