The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

366 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

object of which was to preserve the faithful from disease and
mischief, to ward off death, and to defeat the evil arts of the
witch and the sorcerer. Secondly, there are the hymns to the
gods; and, lastly, the penitential psalms, which resemble in many
respects the psalms of the Old Testament, and were employed
not only by the individual, but also in seasons of public calamity
or dismay. We owe the first discovery of this sacred literature
to the genius of François Lenormant; he it was who first drew
attention to it and characterised its several divisions. It was
François Lenormant, moreover, who pointed out that its nearest
analogue was the Hindu Veda, a brilliant intuition which has
been verified by subsequent research.
Unfortunately our knowledge of it is still exceedingly
imperfect. We are dependent on the fragmentary copies of
it which have come from the library of Nineveh, and which
resemble the torn leaves, mixed pell-mell together, that alone
remain in some Oriental library from vanished manuscripts of
the Bible and the Christian Fathers. Until the great libraries
of Babylonia itself are thoroughly explored, our analysis and
explanation of the sacred literature of the country must be
[400] provisional only; the evidence is defective, and the conclusions
we draw from it must needs be defective as well.
Moreover, the purely ritual texts, which stand to the hymns
in the same relation that the Atharva-Veda stands to theZig-
Veda, have as yet been but little examined. Their translation
is difficult and obscure, and the ceremonies described in them
are but half understood. The ritual, nevertheless, constituted
an important part of the sacred literature, and its rubrics were
regarded with at least as much reverence as the rubrics of the
Anglican Prayer-book. Doubtless the actual words of which they
consisted did not possess the same magical or divine power as
those of the incantations and hymns, they were not—in modern
language—verbally inspired, but they prescribed rites and actions
which had quite as divine and authoritative an origin as the hymns