The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

382 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

ritual, where the sorcerer first recited the incantation, and then
called upon the individual to repeat it once or oftener after him. It
is another proof of the intimate connection that existed between
the hymns and the incantations out of which they had sprung;
like the Veda or the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of ancient
Chaldæa mixed magic and the spiritual worship of the gods
together in a confusion which seems to us difficult to understand.
It was the same with the penitential psalms which constitute
the third division of the sacred literature of Babylonia. In
many respects they resemble the psalms of the Old Testament.
Like them they are intended for public use, in spite of their
individualistic form; the individual represents the community,
and at times it is the national calamity and the national sin to
which reference is made. After the revolt and reconquest of
Babylon by Assur-bani-pal, when the city was still polluted by
the corpses of those who had perished by famine or the sword,
the prophets^324 ordered that its shrines and temple-roads should
be purified, that its“wrathful gods and angry goddesses”should
be“appeased by prayers and penitential psalms,”and that then,
and only then, the daily sacrifices in the temples should be
offered once more.^325 Doubtless the penitential psalms were in
the first instance the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of the
[417] individual; it was his sufferings that they depicted, and his sins
that they deplored; but as soon as they had been introduced into
the worship of the temple, and become part of the public cult,
the individual element in them fell into the background, and in
the sins and sufferings of the individual both priest and laity saw
those of the whole community.
Like the Hebrew psalms, again, they express the belief that sin
is the cause of suffering and calamity, and that it can be removed
by penitence and prayer to the offended deity. But whereas the
Hebrew monotheist knew of one God only who could inflict

(^324) Literally,“the prophetdom”or“college of prophets”(isipputi).
(^325) WAI.v. 4. 86-91.