[99] For the influence of the moral ideas of Egypt on Greece, see Amélineau, Essai, chap. xii, pp. 359–399; Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. x; and Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387.
[100] Petrie, Egypt and Israel (1911), p. 133.
[101] Demonism here was not, as it was and is in China (p. 55), a moral educator of the people, for the reason that the spirits were not conceived as the avengers of wrongdoing, but were thought to molest indifferently the good and the bad.
[102] It is not possible, however, to draw a definite chronological line between the nonethical and the ethical texts. Cf. Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 297.
[103] King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (1899), p. 220.
[104] The nature myths constituting the epic literature of the Babylonians, which consisted largely of elaborate tales of the struggle between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, were never moralized like the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, or the Iranian myth of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
[105] Here are a few lines of a penitential prayer or psalm:
O my god who art angry with me, accept my prayer;
* * * * *
May my sins be forgiven, my transgressions be wiped out.