Unto the church its own,
And the broad lands to Robert gave
(Thou'lt see it figured on his grave);
And now the curse is gone!
The Poem Of Izdubar.
M. François Lenormant, in continuing the publication of his Essay on the Propagation of the Phœnician Alphabet in the Ancient World, and in editing a Selection of Cuneiform Texts, has just issued two volumes of important and interesting studies on Primitive Civilizations.[34]
The steps of this learned writer in the almost unknown regions which he explores so fearlessly, and usually with so much success, are not always perfectly sure; but, with a good faith so natural to him that it does not seem to cost him even an effort, he knows how to retrace his path and correct whatever may require rectification.
Les Premières Civilisations, several portions of which have been published in various collections, reappears developed and raised to the present level attained by scientific discovery. The work opens by a notice of prehistoric archæology and fossil man, the monuments of the neolithic period, and the invention of the use of metals and its introduction into the West. Studies on Egypt follow, including the Poem of Pentaour and the Romance of the Two Brothers. The second volume, with the exception of the “Legend of Cadmus, and the Phœnician Establishments in Greece,” is entirely devoted to Chaldæa, presenting us with a Chaldæan Vêda, or collection of liturgical and devotional hymns in honor of the principal gods worshipped on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates; the biography of a Babylonian prince of the VIIIth century before our era, Merodach Baladan, with whose name the Bible has already made us acquainted;[35] and, lastly, the Babylonian epic poem of Izdubar. It is this last work of which the range is the most general and the value the greatest in connection with the comparative history of the Semitic races, their national genius, and their religious ideas. It touches, amongst other things, upon three points which it is important to put particularly in relief, on account of the manner in which the inferences resulting from them strengthen the ground of Christian apologists—namely, the myths of one of the most important branches of the race of Sem (or, to speak accurately, the race that was equally descended from Sem and Cham), the Assyrio-Chaldæan belief in the immortality of the soul, and the origin of the signs of the Zodiac. There is also a fourth point—that of the tradition of the Deluge.
It has been repeatedly maintained by the sceptic, M. Renan, and is in fact one of his favorite ideas, that the Semites were radically incapable of producing an epic poem. He refuses everything to this race—imagination, the power of invention, the knowledge of the experimental method, philosophy, and science. One thing alone he accords to them—the monotheistic instinct. Now, the cuneiform tablets demonstrate that the sciences, especially those of astronomy and mathematics, held a very considerable place in the intellectual pursuits of the Babylonians [pg 139] and Assyrians. The poem of Erech, published by Mr. G. Smith, is sufficient of itself alone, by means of the fragments which are known to us, to reduce to nothing all the assertions in his history of the Semitic languages, in which M. Renan affirms that “the imagination of the Semitic races has never gone beyond the narrow circle traced around it by the exclusive idea of the divine greatness. God and man, in presence of each other, in the bosom of the desert—behold the summary, or, as it is termed in the present day, the formula, of all their poetry.”[36] Assuredly one never found one's self less in the desert in presence of God alone and of man alone than in the Semitic poems of Chaldæa.