The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria

[5] Isaiah, xlv. For the Babylonian views contained in this chapter, see Alfred Jeremias, Die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Vorstellungen vom Leben nach dem Tode, pp. 112-116.

[6] Book i. sec. 184.

[7] Book I. ("Clio"), secs. 95, 102, 178-200.

[8] An instructive instance is furnished by the mention of a mystic personage, "Homoroka," which now turns out to be—as Professor J. H. Wright has shown—a corruption of Marduk. (See Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, x. 71-74.)

[9] The excavations are still being continued, thanks to the generosity of some public-spirited citizens of Philadelphia.

[10] The parties concerned rolled their cylinders over the clay tablet recording a legal or commercial transaction.

[11] Besides those at Persepolis, a large tri-lingual inscription was found at Behistun, near the city of Kirmenshah, in Persia, which, containing some ninety proper names, enabled Sir Henry Rawlinson definitely to establish a basis for the decipherment of the Mesopotamian inscriptions.

[12] The best account is to be found in Hommel's Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, pp. 58-134. A briefer statement was furnished by Professor Fr. Delitzsch in his supplements to the German translation of George Smith's Chaldaean Genesis (Chaldäische Genesis, pp. 257-262). A tolerably satisfactory account in English is furnished by B. T. A. Evetts in his work, New Light on the Bible and the Holy Land, pp. 79-129. For a full account of the excavations and the decipherment, together with a summary of results and specimens of the various branches of the Babylonian-Assyrian literature, the reader may be referred to Kaulen's Assyrien und Babylonien nach den neuesten Entdeckungen (5th edition).

[13] The most recent investigations show it to have been a 'Turanian' language. See Weissbach, Achämeniden Inschriften sweiter Art, Leipzig, 1893.

[14] Besides Delitzsch, however, there are others, as Pognon, Jäger, Guyard, McCurdy and Brinton, who side with Halévy.

[15] See now Dr. Brinton's paper, "The Protohistoric Ethnography of Western Asia" (Proceed. Amer. Philos. Soc., 1895), especially pp. 18-22.