had
already, in the period preceding Hammurabi, led to regulated legal forms
and practices for the purpose of carrying out obligations and of
settling commercial and legal difficulties. The proof has been furnished
by Dr. Meissner[139] that syllabaries prepared for the better
understanding of the formulas and words employed in preparing the legal
and commercial tablets, date, in part, from the period which we may
roughly designate as that of Hammurabi,--covering, say, the three
centuries 2300 to 2000 B.C. With this evidence for the existence of
pedagogues devoted to the training of novices in the art of reading and
writing, in order to fit them for their future tasks as official
scribes, we are safe in assuming that these same schoolmen were no less
active in other fields of literature. If, in addition to this, we find
that much of the religious literature, in the shape that we have it,
reflects the religious conditions such as they must have shaped
themselves in consequence of the promotion of Marduk to the head of the
pantheon, the conclusion is forced upon us that such literary
productions date from this same epoch of Hammurabi. This influence of
the schoolmen while centering, as repeatedly pointed out, around the
position of Marduk, manifests itself in a pronounced fashion, also, in
the changed position henceforth accorded to the god Ea. It will be
recalled that in the earliest period of Babylonian history, Ea does not
figure prominently. At the same time we must beware of laying too much
stress upon the negative testimony of the historical texts. Besides the
still limited material of this character at our disposal, the
non-mention of a deity may be due to a variety of circumstances, that
may properly be designated as accidental. The gods to whom the kings of
the ancient Babylonian states would be apt to appeal would be, in the
first instance, the local deities, patrons of the city that happened to
be the capital of the state; in the second instance, the gods of the
vanquished towns; and thirdly, some of the great deities worshipped at
the sacred centers of the Euphrates valley, and who constituted, as it
were, the common heritage of the past. Ea, as the god of the Persian
gulf, the region which forms the starting-point of Babylonian culture,
and around which some of the oldest and most precious recollections
center, would come within the radius of the third instance, since, in
the period we have in mind, Eridu no lo