# The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East/Volume 1

THE SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF THE EAST
WITH HISTORICAL SURVEYS OF THE CHIEF WRITINGS OF EACH NATION
Translations, Bibliographies, etc., by the following Leading Orientalists:
IN AMERICA:
MORRIS JASTROW, LL.D., Professor of Semitic Languages, University of Pennsylvania; JAMES H. BREASTED, LL.D., Professor of Egyptology, University of Chicago; CHARLES C. TORREY, D.D., Professor of Semitic Languages, Yale University; A. V. W. JACKSON, LL.D., Professor of Indo- Iranian, Columbia University; CHARLES R. LANMAN, LL.D., Professor of Sanskrit, Harvard University; Rev. CHARLES F. AIKEN, S.T.D., Dean of the Faculty of Theology, Catholic University; FRIEDRICH HIRTH, LL.D., Professor of Chinese, Columbia University; Rev. WILLIAM E. GRIFFIS, D.D., former Professor at the Imperial University, Tokio.
IN EUROPE:
E. A. W. BUDGE, F.S.A., Director of Egyptology in the British Museum; Sir GASTON MASPERO, D.C.L., Member of the Royal Institute of France; Rev. A. H. SAYCE. LL.D., Professor of Comparative Philology, Oxford University; W. FLINDERS-PETRIE, LL.D., Professor of Egyptology, University College, London; STEPHEN LANGDON. Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology, Oxford University; Sir ERNEST SATOW, LL.D., G.C.M.G., British Minister to Japan; H. OLDENBERG, LL.D., Professor of Sanskrit, Kiel University; T. W. RHYS-DAVIDS, LL.D., Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society; ARMINIUS VAMBÉRY, LL.D., Professor of Oriental Languages, University of Budapest.
IN ASIA:
Sir M. COOMARA SWAMY, Legislative Council of Ceylon; ROMESH CHUNDER DUTT, C.I.E., Author of the History of Civilization in Ancient India; DARAB D. P. SANJANA. Educational Society of Bombay; Viscount KENCHO SUYEMATSU. LL.M., Japanese Minister of the Interior; SHEIK FAIZ-ULLAH-BHAI, Head Master of the Schools of Anjuman-i-Islam; RALPH T. GRIFFITH, President Benares College, India; JIVANJI JAMSHEDJI MODI, Fellow of Bombay University, Officier de l'Académie Française.
Under the editorship of a staff of specialists directed by Prof. CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
PARKE, AUSTIN, AND LIPSCOMB, Inc. NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright, 1917, Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, Inc.
THE PRESENT AND THE PAST. An ancient Babylonian coffin just excavated, and a child of the region today.
THE SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF THE EAST
VOLUME I
BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA
In Translations by
Morris Jastrow, Jr., LL.D., Librarian and Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Pennsylvania; Rev. A. H. Sayce, LL.D., Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University; Robert W. Rogers, LL.D., Professor of Hebrew in Drew Theological Seminary; George A. Barton, LL.D., President of the American Oriental Society and Professor of Semitic in Bryn Mawr College; Leonard W. King, F.S.A., Assistant in Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum; Stephen Langdon, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology at Oxford University; Arno Poebel, Ph.D., formerly of the University of Pennsylvania Museum; and other noted Babylonian scholars.
With a Brief Bibliography by Prof. Morris Jastrow, Jr., LL.D.
With an Historical Survey and Descriptions by Prof. CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
PARKE, AUSTIN, AND LIPSCOMB, Inc. NEW YORK LONDON
"Let there be light."—Genesis I, 3.
"There never was a false god, nor was there ever really a false religion, unless you call a child a false man."—Max Müller.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WORK
In speaking of the Sacred Books of the East, that great American sage and teacher, Emerson, called them that "class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for each the supreme result of their experience. . . . All these books are the majestic expression of the universal conscience. They are for the closet, and to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life. We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible."
Emerson spoke with but a shadow of our present knowledge of the East. Mighty books unknown to him have since been recovered by modern scientific search. Yet the reader may well take Emerson's words as a hint of how profoundly EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE, even when only the barest fragments of it were known, began at once to shape the thought of our foremost men.
EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE
We ask therefore of the reader a moment's consideration of the sources of the earliest human thought and books. In ​what far distant epoch man first began to think for himself, we do not know. Those half-brutish minds of some long-forgotten "stone age" have left no trace of the vague first "Why?" with which they began mankind's eternal struggle to pierce the infinite. Feeble indeed must have been these earliest efforts of men to reach beyond immediate physical sensation, to understand themselves and the world around them, and the spiritual world which they felt expanding above them and beyond. So completely blank is the abyss of ignorance which our climbing forefathers have left behind them that, up to a century or so ago, mankind had scarcely a grain of knowledge of what had happened in the world three thousand years before.
Back of the Greek wars sung by Homer, we had almost no guide to earlier ages except in our Scriptures, the Old Testament account of the creation, so brief and so often isinterpreted and misunderstood. Beyond this one mighty Book of the past, with its attention centered on the Hebrew race, we possessed only a few loose references in old Greek authors, who mentioned Babylon and Egypt as fading lands of the past, in which the Greeks took little interest.
The nineteenth century changed this widely. The world of three thousand years ago is now almost as clear to us as yesterday's world. Moreover, we can look back twice as far, six thousand years perhaps, and know more of that distant date than our fathers knew of Homer's time. Even beyond six thousand years we have now well-defined glimpses of an earlier age, of races at least semi-civilized in an antiquity for which we have no measuring terms of years.
THE RECENT REDISCOVERY OF THE PAST
Whence has come this tremendous unfolding of the leaves of the past? It is one of the chief triumphs ever gained by human intellect. With wonderful patience and ability, our scientists have sought and compared and studied over all the scattered fragments of antiquity which they have found throughout Asia and North Africa. Not only Egypt and Babylonia, but India, China, Persia, and a score of ​Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 01.djvu/17 ​Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 01.djvu/18
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA
ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME I