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Updated: May 6, 2025
Long-continued and close observations were necessary, before some of these astronomical results that have reached our times could have been ascertained. Thus the Babylonians had fixed the length of a tropical year within twenty-five seconds of the truth; their estimate of the sidereal year was barely two minutes in excess. They had detected the precession of the equinoxes.
A widespread and apparently very ancient belief among the Babylonians and Assyrians was that certain human beings possessed demoniac power, and could exercise it for evil purposes over whomsoever they pleased. This belief may have originated in the abnormal appearance presented by certain individuals in consequence of physical deformities or peculiarities.
Even as the Babylonians had the Fish, or Fisher, god, Oannes who revealed to them the arts of Writing, Agriculture, etc., and was, as Eisler puts it, 'teacher and lord of all wisdom, so the Chinese Fu-Hi, who is pictured with the mystic tablets containing the mysteries of Heaven and Earth, is, with his consort and retinue, represented as having a fish's tail.
Now a band of ebony archers in leopard skins entered from far Ethiopia, now Bactrian battle-axemen, now yellow-faced Tartars from the northeast, now bright-turbaned Arabs upon their swaying camels,—Syrians, Cilicians, black-bearded Assyrians and Babylonians, thick-lipped Egyptians, came, and many a strange race more.
We possess but few notices, and fewer assured representations, from which to form an opinion of the physical characteristics of the Babylonians. Except upon the cylinders, there are extant only three or four representations of the human forms by Babylonian artists, and in the few cases where this form occurs we cannot always feel at all certain that the intention is to portray a human being.
It is surprising to learn that, previous to their contact with the Greeks, astrology as relating to the individual that is to say, the reading of the stars to determine the conditions under which the individual was born had no place in the cult of the Babylonians and Assyrians.
which means the 'lady of the high or great mountain. The title may have some reference to the great mountain where the gods were supposed to dwell, and which was known to Babylonians as the 'mountain of the lands. Bel, as the chief of the gods, is more particularly associated with this mountain.
Again, the Babylonians did not invent the alphabet; they did not even accept it when all the rest of the world had recognized its value. In grammar and arithmetic, as with astronomy, they seemed not to have advanced greatly, if at all, upon the Egyptians.
They are written in Sumerian, the language spoken by the non-Semitic people whom the Semitic Babylonians conquered and displaced; and they include a very primitive version of the Deluge story and Creation myth, and some texts which throw new light on the age of Babylonian civilization and on the area within which it had its rise.
The incantations accordingly lead us to the next division in the religious literature of the Babylonians, the prayers and hymns. There are some preserved solely in the ideographic style, and others of which we have only the phonetic transliteration. Die Propheten in ihrer ursprünglichen Form, pp. 1, 6.
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