Page:The seven tablets of creation.pdf/16

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XII
PREFACE.

A "practice-tablet," which is inscribed in the Sumerian and Babylonian languages with texts relating to the Creation of the Moon and of the Sun, is also included.

The Appendices contain texts which, for the most part, are closely connected with the interpretation of the Creation Legends, They include:—1. A number of Assyrian commentaries on the Seventh Tablet of the Creation Series, together with fragments of texts which are similar in character to that composition; 2. A NeoBabylonian duplicate of the tablet which has been supposed to belong to the Creation Series and to contain the instructions given to man after his creation, but which is now shown by the new duplicate to be part of a tablet of moral precepts and to have no connection whatsoever with the Creation Series; 3. Part of a large astrological text of the period of the Arsacidac, in which some of the chief personages of the Creation-story appear in astrological characters, and the story itself is interpreted on astrological lines; and 4. The text of the legend which was at one time commonly, but erroneously, believed to contain an Asstyian version of the story of the Tower of Babel. The last appendix contains a "Prayer of the. Raising of the Hand to Ishtar," which belongs to the series of similar compositions already published in my Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (1896); both from the beauty of its language and from its perfect