Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/64

46 ancient world, while the spell of that art held in thraldom the mind of mediæval Europe.

Out of the Shamanistic element contributed by the Turanian Accadians, grew a system of magic and divination which had a most profound influence not only upon all the Eastern nations, including the Jews, but also upon the later peoples of the West. Mediæval magic and witchcraft were, in large part, an unchanged inheritance from Chaldæa.

The Chaldæan Genesis.—The cosmological myths of the Chaldæans, that is, their stories of the origin of things, are remarkably like the first chapters of Genesis.

The discoveries and patient labors of various scholars have reproduced, in a more or less perfect form, from the legendary tablets, the Chaldæan account of the Creation of the World, of an ancestral Paradise and the Tree of Life with its angel guardians, of the Deluge, and of the Tower of Babel.

The Chaldaean Epic of Izdubar.—Beside their cosmological