Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/17



is no longer any doubt in the present age, that a Babylonian literature did exist, composed of works connected with the arts and sciences, which are nearly always written in a religious form. The age and the character of the intellectual labours of the Chaldæans are uncertain; but there are many evidences, more especially in the monuments that have descended to our days, to prove that Babylon was, from the most remote antiquity, the centre of civilization for all the East. Indeed, although it might appear at the first glance that the literature of Babylon had 1