Page:Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions.djvu/17

 forty-four years (2704-2660 B. C.) and Shargalisharri twentyfour years (2660-2636 B. C.). The oldest of the pyramid texts of Egypt was written in the reign of Unis, a king of the fifth dynasty, whose reign, according to Breasted's chronology, was 2655-2625. It seems more probable that our text came from the reign of Naram-Sin than from the reign of Shargalisharri. The bricks of Naram-Sin were three times as numerous in the pavement of the temple court at Nippur as those of his successor. Naram-Sin and Shargalisharri each calls himself, "builder of the temple of Enlil," but it would seem probable that Naram-Sin constructed the terrace early in his reign of forty-four years and that Shargalisharri repaired it after it had had time to fall into disrepair fifty or more years later. If our somewhat uncertain chronologies are correct, Shargalisharri's reign was nearly contemporaneous with that of the Egyptian king Unis, while that of Naram-Sin antedated it. It is more probable that a foundation cylinder would be placed beneath the structure when it was first constructed than when spots in its worn pavement were repaired. It is, accordingly, a plausible conjecture that our cylinder was written early in the reign of Naram-Sin. In that case it is probably half a century older than the pyramid text of Unis and is the oldest extended religious expression that has survived from any portion of the human race.

This consideration gives to the text a supreme interest. It contains a primitive, but comparatively refined strain of religious thought. The men who wrote it entertained the animistic point of view. The world was full of spirits of which they were in terror, but chief among these spirits were gods,