Page:The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).djvu/163



BABYLONIAN FABLES.

OMBINED with these stories of the gods, traditions of the early history of man, and accounts of the Creation, are fragments of a series in which the various animals speak and act. I call these tablets "Fables" to distinguish them from the others, but, as many of the others are equally fabulous and very similar in style, the name must not be taken to imply any distinctive character in this direction. It is probable that all these stories even in Babylonia were equally believed in by the devout and the ignorant, treated as