Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/24



HAVE more than once sat down to write a few words about the folk-lore of the ancient Babylonians, but have given up the attempt again on finding how meagre and unsatisfactory are our materials for it. The clay books of the old libraries of Chaldæa and Assyria have furnished us with rich stores of mythology; we have learned that Babylonia was a very treasure-house of myths, many of which subsequently made their way through the hands of the Phœnicians into Greece, and we have even discovered that a particular group or cycle of those myths had been formed into a great epic by Chaldean poets more than four thousand years ago. But while we have myths and religious legends, epic poems and hymns to the gods in abundance, notices of folk-lore, of popular tales and traditions, are scanty in the extreme.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Babylonian literature was necessarily intended for the learned and cultivated, for the very class, in fact, among whom folk-tales are least likely to be found. Royal libraries are the last places in which to look for the unwritten literature of the multitude; folk-lore found its home, not among scribes and savans, but in the houses of the peasantry, and the streets of the bazaar. As yet the “readers” for whom, we are told, the cuneiform books were copied out and edited, had no idea that there was anything worthy of regard in the popular stories of their uneducated countrymen; no Folk-Lore Societies had been thought of, much less founded. It is only by accident, therefore, that a stray folk-tale has here and there found its way into the Babylonian and Assyrian literature which has come down to us.

One of these tales has been preserved through its having gathered round the person of the most munificent patron of literature Babylonia