Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/28

20 8. “So for a time his rearing went on for him.

9. “He that reared him rejoiced (?)

10. “His stomach with the milk of man he filled and made him his own son.”

The mutilation of the tablet prevents our knowing whether the story was continued. Its preservation at all is due to a curious accident. It is found in an Accadian reading-book, intended to teach the elements of the extinct Accadian language of primitive Chaldea to Babylonian boys of a later date. Easy passages in Accadian have been selected for the purpose, and provided with Assyrian translations, while the text is interspersed with exercises upon the principal words occuring in them. Thus the phrase “he made him his own son,” is followed by examples of the various ways in which the words composing it could be combined with other parts of speech or replaced by corresponding expressions—“his son,” “his sonship,” “for his sonship,” “for his son he reckoned him,” “in the register of sonship he inscribed him,” &c. Like the lesson-books of our own nurseries, this old Babylonian lesson-book also chose such stories as were likely to interest children, and the author of it wisely took his passages from the folk-lore and fairy-tales of the boys’ nursery rather than from the advanced literature of grown-up men. The story of the foundling was no doubt familiar to Babylonian children, who could fill in the beginning and the end, which are not given in the lesson itself. It would seem, however, that, as in similar tales of the kind, the good angel who rescued the child from the gutter was a king. At all events the whole story is prefaced with the statement that “the king gave his name to the child,” and this statement appears only in the Semitic Assyrian text.

These are the only examples I have yet come across of what can properly be called Babylonian folk-lore. The beast-fables of which we possess several fragments translated in George Smith’s Chaldean Genesis can hardly be reckoned to belong to it. The Accadian proverbs, again, of which I have given translations in the Records of the Past (vol. xi.), must be classed apart, though they throw a good deal of light upon the native wit and daily life of the illiterate country