PRIESTS CLAD AS FISH— SARGON— MOSES 387 



fishlike robe to signify that they derived their divinations and 

 incantations from the sacred water, of which Ea was the god. 



In the lower register are drawings of cult utensils, such as 

 holy water bowls, censers, etc., and of the fever demon Labartu, 

 who has been driven from the body of the man and is in flight 

 by boat. The reverse of this bronze has in deep rehef one of the 

 seven devils who is in the act of peering over the upper edge of 

 the bronze, and gazing upon the scene of atonement and magical 

 healing below. 



The cuneiform texts prescribe that fumigation, either for 

 cleansing a person or exorcising a demon, may be performed by 

 the wizard, with or without a censer, a bowl, or lighted torch. ^ 



Apart from its permeation of Israel in legislation as indicated 

 in connection with Hammurabi's Code, the influence of Assyria 

 stands out in other ways clearly. The semi-similarity of 

 treatment of the Deluge has already been noticed, while the 

 rendering in the stories of Sargon and Moses of a widespread 

 legend 2 differs only in such points of detail as the substitution 

 of the Nile or (according to Arabic tradition) of a fish-pond for 

 the Euphrates, and of the irrigator Akki as the discoverer of the 

 chest of reeds for Pharaoh's daughter. ^ 



^ Compare the exorcism by Tobias of Sara's demon in Tobit. Langdon, 

 Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (op. cit.), p. 223, commenting on the difi&culty, 

 which Semitic philology does not clear up, as to whether a wizard is one who 

 cuts himself (as Robertson Smith and most scholars suppose), or whether he is 

 one who casts his spell by whispering or ventriloquy, holds that " from the 

 Sumerian word and the Sumerian ideogram of the word uhdugga which means 

 one who whispers as he casts saliva, we can settle at once the most primitive 

 method of sorcery known to us." 



* Cf . with those of Moses and Sargon the stories of Gilgamesh King of Babylon 

 (^Han, XII. 22), of Semiramis Queen of Assyria (Diodorus Siculus, ii. 4), and 

 of Kama in the Indian Epic of Mahabharata (Cheyne's Traditions and Beliefs 

 of Ancient Israel (London, 1907), p. 519. " It has been conjectured," writes 

 Frazer [op. cit.), II. p. 454 ft, " that in stories like that of the e.xposure of Moses 

 in the water (in this case, unlike most others, all supernatural elements are 

 absent) we have a reminiscence of the old custom as practised by the Celta; on 

 the Rhine, and according to Speke by some Central African tribes in the last 

 century, of testing the legitimacy of children by throwing them into the water 

 to sink or swim ; the infants which sank were rejected as bastards. In the 

 light of this conjecture it may be significant that in several of these stories 

 the birth of the child is represented as supernatural, which in this connection 

 cynics are apt to regard as a delicate synonym for illegitimate." On p. 454 

 he touches on the question whether Moses, the son of Amram by his (Amram's) 

 paternal aunt, was thus the offspring of an incestuous marriage, and therefore 

 exposed on the Nile. 



' See Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (London, 1912), pp. 

 135 ff- 



