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 relief 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.3 
1 Compare the exorcism by Tobias of Sara’s demon in Tobit. Langdon, 
Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (op. cit.), p. 223, commenting on the difficulty, 
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.” 
2 Cf. with those of Moses and Sargon the stories of Gilgamesh King of Babylon 
(Z4Elian, XII. 22), of Semiramis Queen of Assyria (Diodorus Siculus, ii. 4), and 
of Karna in the Indian Epic of Mahabharata (Cheyne’s Traditions and Beliefs 
of Ancient Isyael (London, 1907), p. 519. ‘‘ It has been conjectured,” writes 
Frazer (op. cit.), I. p. 454 ff, “‘ that in stories like that of the exposure 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 Celt 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. 
3 See Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (London, 1912), pp. 
135 ff. 
