Chaldean magic : its origin and development / translated from the French ; with considerable additions by the author, and notes by the editor. By François Lenormant.

  • Lenormant, François, 1837-1883.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chaldean magic : its origin and development / translated from the French ; with considerable additions by the author, and notes by the editor. By François Lenormant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    spite of the importance they continued to attach to the Accadian books as a means of religious instruction. In my Etudes Accadiennes I thought I discovered in this same ideographic group the elements of an argu- ment exactly contrary to that urged by M. Oppert. I observed, and so far I hold to my opinion, that the most common meaning of the second sign used in this group, ]^, would give “ordinary language,” lingua familiaris^ lingua domestica, instead of “language of worship;” and I therefore came to the conclusion that the Assyrians had invented this group in order to designate the Sumirians as the people who spoke the same language as themselves, in contrast with the Accadians. This would not be entirely opposed to my new opinion, that the names Sumirians and Accadians were originally applied to two divisions of the same non-Semitic race. Indeed the appella- tion of Sumirians was certainly afterwards used to designate the inhabitants of Babylonia as opposed to those of Chaldea, but without any definite ethnic idea being attached to it. Now it is historically cer- tain, that the Turanian-Accadian element which was gradually supplanted by the Semitic-Assyrian, lost its supremacy and even died out altogether, much more quickly in the north than in the south, in Babylonia than in Chaldea. At the time that their national existence began and their external power arose, the Assyrians would have been quite right in considering the Sumirians, understood in the sense of inhabitants of Babylonia, as a population speaking the same language as themselves ; but that teaches us nothing