the transfer of animal gods to the sky,[52] no fitter place than Egypt could be found for the transfer. But there have not yet been discovered in Egypt lists of omens and appearances of constellations on days of disaster such as are found in the literature of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and in the Roman historians. Budge speaks of the seven Hathor goddesses who predict the death that the infant must some time die, and affirms that “the Egyptians believed that a man’s fate ... was decided before he was born, and that he had no power to alter it.”[53] But I cannot agree that “we have good reason for assigning the birthplace of the horoscope to Egypt,”[54] since the evidence seems to be limited to the almost medieval Pseudo-Callisthenes and a Greek horoscope in the British Museum to which is attached the letter of an astrologer urging his pupil to study the ancient Egyptians carefully. The later Greek and Latin tradition that astrology was the invention of the divine men of Egypt and Babylon probably has a basis of fact, but more contemporary evidence is needed if Egypt is to contest the claim of Babylon to precedence in that art. [Sidenote: The sources for Assyrian and Babylonian magic.] In the written remains of Babylonian and Assyrian civilization[55] the magic cuneiform tablets play a large part and give us the impression that fear of demons was a leading feature of Assyrian and Babylonian religion and that daily thought and life were constantly affected by magic. The bulk of the religious and magical texts are preserved in the library of Assurbanipal, king of Assyria from 668 to 626 B.C. But he collected his library from the ancient temple cities, the scribes tell us that they are copying very ancient texts, and the Sumerian language is still largely employed.[56] Eridu, one of the main centers of early Sumerian culture, “was an immemorial home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic.”[57] It is, however, difficult in the library of Assurbanipal to distinguish what is Babylonian from what is Assyrian or what is Sumerian from what is Semitic. Thus we are told that “with the exception of some very ancient texts, the Sumerian literature, consisting largely of religious material such as hymns and incantations, shows a number of Semitic loanwords and grammatical Semitisms, and in many cases, although not always, is quite patently a translation of Semitic ideas by Semitic priests into the formal religious Sumerian language.”[58] [Sidenote: Was astrology Sumerian or Chaldean?]