The days of Hammurabi, as they were politically of great importance, also appear to have ushered in a new era in the religious life of the people. Stirring political events are always apt to bring in their wake intellectual movements, and in a country like Babylonia, where politics react so forcibly on religious conditions, the permanent establishment of the supremacy of the city of Babylon would be fraught with important consequences for the cult. The main change brought about by this new epoch of Babylonian history was, as we have seen, the superior position henceforth accorded in the pantheon to Marduk as the patron deity of Babylon; but this change entailed so many others, that it almost merits being termed a revolution. In order to ensure Marduk's place, the relations of the other deities to him had to be regulated, the legends and traditions of the past reshaped, so as to be brought into consistent accord with the new order of things, and the cult likewise to be, at least in part, remodelled, so as to emphasize the supremacy of Marduk. This work, which was an inevitable one, was primarily of an intellectual order. We are justified, then, in looking for traces of this activity in the remains that have been recovered of ancient Babylonian literature. We know from direct evidence that the commercial life of Babylonia had already, in the period preceding Hammurabi, led to regulated legal forms and practices for the purpose of carrying out obligations and of settling commercial and legal difficulties. The proof has been furnished by Dr. Meissner[139] that syllabaries prepared for the better understanding of the formulas and words employed in preparing the legal and commercial tablets, date, in part, from the period which we may roughly designate as that of Hammurabi,--covering, say, the three centuries 2300 to 2000 B.C. With this evidence for the existence of pedagogues devoted to the training of novices in the art of reading and writing, in order to fit them for their future tasks as official scribes, we are safe in assuming that these same schoolmen were no less active in other fields of literature. If, in addition to this, we find that much of the religious literature, in the shape that we have it, reflects the religious conditions such as they must have shaped themselves in consequence of the promotion of Marduk to the head of the pantheon, the conclusion is forced upon us that such literary productions date from this same epoch of Hammurabi. This influence of the schoolmen while centering, as repeatedly pointed out, around the position of Marduk, manifests itself in a pronounced fashion, also, in the changed position henceforth accorded to the god Ea. It will be recalled that in the earliest period of Babylonian history, Ea does not figure prominently. At the same time we must beware of laying too much stress upon the negative testimony of the historical texts. Besides the still limited material of this character at our disposal, the