As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, the first endeavour of the student of ancient Babylonian religion must be to distinguish between the Semitic and non-Semitic elements embodied in it. And before we can do this we must also distinguish between the Semitic and non-Semitic elements in our sources of information. This was the principal task to which I applied myself, and the failure to recognise the necessity of it has been the main cause of the little progress that has been made in the study of the subject. Since I wrote the means for undertaking the task with success have been multiplied; thanks to the excavations of the French and American explorers, the pre-Semitic world of Babylonia has been opened out to us in a way of which we could not have dreamed; and numberless texts have been found which belong to the early days of Sumerian or non-Semitic culture. We are no longer confined to the editions of Sumerian texts made in later times by Semitic scribes; we now have before us the actual inscriptions which were engraved when Sumerian princes still ruled the land, and the Sumerian language was still spoken by their subjects. We can read in them the names of the gods they worshipped, and the prayers which they offered to the spirits of heaven. The materials are at last at hand for determining in some measure what is Sumerian and what is Semitic, and what again may be regarded as a mixture or amalgamation of both. But though the materials are at hand, it will be long before they can all be examined, much less thoroughly criticised. I cannot emphasise too strongly the provisional and imperfect character of our present knowledge of Babylonian literature. Thousands of tablets are lying in the museums of Europe and America, which it will take years of hard work on the part of many students to copy and read. At Tello,(202) M. de Sarzec found a library of more than 30,000 tablets, which go back to the days of the priest-king Gudea; and the great temple of Bel at Nippur in Northern Babylonia has yielded five times as many more to the American excavators. Other excavations by natives or Turkish officials have at the same time brought to light multitudinous tablets from other ancient sites,—from Jokha, near the Shatt el-Hai, and from the ruins of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa. It is true that a large proportion of these tablets are contracts and similar business documents, but they contain much that is of importance not only for the social history of Babylonia, but for its religious history as well. Meanwhile the vast number of texts which have come from the mounds of Nineveh and Sippara is still but imperfectly known; it is only within the last three years that the catalogue of the Kouyunjik collection of tablets, which have been in the British Museum for almost half a century, has been at last completed in five portly volumes; and there still remain the numberless tablets from Babylonia which line the Museum shelves.