The charms translated below will illustrate the superstition of the
Assyrians and Babylonians. Like the Jews of the Talmud, they believed that
the world was swarming with noxious spirits who produced the various
diseases to which man is liable, and might be swallowed with the food and
the drink that support life. They counted no less than 300 spirits of
heaven and 600 spirits of earth. All this, with the rest of their
mythology, was borrowed by the Assyrians from the primitive population of
Babylonia, who spoke an agglutinative language akin to the dialects of the
Finnic or Tatar tribes. The charms are written in this ancient language,
but Assyrian translations are appended in a column to the right of the
tablet. The legends are lithographed in the "Cuneiform Inscriptions of
Western Asia," Vol. II, plates 17 and 18. They have been translated by M.
Oppert in the "_Journal Asiatique_" of January, 1873, and an analytical
rendering of them is given by M. Fr. Lenormant in his "_Etudes
Accadiennes_" II, I (1874).