JULY 1925
THE UNITED AMERICAN
Page Seven
A Story of Man and Creation in the Language of an Ancient People
Records in the Sumerian Language written in Clay Tablets Four to Six Thousand Years ago Reveal a
most interesting Conception of t he Creator and all His Citations
IA7 HEN WE are waxing impatient with the views found tablets which set forth many conflicting accounts
of our fellowmen and project ourselves into the - of the beginning of things, and indications are, accord
future, we should at the same time look into the ing to Dr. Chiera, that the widest possible difference
records of the past and measuring it by the present of opinion existed 4,000 years ago about the origin of
there would be some logic to back up our predictions for mankind. The priests of the Nippur temple, however,
the future.
according to Dr. Chiera, copied accounts as they found
The undisputable records of ancient peoples that them without championing one theory against another
are now being unearthed and translated into modern or showing any of the eagerness which marks contro
languages reveal that those people were as diligently versies of this type in the year A. D. 1925.
in search for a satisfying answer to the mystery of
The priests were engaged in the glorification of
creation as their descendants even into the present the great god, En-Lil, and, so long as the proper wor
time have ever been.
ship was paid to him and the proper gifts made to
A number of tablets of baked clay containing records the temple, they apparently were satisfied. No con
of an ancient people called Sumerians, credited with flict arose between science and religion.
being the race that built the Tower of Babel, were un
The contents of these tablets which was made
earthed some years ago by an expedition from the public on the eleventh of July, 1925, are indicating that
museum of Pennsylvania digging into the sand-hills evolutionary ideas permeated the Sumerian trend of
that cover ancient Babylonia. Some of these tablets thought.
went to Constantinople and some of them were brought
Inasmuch as the Sumerians are credited by many
to the museum of Pennsylvania.
Due to the fact that there are only a few men in scholars with being the earliest race of man having
the world able to read the early Sumerian language developed a real civiliation, they may also to some
in which the tablets were written, the' decipherment extent be credited with being the founders of the
has been a slow process. In twenty- years only about civilization which exists today.
The Sumerian flood story was translated more
one-tenth of the Pennsylvania Museum’s Sumerian
tablets have been translated. Part of these were read than half a century ago by George Smith, the librarian
by Professor George A. Barton. One of the most of the British Museum. The claim that it was the
important was deciphered by Dr. Chiera on his visit original of the Old ..Testament account caused a bitter
a year ago to the Museum of Antiquities in Con controversy due to the intensety with which people
at that time had injected themselves into what has
stantinople.
Dr. Edward Chiera, who is assistant professor in since been called the first evolutionary controversy.
Assyriology of the University of Philadelphia, has just The effort to obtain Government funds to prosecute
made public the translated contents of six of these searches for further. Babylonian tablets was balked
tablets, the inscriptions of which were made two by Gladstone, who denounced the project as an attack
thousand years B. C. or aproximately four thousand on the Bible, and the next expedition into Mesopotamia
was financed by the London Telegraph.
years ago.
The keynote of the Sumerian epic of creation, as
These tablets, which were dug up from a long-
buried school library in Nippur on the Euphrates, give ^lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllllllll!lllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!ll|||lllll||||||llllllilllllllllllll||||||||||||||||lllllllllll>£
an elaborate and complex account of creation, but i
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represent man as having once gone on all fours. They
M. FRUTIGER
make him, however, something akin to the sheep
Dairy
family, not of the monkey. The tablets trace poetically
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Hillsdale
Home
of
Quality Milk
Oregon
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his slow development into a civilized being.
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The great interest in the discovery of the creation 'iiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiiiiiiiiiiini'
story, written on the ancient tablets, lies in the fact
that the famous flood story of the Sumerians is
believed by most Orientalists to have been the basis
for the story of Noah in the Old Testament. Some
Orientalists hold that the cosmogony of the Old Testa
Any kind of lesson at any time and any price
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between 10c and $1.50 an hour, according to number
f
ment is very largely to be traced to Sumerian sources.
of students in class.
Genesis supposedly was written by Moses about the
Methods of instruction based on thorough
i
fourteenth or fifteenth century B. C. The Sumerians
scientific analyses of the process of language
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were writing their creation stories two or three
acquisition by adults and the problems of American
i
citizenship,
as
embodied
in
a
highly
specialized
=
thousand- years earlier.
course of training given by a standard university.
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The creation stories written at Nippur at about
2,000 B. C. are believed to be copies made for school
purposes of stories in themselves thousands of years
662 East 70th Street N.
more ancient.
Phone Garfield 0701
Portland, Oregon
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On the shelves of the buried school at Nippur were
niiiiiiiimuI ..... .
Home School of English
and Citizenship for Adults |
Anna Helene Anderson
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