3. In Babylonia

The Babylonians are usually regarded as the nation among whom magic, in the strict sense of the term, first appeared, although it moat be borne in mind that Babylonian here connotes Sumerian, and that the Babylonian Semites first became acquainted with magic through their Sumerian neighbors. The Medea and Persians were strongly opposed to magic and sturdily resisted the priests of magic coming from Babylonia, India, and Egypt. Neither the Medes nor the Persians can be regarded as the authors of the magic art which later spread from the Orient to Greece and Rome, but the real source of magic was the proto-Babylonian priesthood of the region of the lower Euphrates, whose incantations, written in Sumerian, are doubtless the oldest documents of their class. The Sumerisns seem to have been a "Turanian" people who left their original home in Central Asia and became fused with the Aryan stock south of the Caspian, especially with the Medea, and also with the Semites of the Euphrates valley (see Babylonia, V., §§ 1-2). This worship of the elements and their spirits to which the peoples of central sad northern Asia were devoted thus penetrated into the southwestern part of the continent. In the older magic texts, preserved in numerous clay tablets in the library of Aeshurbanipal (see Assyria, VI., 3, § 14), witchcraft is essentially a system of incantation to avert the power of evil demons, while various gods, especially Es, Marduk, Gibil-Nuaku, and Sin, are invoked as protectors. The entire object was the averting of physical ills and the exorcism of disease-demons, thus presenting numerous parallels with the arts of shamanistic medicine men. It was only this older Babylonian magic, which was still influenced by Sumerian traditions, that was medical, for after the consolidation of the Babylonian kingdom in the second millennium B.c., divination superseded all other forms of magic in Babylonia while astrology spread from Chaldea throughout the west and made the terms Chaldean and astrologer almost synonymous.

In Egypt, which, like Babylonia, was one of the earliest homes of Oriental magic, witchcraft never became overlaid with divination, but always remained essentially a system of mad- 4. In ical exorcism, practised by priestly Egypt medical magicians, and based on sym pathetic cures, the conjuration of hos tile powers of nature, and the banishment of sickness by amulets and the like. The magic papyri of the New Kingdom contain incantations against crocodiles and other noxious creatures, especially serpents, as well as against all sorts of demons, against the evil eye, and against sickness of every kind, and many of their mystic words of power are Assyro-Babylonian in origin.