Sabaean Semitic element grew astrology, the pretended art of forecasting
events by the aspect of the stars, which was most elaborately and
ingeniously developed, until the fame of the Chaldaean astrologers was
spread throughout the ancient world, while the spell of that art held in
thraldom the mind of mediaeval Europe.

Out of the Shamanistic element contributed by the Turanian Accadians, grew
a system of magic and divination which had a most profound influence not
only upon all the Eastern nations, including the Jews, but also upon the
later peoples of the West. mediaeval magic and witchcraft were, in large
part, an unchanged inheritance from Chaldaea.

THE CHALDAEAN GENESIS.--The cosmological myths of the Chaldaeans, that is,
their stories of the origin of things, are remarkably like the first
chapters of Genesis.

[Illustration: ASSYRIAN TABLET WITH PARTS OF THE DELUGE LEGEND.]

The discoveries and patient labors of various scholars have reproduced, in
a more or less perfect form, from the legendary tablets, the Chaldaean
account of the Creation of the World, of an ancestral Paradise and the
Tree of Life with its angel guardians, of the Deluge, and of the Tower of
Babel. [Footnote: Consult especially George Smith's _The Chaldaean
Account of Genesis_; see also _Records of the Past_, Vol. VII. pp.
127, 131.]

THE CHALDAEAN EPIC OF IZDUBAR.--Beside their cosmological myths, the
Chaldaeans had a vast number of so-called heroic and nature myths. The most
noted of these form what is known as the Epic of Izdubar (Nimrod?), which
is doubtless the oldest epic of the race. This is in twelve parts, and is