Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1917 — READS TABLETS OF AGES AGO [ARTICLE]

READS TABLETS OF AGES AGO

University Professor Discovers Funds* mentals of Christian -Religion Were Evolved 2,500 B. C. Dr. Stephen Langdon has just deciphered tablets in the University of Pennsylvania museum which are thousands of years old. The doctrine of a Messianic hope, of the expectation of deliverance from sin and suffering by a God-man in the shape of a king, goes back to at least 2,500 B. C., when the Sumerian theologians evolved a theory which has been the basis of Jewish and Christian religion ever since, accord* Ing to his discoveries. The new tablets are of Interest because they show that the Sumerians never lost hope that the restoration to a state of sinlessness and happiness through the agency of the gods would come and their faith was pinned on earthly kings who Were deified and worshipped in the hope that one would be a deliverer. Elaborate rituals were made for all of them, but each failed. Then came the Semite conquest of Sumer and the era of pessimism set in, as shown jby the famous epic of Gilgamish, one missing book of which has just been found in the Nippur collection of the University museum. The Semites had no such Messianic hope, since the story of Gilgamish, hero of the epic of Gilgamish, is the antithesis of the restoration of Paradise, and this is the more important because Gilgamish himself was halfgod. It is presumed that the Jews got their idea of a Messiah from the Sumerian epics rather than from their own congeners in Babylonia. The discovery is considered important because Lt shows that the Sumerians who first gave an account of the creation, flood and fall of man, ' which were adopted by the Jews, also provided the first theme of a God- 1 man who should suffer death and re- j deem the people from the loss of i paradise. All of these documents date I from before the time of Abraham and apparently are copies of those much I older. The fundamentals of Jewish ' and Christian religion are shown in tablets at least 4,500 years old.