The texts autotypes.--The cuneiform texts further possess an advantage of which the student of the Old and New Testament Scriptures might well be envious. They are the autotypes of the scribes who wrote them for the libraries in the ruins of which they have been found. The texts have never passed through the hands of later copyists little acquainted with the language in which they were composed. The corruptions of the text, such as they are, go back to the scribes of Assur-bani-pal or Nebuchadrezzar, in some cases to the scribes even of the pre-Semitic period. [Illustration: PART OF AN ASSYRIAN BOOK.] Astronomy.--The great work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two chapters or books was originally compiled for the library of Sargon of Accad. It contained chapters on the eclipses or conjunction of the sun and moon, on the planets, the fixed stars, and the comets, and proves that observations of the heavens had been made for a long while previous to its composition. The path of the sun through the signs of the Zodiac had already been mapped out: in fact the Zodiacal Signs owe their origin to the astronomers of Babylonia. At the time they were first named the vernal equinox began with Taurus. Mathematics.--Among the mathematical treatises may be mentioned tables of cube and square roots from the library of Senkereh. The Babylonian system of notation resembled that of the Romans, but by an ingenious application of the sexagesimal system high numbers could be expressed in a very small number of figures. Medicine and law.--The standard work on medicine was voluminous like that on astronomy. It contained a vast number of prescriptions for different diseases, which read very much like modern ones. Law occupied a large space in Babylonian and Assyrian life, and codes of law, which protected the slave as well as the woman, went back to Sumerian times. A considerable part of the law was based on cases which had already been decided by the judges. The judges were appointed by the king, and, at all events in a later age, were under a president. Important cases were heard before several judges at once; thus a case which was tried at Babylon in B.C. 547 was heard before six judges and registered by their two clerks.