but changed constantly, each change, however, bringing with it increased simplicity in the shapes of the characters, and a greater departure from the primitive hieroglyphic form. The earliest contemporaneous monuments with which we are at present acquainted, are those recently excavated by the French Consul M. de Sarzec at a place called Tel-Loh; on these we see the early pictures in the very act of passing into cuneiform characters, the pictures being sometimes preserved and sometimes already lost. A comparison of the forms found at Tel-Loh with those usually employed in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, will show at a glance what profound modifications were undergone by the cuneiform syllabary in the course of its transmission from generation to generation. In contrast to the Babylonians, the Assyrians were a nation of warriors and huntsmen, not of students, and with them, therefore, a knowledge of writing was confined to a particular class, that of the scribes. At an early period, accordingly, in the history of the kingdom, a special form of script was adopted not only in official documents, but in private documents as well, and this script remained practically unchanged down to the fall of Nineveh. This form of script was one of the many simplified forms of handwriting that were used in Babylonia, and it was fortunately a very clear and well-defined one. Now and then, it is true, contact with Babylonia made an Assyrian king desirous of imitating the archaic writing of Babylonia, and inscriptions were consequently engraved in florid characters, abounding in a multiplicity of needless wedges, and reminding us of our modern black-letter. Such ornamental inscriptions are not numerous, and were carved only on stone. The clay literature was all written in the ordinary Assyrian characters, except when the scribe was unable to recognise a character in a Babylonian text he was copying, and so reproduced it exactly in his copy. The clay tablets used by the Assyrians were an improvement on those of Babylonia. Instead of being merely dried in the sun, they were thoroughly baked in a kiln, holes being drilled through them here and there to allow the steam to escape. As a rule, therefore, the tablets of Assyria are smaller than those of Babylonia, since there was always a danger of a large tablet being broken in the fire. In consequence of the small size of the tablets, and the amount of text with which it was often necessary to cover them, the characters impressed upon them are frequently minute, so minute, indeed, as to suggest that they must have been written with the help of a magnifying glass. This supposition is confirmed by the existence of a magnifying lens of crystal discovered by Sir A. H. Layard on the site of the library of Nineveh, and now in the British Museum. [Illustration: AN ASSYRIAN BOOK. (_From the original in the British Museum._)]