The learned professions were well represented. The scribes were a large and powerful body, and in Assyria, where education was less widely diffused than in Babylonia, they formed a considerable part of the governing bureaucracy. In Babylonia they acted as librarians, authors, and publishers, multiplying copies of older books and adding to them new works of their own. They served also as clerks and secretaries; they drew up documents of state as well as legal contracts and deeds. They were accordingly responsible for the forms of legal procedure, and so to some extent occupied the place of the barristers and attorneys of to-day. The Babylonian seems usually, if not always, to have pleaded his own case; but his statement of it was thrown into shape by the scribe or clerk like the final decision of the judges themselves. Under Nebuchadnezzar and his successors such clerks were called “the scribes of the king,” and were probably paid out of the public revenues. Thus in the second year of Evil-Merodach it is said of the claimants to an inheritance that “they shall speak to the scribes of the king and seal the deed,” and the seller of some land has to take the deed of quittance “to the scribes of the king,” who “shall supervise and seal it in the city.” Many of the scribes were priests; and it is not uncommon to find the clerk who draws up a contract and appears as a witness to be described as “the priest” of some deity. The physician is mentioned at a very early date. Thus we hear of “Ilu-bani, the physician of Gudea,” the High-priest of Lagas (2700 B.C.), and a treatise on medicine, of which fragments exist in the British Museum, was compiled long before the days of Abraham. It continued to be regarded as a standard work on the subject even in the time of the second Assyrian empire, though its prescriptions are mixed up with charms and incantations. But an attempt was made in it to classify and describe various diseases, and to enumerate the remedies that had been proposed for them. The remedies are often a compound of the most heterogeneous drugs, some of which are of a very unsavory nature. However, the patient, or his doctor, is generally given a choice of the remedies he might adopt. Thus for an attack of spleen he was told either to “slice the seed of a reed and dates in palm-wine,” or to “mix calves’ milk and bitters in palm-wine,” or to “drink garlic and bitters in palm-wine.” “For an aching tooth,” it is laid down, “the plant of human destiny (perhaps the mandrake) is the remedy; it must be placed upon the tooth. The fruit of the yellow snakewort is another remedy for an aching tooth; it must be placed upon the tooth.… The roots of a thorn which does not see the sun when growing is another remedy for an aching tooth; it must be placed upon the tooth.” Unfortunately it is still impossible to assign a precise signification to most of the drugs that are named, or to identify the various herbs contained in the Babylonian pharmacopœia.