Long before the age of Khammurabi a royal post had been established in Babylon for the conveyance of letters. Fragments of clay had been found at Tello, bearing the impressions of seals belonging to the officials of Sargon of Akkad and his successor, and addressed to the viceroy of Lagas, to King Naram-Sin and other personages. They were, in fact, the envelopes of letters and despatches which passed between Lagas and Agadê, or Akkad, the capital of the dynasty. Sometimes, however, the clay fragment has the form of a ball, and must then have been attached by a string to the missive like the seals of mediæval deeds. In either case the seal of the functionary from whom the missive came was imprinted upon it as well as the address of the person for whom it was intended. Thousands of letters seem to have passed to and fro in this manner, making it clear that the postal service of Babylonia was already well organized in the time of Sargon and Naram-Sin. The Tel-el-Amarna letters show that in the fifteenth century before our era a similar postal service was established throughout the Eastern world, from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. To what an antiquity it reached back it is at present impossible to say. At all events, when Khammurabi was King, letters were frequent and common among the educated classes of the population. Most of those which have been preserved are from private individuals to one another, and consequently, though they tell us nothing about the political events of the time, they illustrate the social life of the period and prove how like it was to our own. One of them, for instance, describes the writer’s journey to Elam and Arrapakhitis, while another relates to a ferry-boat and the boat-house in which it was kept. The boat-house, we are told, had fallen into decay in the reign of Khammurabi, and was sadly in want of repair, while the chief duty of the writer, who seems to have been the captain of the boat, was to convey the merchants who brought various commodities to Babylon. If the merchant, the letter states, was furnished with a royal passport, “we carried him across” the river; if he had no passport, he was not allowed to go to Babylon. Among other purposes for which the vessel had been used was the conveyance of lead, and it was capable of taking as much as 10 talents of the metal. We further gather from the letter that it was the custom to employ Bedâwin as messengers.