The letters of Tel-el-Amarna bridge over the gulf that separates the early Babylonia of Khammurabi from the later Assyria of Tiglath-pileser III. and his successors. The inner life of the intervening period is still known to us but imperfectly. No library or large collection of tablets belonging to it has as yet been discovered, and until this is the case we must remain less intimately acquainted with it than we are with the age of Khammurabi on the one hand, or that of the second Assyrian empire on the other. It is true that the library of Nineveh, of which Assur-bani-pal was such a munificent patron, has preserved copies of some of the earlier epistolary literature of the country. Thus we have from it a fragment of a letter written by a King of Babylonia to two kings of Assyria, at a time when Assyria still acknowledged the supremacy of Babylon. But such documents are very rare, and apart from the Tel-el-Amarna tablets we have to descend to the days of the second Assyrian empire before we find again a collection of letters. These are the letters addressed to the Assyrian government, or more generally to the King, in the reigns of Tiglath-pileser III., Shalmaneser IV., Sargon, Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, and Assur-bani-pal. They were preserved in the royal library of Nineveh, principally on account of their political and diplomatic importance, and are now in the British Museum. As might have been expected from their character, they throw more light on the politics of the day than on the social condition of the people. A few of them, however, are private communications to the King on other than political matters, and we also find among them reports in the form of letters from the royal astronomers, as well as upon such subjects as the importation of horses from Asia Minor for the royal stud. The letters have been copied by Professor R. F. Harper, who is now publishing them in a series of volumes. How numerous the letters are may be gathered from the fact that no less than 1,575 of them (including fragments) have come from that part of the library alone which was excavated by Sir A. H. Layard, and was the first to be brought to England. Many of them are despatches from generals in the field or from the governors of frontier towns who write to inform the Assyrian government of the movements of the enemy or of the political events in their own neighborhood. It is from these letters, for example, that we learn the name of the King of Ararat who was the antagonist of Sennacherib and the predecessor of the King Erimenas, to whom his murderers fled for protection. The details, again, of the long Elamite war, which eventually laid Susa at the feet of Assyria, have been given us by them. It is needless, therefore, to insist upon the value they possess for the historian.