The political constitutions of Judah and Israel were, on the whole, very similar to those of the numerous states which shared the territory of Syria between them, and their domestic history gives us a fairly exact idea of the revolutions which agitated Damascus, Hamath, Carchemish, Arpad, and the principalities of Amanos and Lebanon about the same period. It would seem, however, that none of these other nations possessed a literary or religious life of any great intensity. They had their archives, it is true, in which were accumulated documents relating to their past history, their rituals of theology and religious worship, their collections of hymns and national songs; but none of these have survived, and the very few inscriptions that have come down to us merely show that they had nearly all of them adopted the alphabet invented by the Phoenicians. The Israelites, initiated by them into the art of writing, lost no time in setting down, in their turn, all they could recall of the destinies of their race from the creation of the world down to the time in which they lived. From the beginning of the monarchical epoch onwards, their scribes collected together in the _Book of the Wars of the Lord_, the _Book of Jashar_, and in other works the titles of which have not survived, lyrics of different dates, in which nameless poets had sung the victories and glorious deeds of their national heroes, such as the Song of the Well, the Hymn of Moses, the triumphal Ode of Deborah, and the blessing of Jacob.* They were able to draw upon traditions which preserved the memory of what had taken place in the time of the Judges;** and when that patriarchal form of government was succeeded by a monarchy, they had narratives of the ark of the Lord and its wanderings, of Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon,*** not to mention the official records which, since then, had been continuously produced and accumulated by the court historians.**** * The books of _Jashar_ and of the _Wars of the Lord_ appear to date from the IXth century B.C.; as the latter is quoted in the Elohist narrative, it cannot have been compiled later than the beginning of the VIIIth century B.C. The passage in Numb. xxi. lib, 15, is the only one expressly attributed by the testimony of the ancients to the _Book of the Wars of the Lord,_ but modern writers add to this the _Song of the Well _(Numb. xxi. 17b, 18), and the Song of Victory over Moab (Numb. xxi. 27&-30). The _Song of the Bow_ (2 Sam. i. 19-27) admittedly formed part of the _Book of Jashar_. Joshua's Song of Victory over the Amorites (Josh. x. 13), and very probably the couplet recited by Solomon at the dedication of the Temple (1 Kings viii, 12, 13, placed by the LXX. after verse 53), also formed part of it, as also the _Song of Deborah_ and the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. xlix. 1-27).