The ruins where they were found were at first supposed to have been the remains of the royal residence, but further examination indicates this structure as the depository of the royal archives, the abode of the king’s scribe and custodian of documents. It was near the palace though not of it. A portion of these documents were placed in the museum at Cairo, some were obtained for the British Museum, and the remainder by the Royal Museum of Berlin. They include in all three hundred letters from kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mesopotamia and northern Syria, and from subject princes and governors in Palestine and throughout Canaan. Although in cuneiform script, these characters varied with the locality from whence they came. The indications are that this system of writing had been long in use throughout western Asia. The language chiefly used in these documents was the Semitic Babylonian, in the syllabary of the older Turanian form. In one or two cases the writer uses the Babylonian script to express his native language, the speech of the locality from whence the letter was sent, but these instances are rare. In one letter from Tushratta, or Dusratta, king of Mitanni, the first seven lines are in Assyrian, but after this the remaining five hundred and five lines are in his native language, the speech of Mitanni, a language as yet unknown, having never been translated. The meanings of a few words have been determined by Dr. Sayce and other scholars and the indications are that the language was a Mongol dialect, akin to the Accadian. The similarity of some words to those used by the Hittite prince, Tarkondara, who also writes about this time to Amenophis III, indicates this to be of the same family of speech. The writing of this document is syllabic; and in the older cuneiform, with very few determinatives. In some later explorations at Tel-el-Amarna Mr. Petrie came upon some fragments of other tablets in cuneiform which proved to be dictionaries. “In one case the dictionary expresses Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian, and as the Sumerian words are written phonetically as well as ideographically, it would appear that Sumerian must have been still a living language.” On one of these later found tablets, Babylonian words are given to explain words of two other languages, one of which Mr. Boscawen thinks to be old Egyptian. If this is the case it is the only instance in the Tel-el-Amarna collections where this appears. In no other portion of this correspondence is the language of Egypt used. Throughout the vast region represented by these letters, including various races and forms of speech, from the upper Euphrates to Babylonia; from northern Syria to southern Palestine; everywhere, the Babylonian language and Babylonian script were the common medium of literary intercourse in this correspondence.