The archives in the Foreign Office included not only the foreign correspondence of Amon-hotep’s own reign, but the foreign correspondence also of his father, which he had carried with him from Thebes when he founded his new capital at Tel el-Amarna. And the scope and character of it are astounding. There are letters from the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and the Hittites, of Cilicia and Cappadocia, besides letters and communications of all sorts from the Egyptian governors and vassal princes in Canaan and Syria. Most of the correspondence is in the language of Babylonia; it is only in a few rare instances that the cuneiform characters embody the actual language of the people from whom the letters were sent. It is difficult to imagine anything more subversive of the ideas about the ancient history of the East, which were current twenty years ago, than the conclusions to be drawn from this correspondence. It proved that, so far as literary culture is concerned, the civilized Oriental world in the Mosaic age was quite as civilized as our own. There were schools and libraries all over it, in which a foreign language and a complicated foreign system of writing formed an essential part of education. It proved that this education was widely spread: there are letters from Bedâwîn shêkhs as well as from a lady who was much interested in politics. It showed that this correspondence was active and regular, that those who took part in it wrote to each other on the trivial topics of the day, and that the high-roads and postal service were alike well organized. We learned that the nations of the Orient were no isolated units cut off from one another except when one of them made war with the other, but that, on the contrary, their mutual relations were as close and intimate as those of modern Europe. The Babylonian king in his distant capital on the Euphrates sent to condole with the Egyptian Pharaoh on his father’s death like a modern potentate, and was every whit as anxious to protect and encourage the trade of his country as Mr. Chamberlain. Indeed, the privileges of the merchant and the sacredness of his person had long been a matter of international law.