The need of it is every year becoming more urgent with the ever-growing revelation of the important and far-reaching part played by Babylonian culture in the ancient East. Excavation is just commencing in Asia Minor, and there are many indications that it has startling discoveries and surprises in store for us. Even while my manuscript was in the printer’s hands, Professor Winckler has been examining the cuneiform tablets found by him last spring at Boghaz Keui, on the site of the old Hittite capital in Cappadocia, and reading in them the records of the Hittite kings, Khattu-sil, Sapaluliuma, Mur-sila and Muttallu. Most of the tablets, though written in cuneiform characters, are in the native language of the country, but among them is a version in the Babylonian language of the treaty between the “great king of the Hittites” and Riya-masesa Mai or Ramses II., the Egyptian copy of which has long been known to us. The two Arzawan letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection no longer stand alone; the Boghaz Keui tablets show that an active correspondence was carried on between Egypt and Cappadocia. We must revise our old ideas about an absence of intercourse between different parts of the ancient Oriental world: there was quite as much intercommunication as there is to-day. Elam and Babylonia, Assyria and Asia Minor, Palestine and Egypt, all were linked together by the ties of a common culture; there were no exclusive religions to raise barriers between nation and nation, and the pottery of the Hittites was not only carried to the south of Canaan, but the civilization of Babylonia made its way through Hittite lands to the shores and islands of Greece. On the south, the Ægean became a highway from Asia Minor to Europe, while northward the Troad formed a bridge which carried the culture of Cappadocia to the Balkans and the Danube. A. H. SAYCE. _November_ 1906. [Illustration: THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C.] THE ARCHÆOLOGY OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS CHAPTER I THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS