From these facts other facts follow. The age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty must have been quite as literary as the age of our own eighteenth century, and international correspondence must have been quite as easy, if not easier. Education, moreover, must have been very widely spread; all the civilized world was writing and reading; and the system of writing was a most complicated one, demanding years of study and memory. In spite of this it was known not only to a professional class of scribes and the officials of the Government, but also to the shêkhs of petty Canaanitish towns and even to Bedâwîn chiefs. And along with the system of writing went a knowledge of the foreign language of Babylonia--the French of Western Asia--including some slight acquaintance with the extinct language of the Sumerians. All this presupposes libraries and archive-chambers where books and dispatches could be stored, as well as schools where the Babylonian script and language could be taught and learned. Such libraries and schools had existed in Babylonia from a very early age. Every great city had its library, every great temple its muniment-room. Here the clay books were numbered and arranged on shelves, catalogues being provided which gave their titles. The system under which the longer literary or semi-scientific works were arranged and catalogued was at once ingenious and complete. By the side of the library was naturally the school. Here every effort was made to facilitate the progress of the scholars, more especially in the study of the Sumerian language and texts. The characters of the syllabary were classified and named; comparative grammars, dictionaries and reading-books of Sumerian and Semitic Babylonian were compiled, lists of Semitic synonyms were drawn up, explanatory commentaries were written on older works, and interlinear translations provided for the Sumerian texts. But with all this the cuneiform system of writing must have been hard even for the native Babylonian to learn, and in the case of the foreigner its difficulties were multiplied. It may be doubted whether the average boy of to-day, who finds the spelling of his own English almost too much for him, would have had the memory and patience to learn the cuneiform characters. Even in Sumerian times the difficulty of the task was realized, for there is a Sumerian proverb that “he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn.”[117] It says much for the educational zeal of the Oriental world in the century before the Exodus that it was just this difficult and complicated script which it chose as its medium for correspondence.