Before we have quite done with alphabets, we ought to speak of another system of ancient writing, the cuneiform; which, though it has left no trace of itself on modern alphabets, is the vehicle which preserves some of the most interesting and ancient records in the world. The cuneiform or arrow-shaped character used by the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, is supposed to owe its peculiar form to the material on which it was habitually graven by those who employed it. It arose in a country where the temples were built of unburned brick instead of stone, and the wedge-shaped form of the lines composing the letters is precisely what would be most easily produced on wet clay by the insertion and rapid withdrawal of a blunt-pointed stick or reed. Like all other systems, it began in rude pictures, which gradually came to have a phonetic value, in the same manner as did the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earliest records in this character are graven on the unburned bricks of pyramidal-shaped temples, which a little before the time of Abraham began to be built by a nation composed of mixed Shemite, Cushite, and Scythian (_i.e._ Turanian) peoples round the shores of the Persian Gulf. The invention of the character is ascribed in the records to the Turanian race, the Accadians, who are always designated by the sign of a wedge, which was equivalent to calling them the writers, or the literary people. The Accadians discovered this writing; but it was taken up and wrought to much greater perfection by their successors, the Shemites. In their hands it became the vehicle in which the history of the two great empires of Babylon and Nineveh, and the achievements of ancient Persian kings, have come down to us. For when Nineveh fell before the Persians, they adopted the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians. We have all seen and wondered at the minute writing on the Assyrian marbles and tablets in the British Museum, and stood in awe before the human-headed monster gods-- ‘Their flanks with dark runes fretted o’er,’