The clay tablets found by the fellahin were discovered on the site of the Foreign Office of the ‘Heretic King,’ the bricks of which were each stamped with the words ‘The Record Office of Aten-Ra.’[131] It adjoined the palace, and we learn from a clay seal found among its ruins by Professor Petrie that it was under the control of a Babylonian. This, however, was not extraordinary, since the foreign correspondence of the Pharaoh was carried on in the Babylonian language and the Babylonian system of writing. In fact, the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown that the Western Asia conquered by the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth dynasty was wholly under the domination of Babylonian culture. All over the civilised Oriental world, from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates to those of the Nile, the common medium of literary and diplomatic intercourse was the language and script of Chaldæa. Not only the writing material, but all that was written upon it, was borrowed from Babylonia. So powerful was this Babylonian influence, that the Egyptians themselves were compelled to submit to it. In place of their own singular and less cumbrous hieratic or cursive script, they had to communicate with their Asiatic subjects and allies in the cuneiform characters and the Babylonian tongue. Indeed, there is evidence that the memoranda made by the official scribes of the Pharaoh’s court, at all events in Palestine, were compiled in the same foreign speech and syllabary.[132] That the Babylonian language and script were studied in Egypt itself we know from the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among them have been found fragments of dictionaries as well as Babylonian mythological tales. In one of the latter certain of the words and phrases are separated from one another in order to assist the learner. The use of the Babylonian language and system of writing in Western Asia must have been of considerable antiquity. This is proved by the fact that the characters had gradually assumed peculiar forms in the different countries in which they were employed, so that by merely glancing at the form of the writing we can tell whether a tablet was written in Palestine or in Northern Syria, in Cappadocia or Mesopotamia. The knowledge of them, moreover, was not confined to the few. On the contrary, education must have been widely spread; the Tel el-Amarna correspondence was carried on, not only by professional scribes, but also by officials, by soldiers, and by merchants. Even women appear among the writers, and take part in the politics of the day. The letters, too, are sometimes written about the most trivial matters, and not unfrequently enter into the most unimportant details.