Even the official language and writing were of Asiatic derivation. The language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of the same country. The Babylonian script and language were used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. They were the common medium of intercourse throughout the civilised world. It is in these that an Egyptian official writes to his master, and it is again in these that the reply is sent from the Egyptian foreign office. The fact is a very surprising one, but recent discoveries have tended to explain it. At a very remote epoch Babylonian armies had made their way to the west, and Palestine was a province of Babylonia long before it became a province of Egypt. The long-continued and deep-seated influence of Babylonia brought to it the culture and civilisation of the Babylonian cities. The Babylonian system of writing formed a very important element in this ancient culture, and, along with the language of which it was the expression, took deep root in Western Asia. How long it continued to be employed there may be gathered from the fact that each district of Western Asia developed its own peculiar form of cuneiform script. All this we have learned from a discovery made in 1887 in the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. Among the ruins of the foreign office of Khu-n-Aten, which adjoined the royal palace, the _fellahin_ found a collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. They turned out to be the foreign correspondence of Khu-n-Aten and his father. When Khu-n-Aten quitted Thebes he took with him the archives of his father, and to these were subsequently added the official letters which he himself received. Altogether, about three hundred tablets were discovered. But no one was on the spot who could appreciate their value, and, owing to a series of deplorable accidents, several of them were injured or destroyed before they fell into European hands. Eighty-two found their way to the British Museum, more than 160 fragments are at Berlin, the Gizeh Museum possesses 56, and a few are in the hands of private individuals.