The tablets have thrown a new and unexpected light on the history of the past. To find that the language and script of Babylonia were the common medium of literary and official intercourse throughout Western Asia in the century before the Exodus was sufficiently startling; it was much more startling to find that this early period was emphatically a literary era. Letters passed to and fro along the high-roads upon the most trifling subjects, and a constant correspondence was maintained between the court of the Pharaoh and the most distant parts of Western Asia. The Bedouin chiefs beyond the Jordan send letters protesting their loyalty to the Egyptian monarch, and declaring that their forces were at his disposal; the vassal-king of Jerusalem begs for help from Egypt to protect him against his personal enemies; the governors of Phœnicia and the land of the Amorites describe the threatening attitude of the Hittites in the north; the king of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim dwells with pride on his relationship to the ruler of the Egyptian empire; while the kings of Assyria and Babylonia ask that gold may be sent them from Egypt, where it is as plentiful as “the dust,” or discuss questions of international policy or commercial interest. We are suddenly transported to a world much like our own;—a world in which education is widely spread, where schools and scholars abound, and libraries and archive-chambers exist. The nature of the cuneiform system of writing would of itself indicate that schools were numerous. It was a system which was extraordinarily difficult to learn. Unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, no assistance was afforded to the memory by any resemblance between the characters and external objects; like the Chinese characters of to-day, they consisted merely of groups of conventionally arranged lines or wedges. Like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, the number of characters was extremely large, and each character not only represented more than one phonetic value, but it could also be used ideographically to express ideas. Thus the same character may not only represent the phonetic values _kur_, _mat_, _nat_, _lat_, _sat_, and _gin_; it may also denote the ideas of “country,” “mountain,” and “conquest.” But this was not all. The original picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldæa, from whom it had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors. Accordingly, whole groups of characters which denoted a particular word in Sumerian—the non-Semitic language of ancient Chaldæa—were taken over by the Semites and used by them to denote the same word, though, of course, with a totally different pronunciation. In Sumerian, for example, _mer-sig_ signified “trousers,” but though the two characters _mer_ and _sig_ continued to be written in Semitic times in order to express the word, the pronunciation attached to them was _sarbillu_, the modern Arabic