What Babylon possessed or acquired in science and poetry, Assyria did not fail to appropriate, just as she used her divisions of the heavens and the year, her weights and measures, her standard of coinage, and her writing from all antiquity. In the ruins of Kuyundshik a great number of tablets have been dug up,[410] copies of old Babylonian originals, which have preserved for us the story of the Babylonians about Chasisathra (Xisuthrus) and the great flood, about the descent of Istar to the under world, and other narratives of a mythical character. In addition to this are prayers and poems, with fragments apparently on cosmogonical subjects, very difficult of interpretation, and hardly to be referred to any definite date. Of especial value for the deciphering of the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform writing are the clay tablets discovered here, on which the cuneiform symbols are explained by placing beside them the phonetic value of the words and inflections, first of the Accadian, that language unknown to us, and then of Babylonian-Assyrian.[411] The use of writing was not less extensive in Babylonia and Assyria than in Egypt. The copious application of it for the purposes of government and legal business has been already mentioned. We are indebted to this for the remains of the list of years and rulers, the synchronistic tablets of the kings of Asshur and Babel, and a long series of private documents from the time of Bin-nirar III. down to the overthrow of the empire. These documents, and the ambition of the kings to retain their names in the buildings which they erected, to set up their images wherever their armies or their dominion advanced, to transfer to the walls of the buildings which they erected their achievements written on cylinders or stone slabs, to adorn the walls of their palaces with pictures of their hunts, their sieges, their victories and triumphs, accompanied by written explanations, have enabled us to restore, at least in its main lines, the lost history of Assyria--a history of which the Greeks have left and could only leave to us the fact that a kingdom of this name existed, and was the foremost power in Hither Asia, along with echoes of Medo-Persian songs about Ninus, Semiramis, and Sardanapalus--from which the Hebrews have retained no more than the names and the acts of the rulers who made their influence most deeply felt in the fortunes of Israel. Yet even the inscriptions of the kings of Asshur do not give us the history of Assyria undefiled. But whatever care they took to represent their successes in the most brilliant light possible--here and there we are driven to the attempt to bring back these accounts to the fact--they are far removed from the extravagance and the voluble assertions of the inscriptions of the Pharaohs. The far more realistic and historical sense of the Assyrians is stamped in their monuments and inscriptions. As they allow us to see, year by year, the activity, the untiring