The books of Babylonia and Assyria took the form of thick clay tablets of various sizes. The wedge-shaped characters they bore were made by impressing the wet, soft clay with a triangular-pointed instrument of wood, bone, or metal. The tablet was then baked, and as recent discoveries prove, rendered exceedingly durable. It is a matter of conjecture as to whether the form of the original documents of the Old Testament was that of the Babylonian tablets, or of the Egyptian papyrus rolls, or of rolls of parchment. Perhaps all three were employed by the various biblical writers at different times. It is stretching a point, perhaps, to include among writing materials the tablets of bamboo bark which bore the earliest Chinese characters, since the inscriptions were carved. The Chinese, however, soon discarded such primitive uses, and the paper which is so indispensable to-day was invented by them at a very early date, though it remained unknown to Europe until the Arabs introduced it about the tenth century, A.D. One of the earliest extant writings on paper is an Arabic "Treatise on the Nourishment of the Human Body," written in 960 A.D., but it seems to have been printing which really brought paper into fashion, for paper manuscripts are rare compared with those of parchment and vellum. CHAPTER II THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE It is easier to find the beginning of writing than the beginning of literature. Although we know for certain that the ancient nations of the world had books and libraries, that they preserved traditions, stored records and knowledge, and assisted memory by means of their tablets, their monuments, and their papyri, we shall probably never know when the art of writing was first applied to strictly literary purposes, and still less likely is it that we shall ever discover when works of the imagination were first recorded for the edification of mankind. It is not very rash, however, to assume that as soon as the art had developed the ancients put it to much the same uses as we do, except, perhaps, that they did not vulgarise it, and no one wrote who had not something to write about. But we are not without specimens of antique literatures. Egypt has preserved for us many different specimens of her literary produce of thousands of years ago--historical records, works of religion and philosophy, fiction, magic, and funeral ritual. Assyria has bequeathed to us hundreds of the clay books which formed the great royal library at Nineveh, books of records, mythology, morals, grammar, astronomy, astrology, magic; books of reference, such as geographical tables, lists of temples, plants, birds, and other things. In the Old Testament we have all that now remains of Israelitish writings, and the early literatures of China and India are also partly known to us. After these the writings of Greece and Rome are of comparatively recent origin, and moreover, they are nearer to us in other respects besides the merely chronological.