Although they are nearly five thousand years later, deeper interest attaches to the three hundred and twenty clay tablets, inscribed with the cuneiform character (fig. 41), which were discovered in 1887 among the ruins of Tell-el-Amarna, the Arabic name of a village on the east bank of the Nile, about one hundred and eighty miles south of the once renowned city of Memphis. The village stands on the site of a city founded by Amenophis III., so that the date of the documents, among which are letters received by that king, is known to range from 1500 to 1450 B.C. Two of the tablets contain legends, and one gives a hymn to the war-god, but the larger number comprise communications passing between the kings of Egypt and the kings of Western Asia, many of them being docketed with the date and name of the sender written in Egyptian hieroglyph. One tablet from a Hittite prince is written in the old Akkadian tongue. They furnish valuable information upon the political and commercial relations between Egypt and Babylonia, and upon negotiations between the kings both for wives and subsidies. "Being all in the cuneiform character, they were unlikely to be readily deciphered at the Egyptian court. Hence it was the custom of the Babylonian kings to send interpreters with them, and reference is made to such messengers in several of the letters. But a scribe able to read and write the cuneiform was undoubtedly kept by the Pharaohs for purposes of translation and for inditing replies. Some of the tablets are copies of such replies, written in cuneiform, but retained for reference, just as we in the present day keep copies of important letters." [Illustration: Fig. 43.--Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) OBVERSE.] [Illustration: Fig. 44.--Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) REVERSE.] The actual contents of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets are of secondary importance to the fact that cuneiform writing was in use in Palestine fifteen hundred years before Christ, and, therefore, that Babylonian myths and legends had, in all probability, circulated freely there centuries before the Book of Genesis took shape. Thus the legends of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge, the Chaldean origin of which is established (figs. 42, 43, 44), "can very well have existed in Palestine at the time it was invaded by the Israelites, who would have learned them from the people they subdued, and would have found plenty of time to modify them into the forms in which they appear in Hebrew literature." (_The Witness of Assyria_, p. 11, by Chilperic Edwards.) CHAPTER VI EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS