Sufficient has been said in the foregoing to suggest the far-reaching importance of Babylonian and Assyrian archaeology and literature for the understanding of the Old Testament. We are able now not only to bring new material in contemporary documents to aid us in its study, we are able also to interpret the life and thought of its people in the light of the larger history, political, institutional, social, moral, legal and religious, of the great family to which Israel belonged. The life of the various members of the ancient semitic stock has been illuminated by the discoveries which began with Botta and Layard. The conditions existing in Canaan prior to the conquest, for example, became clear only with the discovery of the Tell-Amarna tablets in 1887. They were found in the palace of Amenophis on the bank of the Nile about 180 miles south of Cairo and they cast an unexpected light upon the period of the Exodus. Israel, her history, her conquests, her captivities and her religion no longer stand as things apart in which the supernatural has been imminent and active in a manner nowhere else discoverable in the history of the race. A "Thus saith Jehovah," however spiritual the content, can no longer be interpreted as essentially different from a divine communication from the gods of Israel's neighbors and kinsmen. While the Old Testament gave us some information about Babylonia and Assyria prior to the discoveries of their own monuments, a brief account of which is given in the following pages, it must be admitted that it has gained by these discoveries incomparably more than it gave. But we have learned not only about Israel and the Bible, we have learned also much about the earlier Amoritic inhabitants of Palestine who had entered there and spread into Egypt and Babylonia as early as the second half of the third millennium B.C. Much has been won from these records about Egypt and Ethiopia, about the peoples of Arabia, the Hittites, the Aramaeans, Armenians, Elamites, Medes and Persians as well as the early inhabitants of Babylonia, the Sumerians, the original inventors of the cuneiform writing, which was a later development of pictographic symbols. We have learned with astonishment of the advances made in Babylonia in early times in the arts and architecture. Deprived by the nature of their country, in which wood and stone were not to be found, we read of Gudea (Circa 3000 B.C.) bringing diorite from Magan, West Arabia, for his sculptures, some of which are now to be seen in the Louvre collection. The skill of the lapidarist in connection with the cunningly engraved cylinder seals is today the admiration of the best workers in the art of engraving, and the wounded lioness from the palace of Ashurbanipal in the seventh century B.C. is the best portrayal of animal life that has come to us from ancient times. As Professor Sayce has recently shown, the lamp in use in Greece in the historical age, and