Through these excavations the history of Babylonia has been carried back to the fourth millenium B. C., and while there are still some important gaps to be filled out, the course of events in Babylonia and Assyria from this remote period down to the year 587 B. C., when Cyrus the Mede established a new empire on the ruins of Babylonia and Assyria, is tolerably clear. Hand in hand with the excavations has gone the decipherment of the inscriptions found in such abundance beneath the mounds. On clay, stone, and metals, rulers inscribed records of their reigns; and added to pictorial illustrations accounts of their achievements in war as well as in the internal improvements of their empires. Clay, so readily furnished by the soil, became the ordinary writing material both in Babylonia and in Assyria, and in the course of time an extensive library, embracing hymns and prayers, omens and portents, epics, myths, legends, and creation stories, arose. In every important centre there gathered around the temples bodies of priests devoted to the preservation and the extension of this literature. Assyrian culture being but an offshoot of the civilization in the south, Assyria reaped the benefit of the literary work accomplished by the scribes of Babylonia, and the most extensive collection of the literary remains of Babylonia has come to us from a library collected through the exertions of Asurbanibal, and discovered in 1849 by Layard in the ruins of that king’s palace at Nineveh. [Illustration: THE “MOABITE STONE.” ABOUT B. C. 850. (_Paris, Museum of the Louvre._) Monument dedicated to the god Kemôsh by Mesha, king of Moab (2 Kings 3:4 ff.), to record his victory over the Israelites in the days of Ahab, and the restoration of cities and other works which he undertook by command of his god. The stone, which measures 3 ft. 10 in. × 2 ft. × 14⅓ in., and contains 34 lines of inscription in the so-called Phenician character, was found at Dibân (the Biblical Dibon, Num. 21:30; 32:34, etc.), in the land of Moab, by the German, Rev. F. Klein, in 1868. Unfortunately, soon afterward it was broken in pieces by the Arabs, but about two thirds of the fragments were recovered by the Frenchman, Clermont-Ganneau, and it is possible to give a nearly complete text of the inscription from the paper impression which was taken before the stone was broken.]