d one column, and in
three or four corresponding columns would be found, first, the name
assigned to it; secondly, the spelling, in syllables, of the phonetic
values which the signs expressed, thirdly, the Sumerian and Assyrian
words which they served to render, and sometimes glosses which completed
the explanation.

[Illustration: 276.jpg Tables]

Even this is far from exhausting the matter. Several of these
dictionaries went back to a very early date, and tradition ascribes to
Sargon of Agade the merit of having them drawn up or of having collected
them in his palace. The number of them naturally increased in the course
of centuries; in the later times of the Assyrian empire they were so
numerous as to form nearly one-fourth of the works in the library at
Nineveh under Assurbanipal. Other tablets contained dictionaries of
archaic or obsolete terms, grammatical paradigms, extracts from laws
or ancient hymns analyzed sentence by sentence and often word by word,
interlinear glosses, collections of Sumerian formulas translated into
Semitic speech--a child's guide, in fact, which the savants of those
times consulted with as much advantage as those of our own day have
done, and which must have saved them from many a blunder.

When once accustomed to the difficulties and intricacies of their
calling, the scribes were never at a standstill. The stylus was plied
in Chaldaea no less assiduously than was the calamus in Egypt, and the
indestructible clay, which the Chaldaeans were as a rule content to use,
proved a better medium in the long run than the more refined material
employed by their rivals: the baked or merely dried clay tablets have
withstood the assaults of time in surprising quantities, while the
majority of papyri have disappeared without leaving a trace behind.
If at Babylon we rarely meet with those representations, which we find
everywhere in the tombs of Saqqara or Gizeh, of the people themselves
and their families, their occupations, amusements, and daily
intercourse, we possess, on the other hand, that of which the ruins of
Memphis have furnished us but scanty instances up to the present time,
namely, judicial documents, regulating the mutual relations of the
people and conferring a legal sanction on the various events of their
life. Whether it were a question of buying lands or contracting a
marriage, of a loan on interest, or the sale of slaves, the scribe was
called in with his soft tablets to engross th