conducted by Mr. George Smith, as well as the later
ones of Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, have added largely to the stock of tablets
from Kouyunjik originally acquired for the British Museum by Sir A. H.
Layard, and have also brought to light a few other tablets from the
libraries of Babylonia. Although, therefore, only one of the many
libraries which now lie buried beneath the ground in Babylonia and Assyria
has, as yet, been at all adequately explored, the amount of Assyrian
literature at the disposal of the student is already greater than that
contained in the whole of the Old Testament. Apart from the help afforded
by the old dictionaries and lists of words and characters, he has more
facilities for determining the meaning of a word by a comparison of
parallel passages than the student of Biblical Hebrew; and in many
instances, accordingly, Assyrian has made it possible to fix the
signification of a Hebrew word, the sense of which has hitherto been
doubtful.

The Assyrian student, moreover, possesses an advantage which is not shared
by the Hebraist. Owing to its hieroglyphic origin, the cuneiform system of
writing makes large use of what are called determinatives, that is to say,
of characters which have no phonetic value, but which determine the class
to which the word they accompany belongs. It is, therefore, always
possible to tell at a glance whether the word with which we are dealing is
the name of a man, of a woman, of a deity, of a river, of a country, or of
a city; or, again, whether it denotes an animal, a bird, a vegetable, a
stone, a star, a medicine, or the like. With all these aids, accordingly,
it is not wonderful that the study of Assyrian has made immense progress
during the last few years, and that an ordinary historical text can be
read with as much certainty as a page from one of the historical books of
the Old Testament. Indeed, we may say that it can be read with even
greater certainty, since it presents us with the actual words of the
original writer; whereas the text of the Old Testament has come to us
through the hands of successive generations of copyists, who have
corrupted many passages so as to make them grammatically unintelligible.

At the same time, the hieroglyphic origin of the cuneiform mode of writing
has been productive of disadvantages as well as of advantages. The
characters which compose it may express ideas as well as sounds; and
though we may know what ideas are represented, we may no