It may still be asked, did not the Assyrians use other materials also?
Did they not write with ink of some kind on paper, or leather, or
parchment? It is certain that the Egyptians had invented a kind of thick
paper many centuries before the Assyrian power arose; and it is further
certain that the later Assyrian kings had a good deal of intercourse
with Egypt. Under such circumstances, can we suppose that they did not
import paper from that country? Again, the Persians, we are told, used
parchment for their public records. Are not the Assyrians a much more
ingenious people, likely to have done the same, at any rate to some
extent? There is no direct evidence by which these questions can be
determinately answered. No document on any of the materials suggested
has been found. No ancient author states that the Assyrians or the
Babylonians used them. Had it not been for one piece of indirect
evidence, it would have seemed nearly certain that they were not
employed by the Mesopotamian races. In some of the royal palaces,
however, small humps of fine clay have been found, bearing the
impressions of seals, and exhibiting traces of the string by which they
were attached to documents, while the documents themselves, being of a
different material, have perished. It seems probable that in these
instances some substance like paper or parchment was used; and thus we
are led to the conclusion that, while clay was the most common, and
stone an ordinary writing material among the Assyrians, some third
substance, probably Egyptian paper, was also known, and was used
occasionally, though somewhat rarely, for public documents.

[Illustration: Partial PAGE 171]

The number of characters is very great. Sir H. Rawlinson, in the year
1851, published a list of 216, or, including variants, 366 characters,
as occurring in the inscriptions known to him. M. Oppei t, in 1858, gave
318 forms as those "most in use." Of course it is at once evident that
this alphabet cannot represent elementary sounds. The Assyrian
characters do, in fact, correspond, not to letters, according to our
notion of letters, but to syllables. These syllables are either mere
vowel sounds, such as we represent by our vowels and diphthongs, or such
sounds accompanied by one or two consonants.

The vowels are not very numerous. The Assyrians recognize three only as
fundamental--_a, i_, and _u_. Besides these they have the diphthongs
_ai_, nearly equivalent to _e_, and _au_, n