few doubtful texts, the libraries of the
old civilised world of the East were lying underground, waiting to be
disinterred by the excavator and interpreted by the decipherer. Egypt,
Assyria, and Babylonia have yielded up their dead; Arabia, Syria, and
Asia Minor are preparing to do the same. The tombs and temples of Egypt,
and the papyri which have been preserved in the sandy soil of a land
where frost and rain are hardly known, have made the old world of the
Egyptians live again before our eyes, while the clay books of Babylonia
and Assyria are giving us a knowledge of the people who wrote and read
them fully equal to that which we have of Greece or Rome. And yet we are
but at the beginning of discoveries. What has been found is but an
earnest of the harvest that is yet in store. It is but two years since
that the French excavator, de Sarzec, discovered a library of 30,000
tablets at Tello in southern Chaldaea, which had already been formed when
Gudea ruled over the city in B.C. 2700, and was arranged in shelves one
above the other. At Niffer, in the north of Babylonia, the American
excavators have found an even larger number of tablets, some of which go
back to the age of Sargon of Akkad, or 6000 years ago, while fresh
tablets come pouring into the museums of Europe and America from other
libraries found by the Arabs at Bersippa and Babylon, at Sippara and
Larsa. The Babylonia of the age of Amraphel, the contemporary of
Abraham, has, thanks to the recent finds, become as well known to us as
the Athens of Perikles; the daily life of the people can be traced in
all its outlines, and we even possess the autograph letters written by
Amraphel himself. The culture and civilisation of Babylonia were already
immensely old. The contracts for the lease and sale of houses or other
estate, the documents relating to the property of women, the reports of
the law cases that were tried before the official judges, all set before
us a state of society which changed but little down to the Persian era.
Behind it lie centuries of slow development and progress in the arts of
life. The age of Amraphel, indeed, is in certain respects an age of
decline. The heyday of Babylonian art lay nearly two thousand years
before it, in the epoch of Sargon and his son Naram-Sin. It was then
that the Babylonian empire was established throughout western Asia as
far as the Mediterranean, that a postal service was organised along the
highroads which led from