g but a prodigiously long lapse of time could explain the firm
hold thus obtained by a foreign language, and a system of writing the
most complex and difficult to learn that has ever been invented.

The tablets further prove the existence throughout the Oriental world of
schools and libraries where the Babylonian language and characters could
be taught and learned and its voluminous literature stored and studied.
The age of Khu-n-Aten, which is also the age of Moses, was essentially a
literary age; a knowledge of reading and writing was widely spread, and
an active correspondence was being constantly carried on from one part
of the civilised world to the other. Even the Bedawin shekhs, who acted
as free-lances in Palestine, sent letters to the Pharaoh and read his
replies. The archive-chambers of the cities of Canaan contained
numberless documents contemporaneous with the events they recorded, and
the libraries were filled with the treasures of Babylonian literature,
with legends and stories of the gods, and the earlier history of the
East. Doubtless, as in Babylonia, so too in Palestine there were also in
them contracts and inventories of property, dated in the Babylonian
fashion by the events which characterised the years of a king's reign.
The scribes and upper classes could read and write, and therefore had
access to all these stores of literature and historical materials.

There is no longer any reason, therefore, for doubting that Moses and
his contemporaries could have read and written books, or that the Hebrew
legislator was learned in "all the wisdom of the Egyptians." If we are
to reject the historical trustworthiness of the Pentateuch, it must be
on other grounds than the assumption of the illiterateness of the age or
the impossibility of compiling at the time an accurate register of
facts. The Tel el-Amarna tablets have made it impossible to return to
the old critical point of view; the probabilities henceforward are in
favour of the early date and historical truth of the Old Testament
narratives, and not against them. Accurately-dated history and a reading
public existed in Babylonia long before the days of Abraham; in the age
of Moses the whole Eastern world from the Nile to the Euphrates was knit
together in the bonds of literary intercourse, and all who were in
contact with the great nations of the East--with Egypt, with Babylonia,
or with Assyria--came of necessity under its influence and held the book