ernors and princes of Palestine and Syria, who were tributary to him. Yet these submissive reports to a proud conqueror are written not in Egyptian, but in Babylonian. Their subjects are of very human interest: excuses for not sending tribute, appeals for help against rebellion, vows of honesty and fidelity mingled with bitter charges of bad faith and disloyalty against their neighbors. All the methods of diplomacy" are here revealed to us as being as old as empire itself. Falsehood and the cunning of the vanquished are shown upon the surface, with brute ferocity beneath, ready to strike heavy when it dares.

ASSYRIAN LITERATURE

When we turn to the Assyrian literature we find it of the same general character as that of the older races, whose thought the Assyrians inherited. The later records of boastful kings still read much like those of Sargon and Hammurapi. Only, with the rougher, fiercer Assyrians, there came into each king's boasting a crueler note, a seeming delight in savagery and torture that pictures the Semitic race at its very worst. The mailed foot of Assyria trampled upon the conquered nations with ten times the destruction that Babylon had wrought.

THE READING OF THE RIDDLE OF THE TEXTS

Our volume gives the examples of these grim historical records which are most noteworthy to-day. The first, the "Inscription of Tiglath-pileser I.," has a special interest from having been the text by which scientific scholars first convinced the world that they had really solved the riddle of these old clay tablets, and could interpret their long-forgotten writing. This happened in 1860. Scholars had before offered translations of other Assyrian writings; but critics pointed out that there was no proof that the tablets really meant what some scholars said they did. So four noted Orientalists established a test. They selected this unknown inscription and each translated it separately. The four translations were then presented to a jury of learned men.

If four men, working separately, could read the same meaning from this ancient script, the meaning must be there. There were some small differences among the translations, such as were inevitable at that early stage of our investigation of Assyrian remains; but upon the whole the agreement of the four Orientalists was so close that the whole world was convinced that the riddle of these strange "cuneiform " texts was really solved.

NEO-BABYLONIAN LITERATURE

The volume contains also a brief review of what little we know of the literature of that other later Babylonian kingdom, the Neo-Babylonian, which triumphed briefly over Assyria's fall. This was the kingdom of Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar, and we give their inscriptions and those of Cyrus, the final conqueror of Babylon, so as to complete the picture of the savage, war-ridden days of this grim childhood of the human race.

THE LEGENDS OF BABYLON

THAT SURVIVED ITS FALL

"They that see thee shall gaze at thee, they shall consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble?"

-ISAIAH XIV. 16.

"And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling-place for jackals, an astonishment and a hissing, without inhabitant."

– JEREMIAH LI. 37.