in the fifteenth century B.C. It died hard, like the Keltic languages in Great Britain. But Semitic Babylonian was not a mixed language merely because it was the result of an amalgamation of Sumerian and Semitic elements. Like English, it offered hospitality to words from all parts of the known world. The recent discoveries have shown why this must necessarily have been the case. For unnumbered ages Babylonia had been the centre of culture for the whole of western Asia, and at times it had been the political centre of western Asia as well. As we have seen, the empire of Lugal-zaggi-si comprised Mesopotamia and Syria, and extended to the Mediterranean Sea, while that of Sargon and his son Naram-Sin reached from the mountains of Elam to the frontiers of Egypt. It was not only Semitic Babylonian, therefore or Assyrian, as we are accustomed to call it -which was in contact with the Sumerian language of literature and culture; the other Semitic dialects of western Asia were in contact with it too. And when Semitic Babylonian, with its mixed vocabulary and idioms, began to take the place of the older Sumerian, the influence exercised by the literary speech of Babylonia upon these Semitic dialects became greater than before. The influence, moreover, was not onesided. We have learnt from the contract tablets that colonies of Canaanitish and Syrian merchants were settled in Chaldæa, where land was allotted to them, and they enjoyed rights and privileges which allowed them to become Babylonian officials, to act as witnesses in Babylonian courts, and to bring their disputes with native Babylonians before special judges of their own. From a remote period, consequently, all the Semitic dialects of western Asia from the Euphrates and Tigris to the Mediterranean had passed under the influence of the ancient agglutinative language of Chaldæa. The discovery will necessarily revolutionize the current conceptions of Semitic speech. We can no longer be certain that idioms hitherto supposed to be specifically Semitic were not really once borrowed from Sumerian, or that words which have been pronounced to be of genuinely Semitic origin are not Semitized forms of Sumerian derivation. An explanation is at least afforded us of the fact that the Semitic word for "city" ('îr) which has been borrowed from the Sumerian eri or uru, is found in Canaanite and Hebrew, not in Assyrian. The borrowing must go back to the day when the Semitic languages of the west were in contact with the dominant Sumerian, and when the Semitic nomad became acquainted for the first time with the walled and civilized city. The new facts that have been disinterred from the grave of the past furnish a striking confirmation of Professor Hommel's theory, which connects the culture of primitive Egypt with that of primitive Chaldæa, and derives the language of the Egyptians, at all events in part, from a mixed Babylonian language in which Semitic and Sumerian elements alike claimed a share. We now know that such a mixed language did once exist, and we also know that this language and the written characters by which it was expressed were brought to the shores of the Mediterranean and the frontiers of Egypt in the earliest age of Egyptian history. It must have been at this time that the seal-cylinder-that characteristic product of Babylonian industry -made its way to the Nile. It is a mark and token of the Old Egyptian Empire. After the fall of the Sixth Dynasty it disappears, and, though revived for a time under the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty, it then assumed a new and non-Babylonian shape. But the cylinders of the Old Empire are purely Babylonian in form; one in the Gizeh Museum which bears the name of Menkau-Ra, or Mykerinos of the Fourth Dynasty, cannot be distinguished from Babylonian seal-cylinders of the same age, except by its hieroglyphics, and another which I obtained last winter from Elephantine would be pronounced Babylonian were it not for the Egyptian characters upon it. Now the Babylonian seal-cylinder nians, and there contended with Egypt was known to the Egyptians in the very for the possession of the precious mines earliest days of their history, long be- of copper and malachite. Several cenfore the epoch of the Fourth Dynasty, turies later we find the Babylonian it may be of Menes himself, the founder princes still keeping up their relations of the Egyptian monarchy. One of the with the distant West. When a second hieroglyphs used to denote a high officer dynasty arose at Ur (B.C. 2700), whose of state represents a stone cylinder kings made themselves supreme with a string attached to it, as Pro- throughout Babylonia, their vassal fessor Petrie's researches at Mêdûm Gudea, the high priest of Lagas, imhave made clear. The cylinder is of ported materials for his temples and exactly the same shape as those of palaces from all parts of the known Babylonia, where, as we learn from world. Hewn stones were brought Herodotus, the string was employed to from "the land of the Amorites," as fasten the seal to the wrist. It is im- Syria and Palestine were named, alapossible that two peoples should have baster from the Lebanon, cedar beams independently lighted upon so peculiar from the forests of the Amanus, blocks and intricate an invention. In Egypt, of hard stone from Samalum, north of moreover, there was no necessity for the Gulf of Antioch, gold-dust and the use of a seal-cylinder at all, and it acacia-wood from the great "salt" was on this account that with the fall desert which lay between Egypt and of the Old Empire it went out of fash- Canaan, and diorite from the quarries ion. In Babylonia, on the contrary, of the Sinaitic peninsula. Out of this nature itself seemed to force the inven- diorite Chaldean sculptors carved the tion upon the people. Babylonia was seated figures which are now in the an alluvial plain where stone did not Louvre, and which remind us so forexist. Every small pebble, therefore, cibly of Egyptian art in the age of the was precious, while the natural writing Old Empire. It was not the first time, material was clay. Hence it was that however, that the artists of Lagas had Babylonia was the mother-land of seal- sent to Magan for the hard and intraccutting; and hence it was also that the table stone out of which they essayed to easiest way of signing a document was carve the lineaments of the human by rolling an engraved cylinder over the form. Long before the age of Gudea, soft clay. before even that of Sargon of Akkad, when Lagas was the capital of an independent principality, one of its kings, Ur-Nina by name, had dedicated to his god two statues of stone which had been brought from the Sinaitic peninsula. Gudea did but carry on the traditions of the past. There was, then, intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt at the very dawn of history, and the inscription of Lugalzaggi-si, seems to leave no doubt that this intercourse was, in the first instance, carried on by land. When the first ships made their way along the coast of Arabia to the harbors of Egypt we do not know, but it too must have been in a far-off age. Such, at least, is the conclusion to which we are led by the legends of Eridu, once the seaport of prehistoric Chaldæa, though its site is now far removed from the everretreating waters of the Persian Gulf. The intercourse lasted into later ages. Naram-Sin, the successor of Sargon of Akkad, carried his arms to Magan, the name by which Midian and the Sinaitic peninsula were known to the Babylo652 LIVING AGE. VOL. XIII. The library of thirty-three thousand tablets discovered by M. de Sarzec at Telloh, of which I have already spoken, belongs to the age of Gudea. Like the thirty-two thousand tablets and fragments carried away by the American expedition from the ruins of the library of Nippur, the collection contains-to quote the words of Professor Hilprecht -"syllabaries, letters, chronological lists, historical fragments, astronomical and religious texts, building inscriptions, votive tablets, inventories, taxlists, plans of estates, contracts," etc. When to these collections we add the contents of other libraries of the same date, disinterred for the Turkish government, under the direction of Dr. Scheil, at Abu-Habba, or Sippara, at Jokha, or Isin, at Warka, or Erech, and elsewhere, it will be seen that the Assyriologists have plenty of work in store for them, and that even the historical revelations of to-day are likely to be surpassed in interest and importance by those of to-morrow. It is true that the larger number of tablets hitherto found are contracts relating to the lease and sale of property or the trading transactions of the ancient world, but it is also true that it is just these contemporaneous records of a past civilization which throw most light on the social life of early Babylonia and its commercial relations with the rest of the civilized East, while the value to the historian of the dates attached to them cannot be over-estimated. Thanks to the tablets already examined-a fraction though they be of the whole number now in our handsthe history of Babylonia from the period of Gudea onwards is every day becoming clearer and more distinct. We already know as much about the inner life of the Babylonians in the age of Abraham as we do about the inner life of the Greeks in the age of Themistokles. And with this increase of our knowledge has come a widening of our conceptions as to the character and extent of ancient Babylonian culture. It was a culture that had spread throughout the whole of western Asia, and, in the course of centuries, had taken deep root therein. Along with the culture and writing of Chaldæa had gone the language and religion of the Babylonians. The recollection of the empires of Lugal-zaggi-si and Sargon of Akkad never faded away; up to the of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, when conquest had nanded over to the Pharaohs the political power in western Asia once possessed by the Babylonian kings, the sovereigns of Babylonia never forgot their ancient claims to rule in Syria and Palestine. Whenever a dynasty arose strong era enough to bind Babylonia into a united monarchy, it carried its arms to the shores of the Mediterranean and restored the political supremacy of Babylonia in the distant "land of the Amorites." The second dynasty of Ur, under which Gudea lived, was followed by a third dynasty, and numberless contracts exist dated in the reigns of its kings. One of the latter, Ine-Sin by name, for two successive years carried on war against the Phoenician city of Simyra (the Zemar of Gen. x. 18), while his daughter received the fief of Markhasi, now Mer'ash, in northern Syria. His grandson, Gimil-Sin, signalized the first year of his reign by overrunning the land of Zabsali in the Lebanon. The third dynasty of Ur had to make way for what the native chronologists called the first dynasty of Babylon. But this dynasty was not of Babylonian origin. The names borne by the kings show that they must have come from southern Arabia, and spoken a language more closely allied to Hebrew than to Semitic Babylonian. They were Semites indeed; but the native compilers of the philological tablets regarded them as foreigners. Their rise was contemporaneous with other troubles in Babylonia. The country fell under Elamite dominion, and a rival kingdom to that of Babylon was established in the south, with its capital at Larsa, under an Elamite prince. But Canaan and Syria still obeyed the new lords of Chaldæa. Eri-Aku or Arioch, the king of Larsa, calls his father, though at home merely a subordinate Elamite prince, "the father of the land of the Amorites." It was Khammurabi or Ammi-rabi, the Amraphel of Genesis, who finally put an end to this period of disunion and subjection. He rebelled against his Elamite suzerain and attacked his rival at Larsa. The history of the war has now been cleared up for us, partly by some fragmentary tablets recently discovered by Mr. Pinches, partly by letters of Khammurabi himself, which have just been found by Dr. Scheil in the collections at Constantinople. Eri Aku or Arioch had been supported by Kudur-Laghghamar, the king of Elam, and with Elamite help had driven Sinidinnam, the former king of Larsa, out of southern Babylonia. Sin-idinnam fled to the court of the king of Babylon, and there awaited his opportunity. At last Khammurabi felt himself strong enough to proclaim his independence of Elamite authority. At first, however, the tide of war turned against him. Kudur-Laghghamar, the Chedor-laomer of Genesis, summoned to his help the Umman Manda or nomad “nations" of Kurdistan, whose chief apparently was Tudghula, the Tid'al of Genesis, and with their aid he captured Babylon and desecrated its sanctuary of BelMerodach. But the gods came to the assistance of Khammurabi, and in the end he was successful. The yoke of the Elamite was shaken off, Larsa was restored to its former lord, and Khammurabi ruled over an independent and united Babylonia. One of his letters refers to the statues and other presents which he bestowed upon Sin-idinnam "as a recompense for his valor on the day of Kudur-Laghghamar's defeat." But the ruler of united Babylonia was ruler also of western Asia. Khammurabi once more assumes the title of "king of the land of the Amorites," or Syria and Palestine, and his greatgrandson, Ammisatana, calls himself "king of Babylon, of Kis (or Mesopotamia), of Sumer and Akkad (or Babylonia), and of the land of the Amorites." From henceforth Babylon is the acknowledged head of western Asia, and when its political power waned with the rise of that of Egypt its religious and literary influence still remained undiminished. It was not till the days of Darius and Xerxes, and Zoroastrian unbelievers, and the old prestige finally passed away from the city of BelMerodach, and it ceased to be the sacred city of the Oriental world, the Rome of the ancient East, which alone could give a legitimate title to the reviver of the empire of Lugal-zaggi-si. A. H. SAYCE. From Good Words. A TEN SHILLING TRAGEDY. PEACE AT BURNFOOT. Burnfoot is a lonely spot. It lies at the foot of the back avenue to Barncraig, and the wind, stirring among the branches of the great beech trees, whispers uncannily over the three forlorn cottages of which the hamlet consists. The old quarry-hole at the back of the houses is filled with stagnant water, irresistibly suggestive of drowning, which suggestion is not lessened by the known fact that the body of a child was found in the pool some years ago. The scene has other cheerless features. The houses are faced by the Quaker's Mill, whose great waterwheel, stopped by disaster, rots in the weather. The green slopes that shut the lonely hamlet in, run upward till beyond them the eye finds only the bare hilltops and the sky. It is true that a railway crosses the road within sight of the doors, but the mineral trains which flash through the Glen leave it lonelier than ever, as lightning seems only to deepen the darkness by dispelling it for a moment. A few farm carts use the road, which is deeply rutted and overgrown with weeds. The signalman and his family occupy one of the cottages, but the dreariness of Burnfoot has stamped itself even upon this comparatively comfortable household. The children play about noiselessly and their mongrel puppy barks as if its own voice frightened it. Oddly enough, at the time when my story begins, cheerfulness was most at home in the little hamlet where t might least have been looked for, under the roofs of two half ruinous cots, built gable to` gable, wherein dwelt an old man and an old woman who had lived till it seemed as if death had overlooked the meagre harvest of their souls. The elder of the two, Granny Wilde, was a little wizened woman in whom the vital spark had almost burned out. Her furrowed face and knotted hands were of a bloodless pallor and grey with the gathered dirt of years. The skin of her neck clung to the sinews in yellow folds and her bleached eyelids dropped continually, through want of vigor to sustain themselves, over her faded eyes. She moved with difficulty, leaning upon her stick. In the dim background of Granny's consciousness lay a busy life. She had been wife and mother, but the very names of her children could only be summoned out of the past by a strong effort of memory. She lived in the sensations of the moment. Life to her meant tea and soup, scraps of soft meat, a draw of the pipe, the warmth of the fire and the heat of the sun. One passion possessed her whole soul and being. Her spirit's never-failing cry to God and man was for more coal. She thought of little else than the getting of coal and would cunningly twist any conversation round to the subject that lay at her heart. Our little ones at Barncraig watched her store and never allowed it to become quite exhausted; but although she lived chiefly upon our benevolence, we knew that she had little faith in it. She feared the fires of hell less than she feared the extinction of the fire in her grate. It was her custom to hobble up to Barncraig daily, when the weather permitted, for milk and scraps, and often, with amusement, we have watched her prowling round the outhouse where the coal was kept till she could snatch a lump, as she thought, unseen, and bear it off gleefully under her shawl to add to the bing home. at Our mastiff represented to her the powers of evil in the world. The hatred which she bore to him was for long a mystery to us. As she passed by his kennel the dog would almost choke himself upon his chain. His fury explained itself when Granny was caught one day hooking his dish towards her and picking out of it the best of the bones which had been put there that he might whet his great teeth upon them. The feeble old woman, undaunted by his rage, shook her stick at him angrily as she hirpled off in triumph with the tit-bit of his supper under her shawl. It was well that when off the chain Nero was magnanimity itself. The twins often made him carry Granny's soup LO Burnfoot in a can, but no power on earth could induce him to enter uer cottage. He would wait at the door. whining and unhappy, till they reappeared. Granny heeded him not at all. She hated him only as the guardian of the bones, and feared nothing except that her coal might run down. Between Granny Wilde and her neighbor, Danny Mann, a jealous friendliness subsisted. Danny, who was comparatively young, being only a little over eighty years old, could still, at times, do odd jobs for the farmers. Thus he did not live entirely upon charity. It was in the matter of their coal supply that the old couple were permanently jealous of one another. It had become a fixed idea in Granny's mind that her neighbor helped himself from her store, and many an hour she spent staring into Danny's coal-shed in the hope of being able to identify as hers some peculiarly shaped lump of coal. It made Danny cross to find her thus occupied, his idea being that she was feeding the lust of her eye and would no doubt break through and steal at the first convenient opportunity. He labored hard upon the fence between the yards, but the poor crazy barrier wanted for its repair more skill and wood than he possessed. Thus the old couple lived side by side, in outward amity, but with the canker of distrust eating at the roots of their friendship. Danny was nearly as unwashed as his neighbor, but his cheeks were more fleshy, and in the centre of each glowed a patch of crinkly red which seemed to have been stereotyped there by the hand of time. His back was much bent, so that in a sitting posture his small mousey head, with its spotted cheeks and ferretty blue eyes, was |