INTRODUCTION
 

7^ ISCOVERY of the Cuneiform Inscriptions.—The his-
J_^ tory of the ancients has a peculiar charm for us,
which gradually increases as from year to year the
darkness gives way to light through the excavation and
decipherment of the monuments. Until a very recent
date, scholars were accustomed to turn to Egypt for the
beginning of all things. Egyptian literature was the old¬
est, Egyptian civilization the earliest, and from the Egyp¬
tian hieroglyphs, through the Phoenician, our alphabets
were derived. But the cuneiform inscriptions bring an¬
other story, and the seat of the earliest known and most
influential civilization must now be changed from the val¬
ley of the Nile to the country between the Tigris and the
Euphrates, southern Mesopotamia, or, in other words,
Babylonia. These Inscriptions have opened up to us a
history far more interesting and valuable than that written
on the papyri and monuments of Egypt. It deals with a
nation that played an important part In Old Testament his¬
tory and exerted a powerful influence over the chosen
people—with a nation whose literature begins earlier than
that of the Hebrews and runs parallel with it until the latter
are carried into captivity by the former. Although interest¬
ing from a general historical standpoint, this literature is
the more valuable because of its striking similarities to the
Hebrew, and because of the help it brings to an understand¬
ing of the biblical text.

At the beginning of the present century little was