THE CCTNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS OP TEL EL-AMARNA. 5 



where the Babylonian language and literature were taught 

 and learned. Babylonian, in fact, was as much the language 

 of diplomacy and cultivated society as French has been in 

 modern times, with the difference that, whereas it does not 

 take long to learn to read French, the cuneiform syllabary 

 required years of hard labour and attention before it could be 

 acquired. "We can now understand the meaning of the name 

 of the Canaanitish city which stood near Hebron, and which 

 seems to have been one of the most important of the towns 

 of Southern Palestine. Kirjath-Sepher, or "Book-town/' 

 must have been the seat of a famous library, consisting mainly, 

 if not altogether, as the Tel el-Amarna tablets inform us, of 

 clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters. As the city 

 also bore the name of Debir, or "Sanctuary," we may conclude 

 that the tablets were stored in its chief temple, like the 

 libraries of Assyria and Babylonia. It may be that they are 

 still lying under the soil, awaiting the day when the spade of 

 the excavator shall restore them to the light. 



The literary influence of Babylonia in the age before the 

 Israelitish conquest of Palestine explains the occurrence of 

 the names of Babylonian deities among the inhabitants of the 

 West. Moses died on the summit of Mount Nebo, which 

 received its name from the Babylonian god of literature, to 

 whom the great temple of Borsippa was dedicated; and Sinai 

 itself, the mountain "of Sin/' testifies to a worship of the 

 Babylonian Moon-god, Sin, amid the solitudes of the desert. 

 Moloch, or Malik, was a Babylonian divinity like Rimmon, the 

 Air-god, after whom more than one locality in Palestine was 

 named, and Anat, the wife of Anu the Sky-god, gave her 

 name to the Palestinian Anah, as well as to Anathoth, the 

 city of " the Anat-goddesses." The resemblances that have 

 been observed between the cosmogonies of Babylonia and 

 Phoenicia probably admit of a similar explanation. Here, too, 

 the religious and philosophical ideas of the people of Canaan 

 were moulded by their Babylonian instructors. Among the 

 tablets from Tel el-Amarna, now in the Boulaq Museum, is a 

 legend about Namtar, the Babylonian god of destiny and 



[t was the southward march of the Hittites from the north, 

 the destructive wars between them and Barneses II., which 

 wasted Palestine with fire and sword, and, finally, the Israelitish 

 conquest of Canaan, which appear to have put an end to the 

 old literary intercourse among the populations of Western 

 Asia, and to have caused the Babylonian language and script 

 to be disused and forgotten. The Hittites forced themselves 

 like a wedge between the Semites of the East and of the West, 



