PRIMITIVE BOOKS 



Babylonians and Assyrians were never altogether con- 

 verted to the use of the Eygptian form of book, and that, 

 from first to last, they used of a preference the one 

 which is so characteristic of their civilization, and of 

 which tens of thousands of specimens have been pre- 

 served; namely, the tablet, or cylinder, of baked clay. 

 These tablet books first came to the eye of modern 

 scholarship through the excavations that were made at 

 the site of old Nineveh by the Frenchman Botta, and a 

 little later by Sir Henry Layard, about the middle of 

 the nineteenth century. The most important collection 

 that early investigations of Layard brought to light was 

 found in the ruins of the library of the famous Assyrian 

 king, Assurbanipal. This collection had peculiar in- 

 terest because it contained, among other things, the 

 fragments of the sacred books of the Babylonians and 

 Assyrians, including creation and deluge stories some- 

 what closely akin to those of the Hebrews. Subsequent 

 explorations revealed vast quantities of similar books 

 in the ruins of much older cities than Nineveh, in 

 particular at Nippur, one of the oldest cities of Baby- 

 lonia, where the famous researches of the University of 

 Pennsylvania have been carried out, and where many 

 thousands of tablets in a single collection have been 

 discovered. 



All these tablets are by no means entitled to be called 

 books, many of them being mere business documents, 

 such as bills of sale, records of loans, and the like. 

 But others of the tablets preserve the text of literary 

 documents precisely comparable to modern books. 

 The tablets are usually oblong in shape. The usual 



