SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



size is perhaps three or four inches in width by five or 

 six in length and half an inch to an inch in thickness. 

 Each tablet is complete in itself, constituting virtually 

 the leaves of a book, but there are no means of holding 

 these leaves together. They were merely piled one 

 upon another on the shelves of the library. As an aid 

 to the reader, an expedient was adopted which the 

 printers of modern books invented, independently, 

 some thousands of years later, and which has only 

 recently gone out of vogue; the expedient, namely, of 

 repeating at the foot of each page the first word of the 

 next. 



The writing upon the clay tablet was done with a 

 sharp curved implement, which readily made the little 

 arrow-shaped stroke which is the foundation of the 

 Babylonian script. The deftness and regularity with 

 which these so-called cuneiform inscriptions were made, 

 has been the amazement of all modern scholars who 

 have studied them. Notwithstanding the relative per- 

 fection of execution, however, these inscriptions are 

 extremely difficult to decipher. This is particularly 

 true of some of the smaller tablets where the character 

 is very small. It will be understood, of course, that the 

 inscriptions were made on these tablets while the clay, 

 of which they were composed, was in a soft condition. 

 The tablet was subsequently either dried in the sun, or 

 baked in an oven, becoming a brick of almost imperish- 

 able hardness. This, of course, accounts for the preser- 

 vation of the vast quantities of Babylonian and As- 

 syrian records. Thanks to the imperishable material 

 of these books, the present-day student of ancient his- 



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