16 ANNUAL ADDRESS—PROFESSOR SAYCE. 
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 
Pheenicia 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 plague. 
It was the southward march of the Hittites from the north, 
‘the destructive wars between them and Rameses 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 Hast and of the West, 
while the Israelites destroyed the cities and culture of the 
Canaanites, already exhausted, as they were, by the Hittite 
invasion and the campaigns of the Hgyptian Pharaoh. We 
know from the Old Testament that Kirjath-Sepher, with its 
library, was one of the cities smitten by Othniel, never to rise 
again (Joshua xv.; Judges i.). A knowledge of cuneiform 
writing ceased to extend westward of the Huphrates, and for 
a while the inhabitants of Syria had to be content with the 
hieroglyphs of the Hittites. But it was not long before the 
practical traders of Phoenicia devised a better means of re- 
cording their thoughts or registering their cargoes than 
the cumbrous pictorial forms which the mountaineers of the 
Taurus had brought with them. The characters of the 
Egyptian alphabet were borrowed in their hieratic form, and 
adapted to the needs of the borrowers. In the tenth century 
before our era, the Phcenician alphabet comes before us already 
fully formed. 
