June 22, 1888.] 



SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



595 



fields. The payments were not always made in full at 

 the time of the sale, but sometimes by instalments. 



Among the trade documents may be also classed a 

 certain number having the character of letters ; they are 

 letters of consignment ; for instance, one merchant in- 

 forms another that he has sent a certain quantity of grain, 

 and asks for the amount to be placed to his credit ; 

 letters containing orders, in one case the buyer, after 

 stating the amount of goods he wishes to obtain, names 

 the party who will be present at the loading to see that 

 this amount is correctly delivered. We have, lastly, real 

 bills of exchange, or drafts to be paid at sight, either in 

 silver or kind. 



What may be called social documents are not so nimier- 

 ous,butareof greater interest. Fromthe marriage contracts 

 for instance, we learn what was the dowry brought by 

 the bride; it consisted generally of a sum of money 

 and properties such as slaves, house furniture, etc. 

 Sometimes the marriage contract took the form of a deed 

 of settlement, the bridegroom providing the dowry for his 

 bride, giving her, as her own personal property, house, 

 slaves, etc. We also possess several settlements made 

 by the husband to his wife after they had been married 

 several years ; in this case it was no doubt done to pro- 

 vide for the wife in case of reverse of fortune, for in 

 Babylonia, as in England since the Married Women's 

 Property Act, creditors had no claim on the private pro- 

 perty of their debtor's wife. 



Cases of adoption were not rare. A man having no 

 children or only daughters, often adopted a male child, 

 not always in childhood but even in youth. To do so he 

 had, like in our modern laws, to obtain the consent of 

 his wife, for in the deed of adoption was generally in- 

 cluded a deed of settlement. When the adopting party 

 had a daughter, she as a rule became the wife of the 

 adopted young man. 



Before his death, a Babylonian was able to dispose of 

 his property by will, and there were no restrictions. 

 We possess several Babylonian wills in which the 

 testator divided his estate among his children and other 

 relatives. 



There is a whole class of tablets referring to slaves. In 

 one case a slave-child was given up by his mistress for 

 three years in order that he might be taught the trade of 

 a smith. In other cases slaves were given up with 

 the special provision that the receiver should provide 

 them with food and clothing till their last day. 



All business in the Babylonian courts of law was 

 transacted in writing ; we have therefore a large number 

 of judicial or legal documents, including powers of 

 attorney enabling a man to act for another, and affidavits 

 or sworn statements. If a man or a woman wished to 

 make a claim before a magistrate or accuse any one, this 

 had to be done in writing, signed by the scribe and 

 witnesses. The defendant had also to answer in writing, 

 , and the decision of the magistrate was also written, and 

 marked with his seal. The last resouice of the defendant 

 in a criminal case was the right of petition to the king, 

 and we possess several documents in the form of letters, 

 in which the condemned states the injustice of his sen- 

 tence and appeal to the kindness of the king to re- 

 dress it. 



Private letters of a purely epistolary character have 

 alsj been preserved. In one case a farmer informs his 

 correspondent of the state of the crop, in another a man 

 writes about a fugitive slave, in others commercial 

 agents inform their employers of the progress of their 



operations. A great many letters were addressed to the 

 king, and have therefore a semi-official character. They 

 are not, however, all state-letters, in some cases they 

 give the king information on private matters, such as the 

 health of some private persons, the progress of some ex- 

 cavations, or of the building of some temples. 



From this review of the various kinds of private docu- 

 ments it will be understood how important writing was 

 considered in Babylon. Indeed, it was indispensable in 

 every transaction and circumstance of life. 



A knowledge of the Babylonian — or, as it is generally 

 called, Assyrian or cuneiform — writing was not, however, 

 of easy acquirement. Writing appears to have been 

 brought from Egypt by the first colonists in Babylonia, • 

 and was at first, like the hieroglyphic, pictorial ; the 

 natural desire for quickness brought on abbreviations and 

 conventional groups of lines, like the hieratic of Egypt. 

 It is only when clay was used instead of papyrus, and a 

 wooden style instead of a reed, that the characters 

 assumed the cuneiform shape under which we know 

 them. While the characters were simplified and abbre- 

 viated, nothing was ever attempted to improve the 

 system of writing itself, the same complicated and 

 cumbersome syllabary was used till the last period. Its 

 great defect was principally the polyphonisni, ic, the 

 numerous values attributed to the same character, and the 

 double use of the same signs sometimes as ideograms, 

 sometimes as phonetics. 



Phoneticism was more developed in the historical in- 

 scriptions than in the private and trade documents, in 

 which ideograms were largely used to save space and 

 time, and at the Greek period documents were 

 written nearly exclusively in them. The syllabary was 

 not only complicated but also contained a considerable 

 number of signs {we know about six hundred), and if we 

 add to this the various forms derived from special styles 

 and periods of writing, we can quite understand that the 

 Babylonian scribe must have spent a lifetime in acquir- 

 ing a knowledge of this art, but he was well repaid for his 

 trouble, as, owing to his attainments being indispensable, 

 he was a real power in the state. As it generally 

 happens, when writing is so difficult to acquire it was 

 highly esteemed, and the Babylonian had great venera- 

 tion for all written documents, to which doubtless we 

 owe the preservation of the numbers of tablets which 

 have come into our possession. 



■ »^?t^'^5«f^ 



Astronomical Photography. — The French journals 

 signalize the interesting results obtained by the applica- 

 tion of photography to the examination of the heavens. 

 No fewerthan 74 great negatives of different regions have 

 been taken with the 0-33 metre object-glass at the Paris 

 Observatory. Two special negatives have been taken 

 for the forthcoming monograph of the Pleiades, and 

 sixteen negatives with the object-glass of C 11 metre, one 

 of which shows 30,000 stars. 



Accuracy in Acknowledging Authorities. — Prof. 

 Wiedemann (editor of Wiedemami' s Annaten), in a circular 

 forwarded to various journals and to eminent scientific 

 men, complains of two abuses : firstlj', in matter copied 

 from one journal into another, the original source is often 

 omitted ; secondly, a paper read before a society is often 

 sent simultaneously to several journals, which reproduce 

 it as if it were an original article. This practice occasions 

 much trouble and loss of time in seeking up the literature 

 of any given subject. 



