110 THE BABYLONIAN TABLETS 



digging in the soil of what appears to be natural hills, be- 

 tween the lower course of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. 

 But the Tigris-Euphrates valley is a fertile alluvial plain like 

 the Nile valley, and these gently sloping hills are in reality the 

 ruins of cities that were the marts of the world four thousand 

 years ago. 



In this valley there was neither wood nor stone, except what 

 was brought there from distant mountains. Driven by this lack 

 of a natural building material, necessity forced them to find it in 

 the soil. Burnt bricks were used for outer walls, for drainage 

 and cisterns, but the thick inner walls were made of sun-dried 

 brick. Hence it came about that after a city had been destroyed 

 by an enemy, the rain, or the overflowing of a canal or river, soon 

 converted the sun-dried bricks into the original clay from which 

 they had been made ; the process of erosion softened the harsh 

 lines into a gently sloping mound or hill, the wind bore seeds 

 thither that soon covered the whole mass with verdure, and the 

 once flourishing city was rendered indistinguishable from a low 

 hill. So it was that Xenophon and his brave band of ten thousand 

 men passed by the ruins of Nineveh, little dreaming that two cen- 

 turies before his day it had been one of the foremost cities of the 

 world, and three-quarters of a century earlier the capital of a 

 great world-empire. 



Necessity forced the inhabitants of this valley to use the 

 same material for writing as for building. The fact that their 

 writing is cuneiform, i. e., wedge-form, is an accident due to 

 the character of this material. The earliest writing in Babylonia 

 appears to have been on stone and consists of pictographs drawn 

 with straight lines. Thus, 



is the 



picture of a human head ; ^7 represents a foot; S[ ii 



a fish ; ^£ represents wa_ter. When these same characters 



were drawn on soft clay with a reed- wood stylus (see the models 

 made by Prof. A. T. Clay), the stylus made a triangular de- 



£ 



SQUARE END STYLUS 



