no VEN'. AKCaDEACON WILLIAM SINCLAIR^ ON 



of Moses. When German Eationalism first found favour in 

 England, it was vitiated by an extraordinary blunder, the 

 results of which have since rendered its conclusions unsound. 

 It was assumed that history began with the Greeks, and that 

 what were then considered prehistoric times were barbarous. 

 It was therefore held to be incredible that such a marvellous 

 literature as the Mosaic books could have originated 1,000 years 

 before Herodotus. To-day, however, history dates back to 

 ages far remote, especially in Egypt and Babylonia, and it is 

 known that a thousand years before Moses literature flourished. 

 We are told on high authority that in the century before the 

 Exodus, Palestine was a land of books and schools. 



Early Efji/jdian Civilization : Tel el-Amarna. 



On a Sunday afternoon in April, 1904, I was standing in the 

 great National Museum at Cairo, surrounded by the magnificent 

 relics of the early civilization of the Egyptians in its many 

 different stages. And I was assured by Professor Sayce, who 

 makes his home in Egypt during the winter, and devotes 

 himself to the discovery and explanation of Egyptian antiquities, 

 that the farther you go back the more marvellous does the 

 civilization both of Egypt and of Babylonia appear. The 

 farther you go back, the less trace does there emerge of the 

 beginning. Only in the last few years a buried and forgotten 

 stage of Egyptian civilization of the remotest antiquity has 

 been unearthed ; and it seems as completely organized as its 

 distant successors. Another discovery, made in 1887, was that 

 of the Tel el-Amarna tablets — Tel el-Amarna is a city on the 

 banks of the Nile, which was the capital of a reforming and 

 monotheistic King of Egypt. His reforms were disliked, and 

 his city razed to the ground after his death. This preserved 

 the correspondence of his foreign office with the governors of 

 the subject provinces of Canaan and Syria, and the Kings of 

 Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. This corre- 

 spondence is in the writing of Babylonia, and for the most part 

 in the Babylonian language, which was evidently the language 

 of diplomacy in those early days even in Egypt. The variety 

 of the places from which the tablets come show that there must 

 have been schools and libraries like those of Babylonia itself, in 

 which the literature of Babylonia was studied, and its language 

 and system of writing tauglit and learned. The legal code of 

 Amraphel, or Khammurabi, King of Shinar, the contemporary 

 of Abraham, recently discovered, makes it clear that Babylonian 

 law was also known in the west. 



