338 



PROF. H. TCDOUARD NAVILLE, D.C.L., LL.D., ON 



Books, especially religious books, and all documents which had 

 to be preserved, were written in Babylonian cuneiform on 

 tablets of wet clay which generally were baked afterwards. 

 The idea that the books of Moses were first cuneiform tablets 

 has been put forward by others before me, especially by Col. 

 Conder and Professor Sayce. This is a startling fact to many 

 people, and a stumbling-block to the critics. Therefore, without 

 entering on a lengthy discussion of this point, I feel bound to 

 mention a few of the chief arguments in its favour. . 



The time of Moses is the nineteenth dynasty, a series of 

 sovereigns who came to the throne after serious troubles, the 

 cause of which was a religious revolution made by King 

 Amenophis IV. The kings of the nineteenth dynasty were 

 certainly far less powerful than their great predecessors of the 

 eighteenth, the Thothmes and the Amenophis, the conquerors 

 under whose dominion the Egyptian Empire reached its utmost 

 territorial expansion. 



The kings of the eighteenth dynasty had conquered Palestine, 

 and had established in the principal cities native governors, who 

 from time to time wrote to their sovereign, and reported what 

 was going on in their cities. These letters and reports have 

 been preserved to us in a city of Middle Egypt, now called Tel 

 el Amarna, where the archives of the kings Amenophis III. 

 and Amenophis IV. were discovered. And these archives 

 contain not only their correspondence with their subordinates, 

 but also letters to and from great kings of Mesopotamia. 

 Every one of these documents, without a single exception, is a 

 clay tablet written, or, rather, engraved in Babylonian cunei- 

 form. It was certainly an archaeological event of first import- 

 ance when the fellaheen of Tel el Amarna came upon this hoard 

 of cuneiform tablets. It first revealed the surprising and abso- 

 lutely unknown fact that Babylonian cuneiform was the usual 

 written language in Palestine at the time of the eighteenth 

 dynasty. It is quite natural that the kings of Mesopotamia should 

 use that language and writing, which evidently were their own. 

 But it was all the more surprising and unexpected from gover- 

 nors of the Palestinian cities, who had to write to their sovereign 

 and report to him what was going on in the region they governed. 

 Why did Abd-Hiba of Jerusalem, Abi-milki of Tyre, and all the 

 prefects of Zidon, Megiddo, Ashkelon, Gaza write in Babylonian 

 unless it was their own written language ? For the King of 

 Egypt did not understand it : he was obliged to resort to the 

 help of a dragoman. Letters of that kind must be in the 

 language either of the ruler or of the subject. Since it was not 



