The Babylonians were the Chinese of the ancient world. They were essentially a reading and writing people. In spite of the intricacy of their system of writing, with its multitudinous characters, each of which had more than one phonetic value, and might be used to express an idea or word, books were numerous and students were many. The books were for the most part written upon clay with a wooden reed or metal stylus, for clay was cheap and plentiful, and easily impressed with the wedge-shaped lines of which the characters were composed. But besides clay, papyrus and possibly also parchment were employed as writing materials; at all events the papyrus is referred to in the texts, though all vestiges of it have long since disappeared in the damp climate of the valley of the Euphrates.

The use of clay for writing purposes extended, along with Babylonian culture, to the neighbouring populations of the East. In the century before the Exodus, recent discoveries have shown that clay libraries existed, and that an active correspondence was carried on by means of clay tablets in all parts of the ancient Oriental world. The Babylonian language and characters were taught and learned not only in Mesopotamia and Aram, but also in Kappadocia, Syria, Palestine, and even Egypt. Letters on clay in the cuneiform script were sent from Phœnicia and the cities of the Philistines, from Gaza and Ashkelon, from Lachish and Megiddo. If ever the site of Kirjath-Sepher or ‘Booktown,’ which was destroyed by Othniel⁠[10], be discovered and excavated, it is possible that we may find a store of records in clay among its ruins. The invasion of Syria by the Hittites and their subsequent wars with the Egyptians, together with the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, put an end to the early intercourse between Babylonia and the West. The use of the Babylonian language was discontinued among the educated circles of Syria and Palestine; the cuneiform syllabary was supplanted by the simpler Phœnician alphabet; and papyrus or parchment, rather than clay, became the ordinary writing material. But in the later days of the Jewish monarchy the employment of clay seems to have again come into favour. From the reign of Ahaz onwards, Assyrian influence was strong in Judah; Ahaz himself set up a sun-dial in Jerusalem⁠[11], in imitation of those which had existed from time immemorial in Babylonia; and Hezekiah caused old texts to be edited⁠[12], like the kings of Assyria and Chaldea, who kept scribes constantly employed in copying out the ancient literature with which their libraries were filled. It is not surprising, therefore, that the common writing material of Assyria and Chaldea was also introduced into Judah. We may gather from Jeremiah⁠[13] that, as in Assyria, so too in Judah, in the age of Jeremiah, legal documents were inscribed on tablets of clay, which were then sealed and covered with a clay envelope. On this was written a summary of the deed it contained; the whole document being subsequently consigned to the safe keeping of an earthen jar.

It is astonishing how much matter can be compressed into the compass of a single tablet. The cuneiform system of writing allowed the use of many abbreviations—thanks to its ‘ideographic’ nature—and the characters were frequently of a very minute size. Indeed, so minute is the writing on many of the Assyrian (as distinguished from the Babylonian) tablets that it is clear not only that the Assyrian scribes and readers must have been decidedly short-sighted, but also that they must have made use of magnifying glasses. We need not be surprised, therefore, to learn that Sir A. H. Layard discovered a crystal lens, which had been turned on a lathe, upon the site of the great library of Nineveh.

Where it was found impossible to compress a text within the limits of a single tablet, it was continued on a second, a very clever arrangement being adopted in order to facilitate reference. The tablets were called ‘the first’ or ‘second’ of a series, which received its name from the first word or line of the work inscribed upon them, and the last line of the first tablet was repeated at the beginning of the second. In this way the librarian and reader were able without loss of time to refer to any tablet which was required in a particular series or work. Of course the scribes who copied the tablets endeavoured to make each tablet correspond with what we should call a chapter, so that the several tablets of a series may be described as the successive chapters of a book.

To learn the cuneiform syllabary was a task of much time and labour. The student was accordingly provided with various means of assistance. The characters of the syllabary were classified and named; they were further arranged according to a certain order, which partly depended on the number of wedges or lines of which each was composed. Moreover, what we may term dictionaries were compiled, in which every character not only had assigned to it the different phonetic values it possessed, but also the different ideographic significations with which it had been used, or was thought to have been used, in earlier literature. These ideographic significations resulted from the fact that the cuneiform system of writing had been pictorial and hieroglyphic before it had developed into a syllabary, each character representing an idea or word.

To learn the signs, however, with their multitudinous phonetic values and ideographic significations, was not the whole of the labour which the Babylonian boy had to accomplish. The cuneiform system of writing, along with the culture which had produced it, had been the invention of the non-Semitic Accado-Sumerian race, from whom it had been borrowed by the Semites. In Semitic hands the syllabary underwent further modifications and additions, but it bore upon it to the last the stamp of its alien origin. On this account alone, therefore, the Babylonian student who wished to acquire a knowledge of reading and writing was obliged to learn the extinct language of the older population of the country.

There was, however, another reason which even more imperatively obliged him to study the earlier tongue. A large proportion of the ancient literature, more especially that which related to religious subjects, was written in Accado-Sumerian. Even the law-cases of early times, which formed precedents for the law of a later age, were in the same language. In fact, Accado-Sumerian stood in much the same relation to the Semitic Babylonians that Latin has stood to the modern inhabitants of Europe. Even words and proper names had been borrowed from it, and just as the etymology and meaning of many of our words can be understood only by a reference to Latin, so the etymology and meaning of such words could be understood only by a reference to Accadian.

Besides learning the syllabary, therefore, the Babylonian boy had to learn the extinct language of Accad and Sumer. For this purpose he was provided with lists of words or vocabularies in which the Accadian word was explained in Semitic Assyrian, with grammatical paradigms giving the forms of the Accadian verbs and postpositions, with the explanations of difficult phrases, with extracts from ancient books translated into Assyrian, notes being sometimes added upon obscure and important words, as well as with interlinear or parallel translations of long and complete texts. The student was also encouraged to write himself in this literary Latin of Chaldea, and numerous works exist which show by their age, their idioms, and sometimes even their errors, that they must have been the work of Semitic scribes. The Accadian of the subjects of Nebuchadnezzar could be as faulty as monkish or schoolboy’s Latin.

But a knowledge of Accadian was not all that was demanded from the Assyrian or Babylonian gentleman, if he wished to make his way in the world. It will be remembered that the Rab-shakeh, or ‘Vizier’ of Sennacherib, addressed the Jews at Jerusalem in their own language, and that the ministers of Hezekiah asked him to use ‘Aramaic’ or ‘Syrian’ instead⁠[14]. They thus assumed that he could speak a language which, though unknown to the uneducated ‘people on the wall,’ was evidently considered to be included in the course of study of an educated gentleman. Aramaic, in fact, had come to occupy a similar position to that occupied by French in modern diplomacy and society. It was the international language of the statesmen of the day. But, unlike French, it had come to occupy this position from its being the language of trade. Aramaic traders were settled in the towns of Babylonia and carried on business in the midst of Nineveh. Commercial documents exist of the age of Tiglath-pileser III and his successors, in which an Aramaic docket is attached to the cuneiform text, and weights have been found in Assyria which have upon them both Aramaic and Assyrian inscriptions. The Assyrian and Babylonian merchant was consequently compelled to read, write, and speak Aramaic; and the Assyrian conquests, which had for their chief object to divert the trade of Aram and Phœnicia into Assyrian hands, had made it necessary for the politician to follow the example of the merchant. The Assyrian or Babylonian boy had his Latin and French to learn no less than the English boy of to-day.

The history of the Rab-shakeh of Sennacherib shows that a knowledge of these two languages might be supplemented by the knowledge of a third. In addition to Assyrian and Aramaic, he was also able to speak Hebrew, learned, perhaps, from one of the exiles from the northern kingdom who had been carried away from Samaria eighteen years before. Assyrian contract-tablets of this age have been found, in which mention is made of persons with Israelitish names who resided at Nineveh. The dragoman, or interpreter, moreover, had long been a recognized institution in the East. As far back as the fifteenth century before our era, the King of Aram Naharaim speaks of the targumannu, or ‘dragoman,’ whom he sent to Egypt; and, seven centuries later, an Assyrian writer makes mention of a targumannu of the country of the Minni. When the ambassadors of Gyges of Lydia first arrived in Nineveh it is recorded, as an evidence of the distance from which they had come, that there was no one found there to understand what they spoke.

The study of foreign tongues naturally brought with it an inquisitiveness about the languages of other people, as well as a passion for etymology. The latter led the grammarians to invent Accadian etymologies for Semitic words, like the Greek or Latin etymologies invented for Teutonic words in English by the dictionary-makers of a former generation. Thus we find Sabattu or Sabatuv, ‘the Sabbath,’ derived from the two Accadian words sa, ‘the heart,’ and bat, ‘to end,’ and accordingly explained to mean ‘a day of rest for the heart.’ The inquisitiveness about foreign languages produced better results. We owe to it the preservation of the meaning of several words in the ancient languages of Elam, and of the other countries by which Babylonia was surrounded. We have, for instance, a list of words belonging to the language of the Kassites on the eastern side of Babylonia, together with their translation; and even a conqueror like Sargon goes out of his way to tell us that a particular architectural term was of Phœnician origin.

But there were other things besides languages which the young student in the schools of Babylonia and Assyria was called upon to learn. Geography, history, the names and nature of plants, birds, animals, and stones, as well as the elements of law and religion, were all objects of instruction. The British Museum possesses what may be called the historical exercise of some Babylonian lad in the age of Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus, consisting of a list of the kings belonging to one of the early dynasties, which he had been required to learn by heart. The last ruler of the Babylonian Empire, Nabonidos, the father of Belshazzar, was himself an enthusiastic antiquarian, and the pioneer of archaeological excavation. He caused excavations to be made on the sites of the older temples of Babylonia, in order to discover the inscriptions and records of the kings to whom their foundation was ascribed. His search for the buried monuments of the founder of the great Temple of the Sun-god at Sippara reads like the history of similar searches made in recent years in Westminster Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral. Natural history, as distinguished from the history of the monumental past, was, of course, in its infancy, and consisted of little else than a descriptive catalogue of natural objects. The work of King Solomon on trees, and ‘beasts, and fowl, and creeping things, and fishes⁠[15],’ must have been of a like character.

The libraries were established in the temples, and the schools in which the work of education was carried on were doubtless attached to them. Strabo, the Greek geographer, tells us that Borsippa, the suburb of Babylon, was famous for the schools or universities that had once existed there; and the medical college of Borsippa seems to be referred to in a Babylonian treatise on medicine, fragments of which are now in the British Museum. The library of Borsippa was stored in the great Temple of Bel; and as late as the time of Darius we find a Babylonian copying out a portion of the Epic of the Creation, and depositing it in the library, ‘for the preservation of his life, and the life of all his house⁠[16].’ To add fresh copies of books to the collection was thus considered a pious act.

The libraries were open to the public. Assur-bani-pal, for instance, is never weary of declaring that the library of Nineveh had been founded and enlarged ‘for the use of readers,’ and from a very early epoch the office of librarian was held in high honour. One of the earliest Babylonian librarians of whom we know calls himself the son of the king. It was, without doubt, a well-paid post, and the number of scribes employed in the library required in its holder the possession of administrative abilities.

A considerable proportion of the inhabitants of Babylonia could read and write. The contract tablets are written in a variety of running hands, some of which are as bad as the worst that passes through the modern post. Every legal document required the signatures of a number of witnesses, and most of these were able to write their own names. It was only when they could not do so that the law was satisfied with a simple ‘nail-mark’ in the clay, the name of the witness being appended to the nail-mark by the clerk. In Assyria, however, education was by no means so widely spread. Apart from the upper and professional classes, including the men of business, it was confined to a special body of men—the public scribes. Indeed, it is probable that, before the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (B.C. 745-727), it was only the scribes, as a general rule, who had learned to read and write. In Assyria, accordingly, we find none of that variety of handwritings which often makes the decipherment of a Babylonian document so difficult. A neat official hand was in use there, which seldom displays any individual peculiarities, and remained practically unchanged for several centuries.

Women, as well as men, enjoyed the advantages of education. This is evident from the Babylonian contract-tablets, in which we find women appearing as well as men as plaintiffs or defendants in suits, as partners in commercial transactions, and as signing, when need arose, their names. There was none of that jealous exclusion of women in ancient Babylonia which characterizes the East of to-day, and it is probable that boys and girls pursued their studies at the same schools.

The education of a child must have begun early. The strain put upon the memory by the cumbersome cuneiform syllabary and the Accadian language that lay behind it were so great that the acquisition of them must have commenced at an early age. The fragment of an old Accadian folk-tale, which once formed part of a lesson-book for the nursery, shows, however, that it was probably not before the age of five or six. The story is that of a foundling who was picked up in the streets, and taken ‘from the mouth of the dogs and ravens,’ being subsequently adopted by the king as his own son. The child, we are told, was first brought before the asip, or ‘prophet,’ who marked the soles of his feet with his seal⁠[17]; he was then handed over to the nurse, to whom the boy’s ‘bread, food, shirt and (other) clothing were assured for three years.’ ‘So,’ the story proceeds, ‘his rearing went on for him for a time.’ Had the rest of the tale been preserved, we should doubtless have heard something about his education, and light would thus have been thrown on the school life of a Babylonian lad.

We already know enough, however, to see that education was by no means backward in the old empires of Western Asia. As in Egypt, so too in Babylonia, if not in Assyria, a knowledge of reading and writing was widely spread, books were multiplied, and there were plenty of readers to study them. So far from being illiterate, the ancient civilized East was almost as full of literary activity as is the world of to-day. The so-called critical judgements that have been passed upon it, begotten of ignorance and prejudice, must be revised in the light of the fuller knowledge which we now possess.

The Israelites in Canaan were surrounded by nations who were in the enjoyment of ancient cultures, and abundant stores of books. There is every reason for believing that the Israelites also shared in the culture of their neighbours, and the literary activity it implied. We now know that Egyptians and Babylonians wrote and read, not only in the time of David and Solomon, but ages before; why should not the Hebrews also have done the same? If the historical authority of the Old Testament Scriptures is to be overthrown, it must be by other arguments than the unwarranted assumption that letters were unknown in the epoch which they claim to record.