THE path of our alphabet seems to be taking us far afield when we turn to Chinese systems of writing and to the origin and development of cuneiform. Nevertheless, it is in this course that some of the richest developments have appeared and the greatest rewards have been obtained by scholars in this special direction of research.

In the narrative given of the decipherment of cuneiform writing reference was made to the three distinct combinations of the arrow-headed or wedge-shaped characters in the trilingual inscriptions at first deciphered.

It was found that these three distinct combinations of cuneiform signs represented three languages of three distinct races of men, the Persian, an Aryan people speaking an inflectional language; the Assyro-Babylonians, Semitic people who spoke a language related to the Hebrew, and the third a Turanian people who spoke an agglutinative language, allied to that of the modern Turks or Finns.

It was some time after the decipherment of the Persian version of the cuneiform texts before these facts became fully understood. The Semitic text presented unusual difficulties, while the language of the other version remained for a time unknown.

The discoveries of Mr. Layard, shortly after, on the site of ancient Nineveh, were to throw more light upon the subject.

With the unearthing of the royal palace of Assur-bani-pal, at Keyunji, the remains of the great library founded by this monarch were discovered beneath the ruins.

These remains consisted of more than twenty thousand bricks, tablets and cylinders, some of which were in fragments, but a greater part entire, and the inscriptions thereon as distinct as when first impressed in the soft clay.

This was a fine, tenacious clay of the region which had been moulded into bricks and cylinders of various sizes, upon which when moist the cuneiform letters had been impressed by a wooden or metal stylus. They had then, for the greater part, been hardened by a slow fire, and were thus made practically indestructible. These cuneiform books were soon distributed in the great libraries and museums of Europe, and thus became accessible to scholars.

Among these literary documents were found a large number which consisted of translations, either interlinear or in parallel passages, from a non-Semitic language into Assyro-Babylonian.

It appeared in two dialects, the speech of the early people of northern Babylonia—the people of Accad—and the speech of the primitive inhabitants of southern Babylonia—the people of Sumir or Shinar.

The close alliance of the peoples of Accad and Sumir in race and language has led to the general application of the name of Accadians to both families. A closer distinction in general terms now adopted by scholars is Sumerian.

Further discoveries rapidly following the unearthing of the Ninevite tablets, confirmed the evidences that these people were the inventors of cuneiform, and that the Sumerian dialect represented the most ancient of the cuneiform scripts.

In the oldest inscriptions which have yet been found the characters are hardly as yet cuneiform. The lines are straight and simple, resembling somewhat the strokes and dashes appearing in words spelled by the electric telegraphic code.

The arrangement of these is pictorial, forming picture hieroglyphics, and these were found to be ideographic and not phonetic.

By degrees the wedge-shaped and arrow-headed characters appear, the pictorial forms are not so distinct and these characters express sound as well as ideas.

The story revealed by these older inscriptions was a genuine surprise to scholars. It not only presented the remoter occupation of Mesopotamia by a hitherto unknown people, but also that while to Mesopotamia is to be accorded the distinction as the “mother land” of the arts and sciences, it was not to its Semitic inhabitants, the Assyrians and Babylonians of history, that this is due.

Here, long before the appearance of a Semitic people in the land, scientific applications to the industrial arts were abundant. An extensive system of irrigation and canals were in use in the arid regions and drainage for the low lands near the sea. The arts of metallurgy were practised. Mathematics and geometry were applied to structures, and astronomy to measurements of time and planetary movements.

They were builders of cities. As we have seen, they had invented a system of writing. In certain cities they had schools for scribes, and they had libraries where the literature thus developed was collected.

When we learn that this testimony takes us back to a date older than the pyramids and to the earlier Egyptian dynasties, we may well exclaim at the astonishing facts archÆology is presenting.

Until recently there were no evidences of a civilization in Babylonia which approached the antiquity of Egyptian monuments.

In 1883, Dr. Taylor placed the earliest dates from the cuneiform at between 2700 and 3000, B. C. Recent discoveries, however, refer back to a period, according to Prof. Hilfrecht, at least three milleniums earlier, and point to a civilization distinct and original with the Turanian races of Asia preceding that of other races and people in these regions.

Mesopotamia, “The land between the rivers,” is a tract of country extending about seven hundred miles from its northernmost boundaries, near the mountains of Armenia, to the southernmost limit, the Persian Gulf. A range of hills crosses this region near the center, running east and west, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. North of these hills the country is the ancient Assyria, with its capital, Nineveh, situated on the Tigris. South of these hills to the Persian Gulf, is the ancient Babylonia, or Chaldea, where, on the Euphrates, its later capital, Babylon, was situated.

In the more ancient records Assyria appears as “Accad,” or “Agade;” the southern portion, or Babylonia, as “Sumir,” or the land of “Shinar,” and later as Chaldea.

For the greater portion, this region is a dead level, its monotony unbroken but for the rich verdure of the lands bordering upon these great rivers, and the long lines of slightly elevated embankments marking the course of ancient, or more recent canals, and the solitary mounds rising here and there from the plain.

These are the sites of ancient temples and cities and are sometimes very extensive. The mounds of Warka, the ancient Erech, are nearly six miles in circumference and in some places rise to the height of one hundred feet.

The great mound of Koyunjik covers an area of over one hundred acres in extent, and is ninety-five feet high at its most elevated point. That of Nippur, with the ruins of the great temple of Bel, rose over one hundred feet above the plain. Others are smaller, and sometimes were intended to support but one palace or temple.

These mounds are artificial, their foundations consisting of earth mixed with burned bricks in alternate layers, the whole encased by a wall of bricks cemented with bitumen, or as in Assyria, where stone could be obtained, by a facing of stone masonry.

Upon these artificial hills or mounds, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, from the most remote to later times, built their cities, their palaces, their temples and other important structures.

The heavy rains of the winter season coursing down these declivities for so many centuries, have in places worn deep ravines in the mounds, through which the torrents have carried the crumbling debris far out upon the plain. In this way many valuable relics have come to light; bits of pottery, inscribed bricks, seals and cylinders, the form and style of the inscriptions upon some of these indicating great antiquity.

These indications of greater antiquity include inscriptions on bricks for building purposes as well as those used for record and literature. They include also the form and character of the inscriptions, whether archaic or later cuneiform, and again the use of bitumen or cement in masonry.

In primitive times the first bricks which succeeded the mud wall were sun-dried and were laid up with reeds and plastered with soft mud or bitumen. This bitumen was applied hot and adhered so firmly to the bricks that it is almost impossible to break them apart to obtain the cement and is one cause why the masonry consisting of sun-dried bricks has in many cases withstood the ages. Later the sun-dried bricks came to be used only for interior walls, while for the outer walls bricks were made from selected clay and were carefully prepared and burned, forming bricks of superior quality and strength. So well have these withstood the ravages of time that some of the mounds, notably those of the later Babylonian period, are veritable quarries of building brick.

It is stated that the bricks of which the temples and palaces of Babylon were built, have for the past two thousand years supplied cities of the surrounding region with the material used in the construction of public and private edifices, and that certain families of the Babili tribe, who claim to be direct descendants of the Babylonians, are exclusively employed in quarrying them.

As has been stated, bitumen was used for laying the masonry in the remoter times long before Babylon was built. Of this substance an abundant supply was to be obtained at various places in southern Mesopotamia, near the Arabian desert, notably in the neighborhood of Ur, now Mugheir, “the bitumened,” so called from the bitumenous springs of the vicinity. In time, the use of this for masonry gave place to a fine white mortar made from a peculiar calcareous clay, found near the Arabian frontier to the west of the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, which for lightness and strength has never been surpassed.

These evidences, including also the inscriptions originally stamped upon the bricks, with the name of the king or ruler under whose orders they had been prepared, furnish indications of their time and place in history.

It thus came about that explorers following the work of Botta, Layard, George Smith and others, found their way to sites more ancient by many centuries than the beginnings of Nineveh or Babylon, and have obtained from these records of great historical importance.

The more ancient of these sites are in the southern portion of the country, in that region anciently known as Sumir, or Shinar, and later as Chaldea.

This was on the lower courses of the great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, towards the Persian Gulf. This region abounds with the ruins of ancient cities as yet unexplored. The most important of the cities of this region were Eridu, the most ancient and sacred, now marked by the mud heaps of Abu Sharein; the city of Ur, now Mugheir, once a maritime and commercial city of these earlier times, and of special interest as that “Ur of the Chaldees,” the early home of Abraham; Nippur, or Neffur, the seat of older Bel; Tel-Loh, the ancient Sirgulla, and Larsa.

The sites of Ur and Eridu, once near the sea, are now far inland. Eridu, formerly directly upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, is now one hundred and fifty miles distant, while Ur, once situated at the mouth of the Euphrates, is now about one hundred and fifty miles distant from the sea, and about six miles to the west of the present course of the Euphrates on the western banks of the older bed of the river, nearly opposite the point—though six miles away—where the Shat-el-Hic enters the Euphrates from the east, as it approaches from its source in the Tigris.

It is estimated that the alluvium brought down by these great rivers has encroached upon the Persian Gulf by the formation of land about sixty feet annually, creating a delta at the head of the gulf of ninety miles in three thousand years.

These deposits have been more rapid in later times than anciently. The great cause of the difference between ancient and modern Chaldea is the neglect of the water courses. In ancient times, a well arranged system of embankments and irrigating canals held these great rivers in their courses by distributing the superabundant waters of the great flood times to all parts of the country, thus enriching the soil with abundant water supply at all seasons.

In the present neglected condition of this region the floods as they come down from the mountain sources of the Euphrates are liable to wash away the banks, sometimes changing the course of the river, and overflowing large tracts at slightly lower levels, which have become unwholesome marshes, while other large tracts which are never inundated, in the fierce heats become parched and desolate sand wastes. It is said that such is the spread and waste of the Euphrates in its lower course, that, except in flood time, but a small proportion of this great volume of water reaches the sea.

These conditions do not so seriously affect the Tigris, which for the greater part of its course flows over a rocky bed, between high embankments, and which, though a narrower, is a deeper and swifter stream than the Euphrates.

Within historic times, the Tigris and Euphrates entered the sea by separate channels nearly thirty miles apart. At the present time, and for many centuries, these two rivers have been united, forming the great river, the Shat-el-Arab, through which, in a course of about one hundred and twenty miles, their united waters reach the sea.