Egypt about 1500 B. C., and amid these same archives of Tell-el-Amarna are letters from women to women, and one dainty little tablet written by a princess to her royal father, all in the cuneiform characters; these after lying in wooden chests for more than thirty-three centuries have been deciphered and read once more. Many legal documents signed by women exist in the brick libraries of the Euphrates valley. In Assyria education was more limited. In these countries, when the writing was in tended to last, the old Chaldean cuneiform characters were used and clay tablets; when it was but of an ephemeral nature, the scribes often used prepared skins, or wooden tablet?, or the papyrus leaves and the cursive char acters derived from the Phoenician alphabet (at least in later times.) Books of baked earth were inconvenient to hold, heavy to handle, and the letters did not show up well against the yellow of the clay; but they lasted better than papyrus rolls, fire could not hurt them, water was slow to injure them.;f broken they could still be re-united and de ciphered, unless actually ground to powder. Thus have books, composed thousands of years before the Assyrian empire, survived the accidents of twenty conquests, the de stroying fury of man and the assaults of time, and remain intact. When legal contracts were drawn up each party employed a scribe, who, with the judge's scribe, all began to write at the same time, at the upper left-hand corner of the tablet; for three copies of every legal docu ment were required, one for each party and one to be deposited with the royal notary, or registrar of deeds; originally two copies only of contracts had been used, one remaining with each party: but skilful though dishonest people even then existed. These Chaldeans had a good way of preventing fraudulent alterations—the tablet when signed and sealed they covered with a second layer of clay, upon which they traced an exact copy
of the original deed or contract; this latter was, of course, inaccessible to the forger, and if a dispute arose or an alteration was sus pected in the visible text the outer tablet was broken open before witnesses and the origi nal version appeared. When the scribes had finished their work, they compared the copies, the judge read it aloud, then the par ties, the witnesses, the scribes and the judge all affixed their signatures or marks, the offi cials also placing their seals; finally the tab lets were placed in an oven and baked. These contracts were dated—sometimes in the year of the king, sometimes by reference to some event, as "the year in which Ashnumak was inundated, under King Kham murabi," or "the year o.f the great wall of Kar-Sha-Mash," or "the year in which King Khammurabi, by order of Ann 'and Bel, de stroyed the walls of Mairu and the walls of Malka." Two different principles struggled for recognition in the Babylonian family, the patriarchal and the matriarchal. This may have been due to the duality of race, the older Sumerian, the younger Semitic; or per haps to the circumstances under which the early Babylonian lived. Scholars say that at times it would seem as if we must pronounce the Babylonish family to have been patri archal in its character; while at other times the wife and mother occupies an independent and even a commanding position. In the old Sumerian hymns the learned reader finds the phrase "female and male;" but in the Semitic translations we have "male and female," as in these twentieth century days. Wherever in the Semitic world Babylonian culture had not penetrated, the woman was subordinate to the man, his helpmate and not his equal. I star, in Babylonia, was a god dess; independent; equal to the gods; when she got among the Semites in Southern Ara bia, and Moab, she became a god. In Babylonia the women claimed rights which placed them almost on a level with
