file annual path of the sun through the sky had been mapped out among twelve constella tions—the twelve signs of the Zodiac which arc still familiar to the almanac-makers.
The library of Sargon was but one out of many Babylonian public libraries, and a large part of the latest and largest of them—the library of Nincveh—is now in the British Iiiseurn.
Its last and most generous benefactor was Assur-bani-pal, the Sardanalialus of the Greeks, predecessors, it became necessary to translate the literary products of the older Chaldea into Semitic Babylonian. For many centuries, Baby lonia possessed a bilingual population and the educated classes were required to know, not only inflectional Semitic, but also agglutinative Sumerian.
(3) Two Languages. As late as the reign of Khammurabi, with whom the history of united Baby Ionia begins, in the twenty-fourth century B. C., the public inscriptions of the king were written in the two leading languages of the coun try, and there are numerous legal documents of the same age, the language of which is still Sumerian. The two languages necessarily bor rowed words and idioms, one from the other, so that a knowledge of Sumerian was as important to the student of Semitic Babylonian as a knowl who seems to have had a passion for literature. The cities of Babylonia were ransacked for books which related to the favorite studies of the As syrian king, and a considerable body of scribes was kept busily at work in copying and so re editing the older literature of the country. Asstin bani-pal is never weary of telling us that the literary treasures which he collected were for the benefit of the lie iple—that the ancient books of Babylonia had been collected and re-edited "for the inspection of the nailer." The con tents of a Babylonian or Assyrian library were sufficiently varied. All the branches of the knowledge of the day were represented in it. History and chronology, grammar and lexicogra phy, religion and the sciences, as they were then understood and pursued, all alike found a place there.
The earliest philologists, so far as we know, were the scribes of Chaldea and Nineveh The original language of literary Babylonia had been agglutinative, and differed in foto from the Sem itic language of the later rulers of the country.
therefore, when the I utter. admit/. I the culiore. the script, and the literary product ams of their edge fif Latin is to a student of English. The cuneiform syllabary itself could not be properly learned without sine knowledge of the ancient language of Chaldea.
It had been a Slim( rian invention, but it was an invention which, like all others of the same kind, had been of slow growth; when the Semites became dominant. in Babylonia, it was still grow ing, and it was finally completed under Semitic supervision. The interlacing of Sumerian an.l Semitic elements which was the consequence of this double growth has been the cause of hasty and nnf nundid theories in regard to the Sumerian language But it had much to do with making the old Babylonians a nation of philologists. for as soon as they began to learn, as it were, their plphaliet, they were brought face to face with two languages utterly unlike one another, and a study of the ancient literature of their country brought the fact still further before them; hence origi nated the grammar and vocabularies, the reading books. and interlinear or parallel translations which formed so large a portion of the contents of a lcihvinniin or Assyrian library A consid erable part of the sacred literature of Chaldca was written in Sumerian—so also was a great deal of the legal literature, and in order to under stand it, comparative grammars and lexicons were necessary. It is not astonishing that when once the fact of the diversity of languages had been impressed upon the mind of the cultivated Babylonian, a philological interest should have been awakened in him. Babylonia was sur rounded by populations of diversified speech, and some of these populations established themselves in Babylonia itself. Not long after the line of Khammurabi, for instance, the country was con quered and governed for several centuries by Kassites from the mountains of Elam, who spoke an agglutinative language, and the name of Khammurabi himself shows that although his native language was Semitic, it was not Semitic Babylonian.