Explanatory lists of the words and names of these foreign populations were drawn up by the Babylonian scribes, and a table has been dis covered which contains a list of common Kassite terms with their Babylonian equivalents.
(4) Philology of the Babylonians. The Babylonians were consequently as regards phil ology, and the recognition of the fact that other languages besides their own were worthy of study, far in advance of either Greeks or Rom ans ; what would we not give, for example, for a list of Etruscan words with their Latin render ings, like the list of Kassite words of which I have just spoken ? Doubtless the philology of the Babylonians was still immature, and their ideas of etymology exceedingly imperfect, but so also was the philology of the European scholars only a hundred years ago. We can easily match the shortcomings of the Babylonian lexicogra phers by the similar shortcomings of the English lexicographers of the last century. Sumerian words were confounded with antiquated Semitic Baby lonian words, or words belonging to the languages by which Chaldea was surrounded, and Semitic words were provided with Sumerian etymologies, just as Anglo-Saxon words were provided with Greek or Latin etymologies by our dictionary makers. The Semitic Sabbatu, "a Sabbath," is a curious example of this. A Babylonian scribe derives it from the Sumerian sa, "heart," and bat, "to end," and accordingly explains it as "a day of rest for the heart." However, the per verseness of the derivation is not greater than that of some modern Assyriologists, who have traced Sumerian words to Semitic roots.
People do not begin to compile grammars and dictionaries, or to speculate on the origin of words, until books and libraries abound, and a literary education is widespread. The daily ne cessities of life may originate works on law or astronomy ; the vanity of princes may lead to the compilation of annals, and the composition of history, while religious and poetical literature belong to the earliest days of national culture, but the philologist is a late product of civiliza tion and bears incontrovertible evidence of a long and familiar acquaintance with the art of writing.
It is just this fact which makes the philological works of the Babylonian scribes of such especial value. A considerable amount of the criticism which has been passed upon the Old Testament records has been based on the assumption that the civilized nations of the ancient East were as illiterate as the nations of northern Europe dur ing the middle ages. But the revelations which have been made to us by the buried libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, and the discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel-el-Arnarna—testifying as they do, to an active literary correspondence throughout western Asia, in the fifteenth century B. C.—have finally and decisively proved that such an assumption is false.
The art of writing was generally known and practiced in the ancient East, and the natives of western Asia and Egypt were quite as fond of i indulging in it as we moderns are to-day. So far as literary facilities were concerned, there was no reason why the contemporaries of Abra ham or Moses should not have recorded on clay and papyrus the events which were passing be fore them. If in future we are to question the historical accuracy of the narratives which have been handed down to us, it must be upon other grounds than a want of literary knowledge and skill.
(5) The Historic Sense. Of course it does not follow that because a people is literary and fond of reading and writing, it should therefore be possessed of what has been called a historical sense. The Egyptians, for instance, were singu larly deficient in this respect ; the inscriptions which cover the walls of their temples and tombs seldom record a single historical fact. We find interminable lists of bombastic titles, wearisome invocations to the gods, and long accounts of the piety of the king or the dead man, but we look al most in vain for references to historical events. Even the papyri of Egyptian history contain his torical romances rather than history in the true sense of the word. The Babylonians again, though their contempt for history was not so marked as that of the Egyptians, preferred to cover their clay tablets with religious texts rather than with the annals of their country.