Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1916-12-28

:. HineS eyes: my extravagances are beyond all
.ne patience OF man. Behold, thy slave is return
ing without the shekels thou so brazenly hast de-
enahded' Ever thy devoted husband"
Or, to a slave overseer who had wittinplv or
unwitt1ngly done him in some household deal. he
stylused in hot haste: SIT is with sorrow that tbv
STUPIDITY is borne upon my consciousness. Thou
mast cheated me in scales and in price. D
tnee' thou art not worth three bekas a week l"-
winch is probably what a slaves food cost then,
Ihis, according to May Bosnian, writing in the
New York Sun. She continues:
AT all events, the great wealth of tablet records
aug up In Mesopotamia in recent years and
cieuneu ana deciphered shows so many little ia
mlllar, Intimate touches and such an abundance
OF letter writing on all subjects under the SIM
that the possibility of the existence Of epistolorv
guides then must be borne upon our conscious.
ness, too.
An interesting lot of deciphering of such tablets
Is Delng accomplished by DR.. Stephen Lancdon
VINO came in September frem Oxford, England 70
De curator OF the Babylonian division of the mi
versity OF Pennsylvania museum in Philadelnhia
he is a young man still, but he is the only man
living VINO mas seen and handled all the thousands
u taolets unearthed by University of Pennsyl-
wanna museum expeditions above the city of Mn
pur, both those retained by the authorities at Con-
stantlnople and those sent to Philadelphia.
There are only about Is men in the world who
can read Sumerian and Babylonian characters.
and he is one of them. Thanks to the war. which
mas ieIt OXFORD a dull, dead spot, America has Sc
cured MN for one year. He will decipher as many
as possible of the thousands of tablets that have
been cleaned at the University of PENNSYLVANIA
museum, will publish TRANSACTIONS Of all important
ones, now or later, and will classify and catalogue
the collection, a stupendous task.
In $500 B. C. papyrus and paper for writiag
were nnEn0wn Man Sarofabo1 ,rtA1. -
steel instrument called a stylus on unbaked red
clay tablets of various sizes, mostly about the
size, shape and thickness of a small book. They
wrote on both sides, and then, If they were not
through. continued on another tablet. The analogy
of these tablets to sheets of paper Is not hard to
comprehend. Sometimes a tale stops in the mid
die and the next tablet on which it was continued
is never found, or is found years later.
In the temples scribes were busy copying sold
pieces of literature to hand down to ~posterity,
just as later monks spent their days and their
nights copying laboriously and preserving old
books for the archives of the monastery. The
work of the amanuenses was placed on shelves in
a Hbrary-neat little rows and piles of clay books.
Men digging 5000 years later have found them,
and other men have spent their lives in studying
them, that they might tell us what the tablets say.
The books cover a wide field and comprise odes,
epics, religious hymns, dictionaries. scientific
pamphlets. The old Babylonian and Sumerian
temples were, also, great industrial, commercial,
agricultural and stock-raising centers, and they
kept a vast number of documents relating to these
various interests.
Millions of tablets have been found recording
sales of cattle, slaves and staple goods; marriage
contracts and agreements divorce DEGREES; wills;
receipts for innumerable things from jewelry and
woman's dresses to human chattels. There are
the timekeepers' slips of the temple workers. and
bookkeeping accounts. Doctor Langdon has found
that one big banking house did business in the
city of Babylon for 600 years.
The great bulk of the tablets have been found
on the site of the ancient temple of Nippur In
,Babylonia. This temple was both a religious
.Enter and a college designed primarily for the
education Of priests, but the range of textbooks
unearthed there shows that instruction began at q
primary stage and continued through elementary
and grammar grades to the regulation college
course, as Babylonians conceived 1t, and to theo-
logical classes. The textbooks show a high or
der Of intellectually. Indeed, the resemblances
Of these people to us of today bring home again
the unchangeableness of the great antiquity OF
civilization, so called.
Boys exercise books have been found repeat
eddy, in this and in other collections. They were
like present-day school states, but made of wet
CLAW. and the little fellow marked on them with
n STYLUS, and when he mhde a mistake blotted
It out with his thumb.
The quality and range of the textbooks aston
ish one. Books on mathematics abound; they
taught the multiplication table up to 2,40O and
hO0 times a number. In their financial transac-
tions Sumerians had to do stupendous calculations
IN their heads. Doctor Langdon has Just found,
TOO. a comprehensive volume used in the study of
Jaw; and among the grammar books one dealing
AarticularIy and completely with the use OF the
Mreposition. A race that has arrived at the prepo-