The Knoxville independent. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1894-current, 1917-01-06

kAR might build the important c0mHuul-
w. cation he had in hand.
To his wife he made little hen
| W scratches and scrawls that great
scholars tell us read: Beloved light
of mines eyes: Thy extrayagances are beyond all
the patience of man. Behold, thy slave is return
1ng without the shekels thou so brazenly hast de-
manded. Ever thy devoted husband"
Or, to a slave overseer who had Willingly or
unWittingy done him in some household deal, he
styused in hot haste: 1T is with sorrow that thy
stupidity is borne upon my consciousness. Thou
hast cheated me in scales and in price. D.
thee, thou art not worth three bekas a week ~
which is probably what slaves food cost then.
This, according to May Bosnian, writing in the
New York Sun. She continues
AT all events, the great wealth of tablet records
dug up in Mesopotamia in recent years and
cleaned and deciphered shows so many Eittle ia
mtliar, intimate touches and such an abundance
OF letter writing on all subjects under the sun
that the possibility of the existence of epistolary
guides then must be borne upon our conscious
ness too.
An interesting lot of decphering of such tablets
is being accomplished by Dr. Stephen Langdon
who came in September freln Oxford England to
be curator of the Babylonian division of the Uni
Versty of Pennsylvania museum in Philadelphia.
He is young man STILL but he is the only man
of tablets unearthed by University of PennsyI-
vania museum expeditions above the city Of Nip
pur both those retained by the authorities at Con-
stantinople and those sent to Philadelphia.
49, FifcFe are only about Is men in the world who
can read Sumeran and Babylonan characters,
and he is of them. Thanks to the war which
has left Oxford dull, dead spot, America has Sc
cured him for one year. He will decpher as many
possible of the thousands Of tablets that have
been cleaned at the University of Pennsylvania
museum will publish TRANSACTIONS of all important
ones, now OF later and will classify and catalogue
the collection, a stuDendous task
In $500 B. c. papyrus and paper for writing
were unknown. Men scratched with pointed
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 scrbes were busy copying old
pieces of literature to hand down to posterlty,
just as later monks spent their days and their
nights copying laborously and preserving old
books for the archives Of the monastery. The
work of the amanuenses was placed on shelves III
library-neat little rows and piles of clay books.
con 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 Babylonan 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
Of tah1a have fOnn6 recording
sales of cattle slaves and staple goods marriage
contracts and agreements; divorce DEGREES; wills;
receipts for nnumerabe things from jewelry and
woinan'S dresses to human chattels. There are
the timekeepers slips of the teTnple 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
nm the site of the ancient temple of Nppur III
Babylonia. This temple was both religious
center and a college designed primarily for the
education of priests, but the range of textbooks
unearthed there shows that instruction began at a
urinary stage and, continued through elementary
and grammar grades to the regulation college
course as Babylonans conceived 1t, and to theo-
logical classes The textbook show high or
der of intellectually. Indeed the resemblances
of these people to of today bring home again
the unchangeableness Of the great antiquity OF
civilization, so called.
Rows exercise books have been found repeat
odIv in This and in other collie ctions. They were
like present-day school states, but made of wet
clav and the little fellow marked on them with
stylus, and when he made a mistake blotted
II out with his thumb.
The quality and range of t1e textbooks aston
,eb ono Rocks on mathematics abound they
taught the multiplication table up to 24Oo and
600 times number. In their financial ransac-
IONS Sumerlans had to do stupendous calculations
in their heads Doctor Langion has JUST round
too. comprehensive volume Iseu ID me st.iuy VI
law and among the grammar DOCKS one otanns
and completely :sith the use of the
.s-o.os.tsnn race that has arrived at the prepo-