The Hays free press. [volume] (Hays, Kan.) 1908-1924, 1917-01-06

IL To his wife he made little hen
scratches and scrawls that great
scholars tell read: Beloved light
OF mines eyes: Thy extravagances are beyond all
the patience of man. Behold, thy slave is return
ing without the shekels thou so brazenly hast de-
manded- Ever thy devoted husband"
Or TO a slave Overseer who had Willingly or
unw1ttngly done him in household deal, he
StyIused in hot haste: st is with sorrow that thy
STUPIDITY is borne upon my consciousness. Thou,
mast cheated me in scales and in price. D
thee' thou art not worth three bekas week p
Mhicn is PROBABLY what slaves food cost then.
Ih1s, 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
cleaned and deciphered shows so many LITTLE fa-
m1l1ar intimate touches and such an abundance
OF letter writing all subjects under the sun
mat the possibility of the existence of epistoary
guides then must be borne upon our conscious
ness, too.
An interesting lot of deciphering of such tablets
Is Oelng accomplished by DR.. Stephen Langdon
VINO came in September fem Oxford England Tn
be curator of the Babylonian division of tbe Uni
VeFslty OF pennsylvania museum in PhiIadeIpbia
He is a young still, but he is the only man
living who has seen and handled all the thousands
OF tablets unearthed by University of PennsvI-
van1a museum expeditions above the CITY of Min
pur both those retained by the authorities at Con-
stantnople 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 Ieft oxford dull, dead spot, America has Sc
cured MIN Tor 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 translations of all important
ones, now later, and will classify and catalogue
the collection, stupendous task.
In 250O B. G. papyrus and paper for writing
were unknown. Men scratched with pointed
steel instrument called stylus 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 another tablet The analogy
OF these tablets to sheets of paper is not hard to
comprehend. Sometimes tale stops in the mid
die and the next tablet which it was continued
is never found or is found years later.
In the temples scribes were busy copying old
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 placed shelves in
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 what the tablets say.
The books cover wide field and comprise odes
epics. religious hymns, dictionaries scientific
pamphlets. The old Baby1onian and Sumeran
temples were, also, great Industrial commercial,
agricultural and stocz-rasing centers, and they
kept a vast number of documents relating to these
various interests.
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
Babyionia. This temple 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
primary stage and continued through elementary
and grammar grades to the regulation college
course as Babylonians conceived it, and to theo-
logical classes. The textbooks show high
der of intellectually. Indeed. the resemblances
of these people to OF today bring home again
the unchangeableness of the great antiquity OF
civilization, called
Bows, exercise books have been found repeat
edIv in this and other collections. They were
like present-day school states, but made Of wet
CLAW and the little fellow marked them with
a STYLUS and when ne made a mistake blotted
1t out with his thumb.
The quality and range OF the textbooks aston
,sb ONO Books on mathematics abound; they
taupht the multiplication table up to 2,4O0 and
. 800 times a number. In their financial uansac-
tions Sumerians had to do stupendous calculations
in their heads Doctor Langdon has just found,
too a comprehensive volume used in the study OF
law: and among the grammar books one dealing
particularly and completely with the use of the
nrenostion. A race that has arrived at the prep0-