he Babylonians and
Assyrians seem to have had great power in this direction.

One of the most interesting collections of historical pieces is that
recently discovered at Amarna. Here, out of a mound which represents a
palace of the Egyptian King Amenhotep IV., were dug up numerous letters
which were exchanged between the kings of Babylonia and Egypt in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and numerous reports sent to the
Egyptian government by Egyptian governors of Canaanite cities. These
tablets show that at this early time there was lively communication
between the Euphrates and the Nile, and they give a vivid picture of the
chaotic state of affairs in Canaan, which was exposed to the assaults of
enemies on all sides. This country was then in possession of Egypt, but
at a still earlier period it must have been occupied by the Babylonians.
Only in this way can we account for the surprising fact that the
Babylonian cuneiform script and the Babylonian language form the means
of communication between the east and west and between Egypt and Canaan.
The literary value of these letters is not great; their interest is
chiefly historic and linguistic. The same thing is true of the contract
tablets, which are legal documents: these cover the whole area of
Babylonian history, and show that civil law attained a high state of
perfection; they are couched in the usual legal phrases.

The literary monuments mentioned above are all contained in tablets,
which have the merit of giving in general contemporaneous records of the
things described. But an account of Babylonian literature would be
incomplete without mention of the priest Berosus. Having, as priest of
Bel, access to the records of the temples, he wrote a history of his
native land, in which he preserved the substance of a number of poetical
narratives, as well as the ancient accounts of the political history.
The fragments of his work which have been preserved (see Cory's 'Ancient
Fragments') exhibit a number of parallels with the contents of the
cuneiform tablets. Though he wrote in Greek (he lived in the time of
Alexander the Great), and was probably trained in the Greek learning of
his time, his work doubtless represents the spirit of Babylonian
historical writing. So far as can be judged from the remains which have
come down to us, its style is of the annalistic sort which appears in
the old inscriptions and in the historical books of the Bible.

The Babylonian liter