IV. Private Letters Of The First Dynasty Of Babylon
V. Sennacherib's Letters To His Father, Sargon
VI. Letters From The Last Year Of Shamash-Shum-Ukin
VII. Letters Regarding Affairs In Southern Babylonia
Letters About Elam And Southern Babylonia
IX. Miscellaneous Assyrian Letters
X. Letters Of The Second Babylonian Empire
Appendix
I. The Prologue And Epilogue To The Code Of Hammurabi
II. Chronology
III. Weights And Measures
IV. Bibliography Of The Later Periods
Index
Footnotes

DEDICATION

To
My Mother
In Memory Of Loving Help

PREFACE

The social institutions, manners, and customs of an ancient people must
always be of deep interest for all those to whom nothing is indifferent
that is human. But even for modern thinkers, engrossed in the practical
problems of our advanced civilization, the records of antiquity have a
direct value. We are better able to deal with the complicated questions of
the day if we are acquainted with the simpler issues of the past. We may
not set them aside as too remote to have any influence upon us. Not long
ago men looked to Greece and Rome for political models. We can hardly
estimate the influence which that following of antiquity has had upon our
own social life.

But there is a deeper influence even than Greek politics and Roman law,
still powerfully at work among us, which we owe to a more remote past. We
should probably resent the idea that we were not dominated by Christian
principles. So far as they are distinct from Greek and Roman ideals, most
of them have their roots in Jewish thought. When a careful investigation
is made, it will probably be found that the most distinctive Christian
principles in our times are those which were taken over from Jewish life,
since the Old Testament still more widely appeals to us than the New. But
those Jewish ideas regarding society have been inherited in turn from the
far more ancient Babylonian civilization. It is startling to find how much
that we have thought distinctively our own has really come down to us from
that great people who ruled the land of the two streams. We need not be
ashamed of anything we can trace back so far. It is from no savage
ancestors that it descends to us. It bears the "hall mark," not only of
extreme antiquity but of sterling worth.

The people, who were so highly educated, so deeply religious, so humane
and intelligent, who developed such just laws,