ife and custom.
Professor Sayce's _Babylonians and Assyrians_ makes large use of the data
given by the contracts. Dr. T. G. Pinches's _The Old Testament in the
Light of the Monuments of Assyria and Babylonia_ also gives a very full
account of what may be gleaned from them. The present writer's _Assyrian
Deeds and Documents_ makes an attempt to treat one branch fully. This work
can only present the most essential facts. The whole amount of material is
so vast, so much is yet unpublished, so many side-issues arise, all worth
investigating, that it can only serve to introduce the reader to a
fascinating and wide field of study.

(M20) The material with which we have to deal, for the most part, falls
very naturally into epochs. The early Babylonian documents, though very
numerous, are mostly of the nature of memoranda and include few letters or
contracts. The documents of the First Dynasty of Babylon are extremely
rich in examples of both contracts and letters. Then the Tell Amarna
letters form a distinct group. The Ninevite contracts and letters of the
Sargonid Dynasty are well marked as separate from the foregoing. Lastly,
those of the New Babylonian Empire are a group by themselves. A few
scattered examples survive which form intermediate groups, usually too
small to be very characteristic, and certainly insufficient to justify or
support any theory of the intermediate stages of development.

(M21) It must be observed that to a great extent these groups are not only
separated by wide intervals of time--several centuries as a rule--but that
they are locally distinct. The first comes from Telloh, the larger part of
the second from Sippara, the third from Egypt (or Syria), the fourth from
Assyria, the last from Babylonia. Whether the documents of Sippara in the
third period showed as great divergence from those of the second period as
the Tell Amarna letters do, or whether each group is fairly characteristic
of its age in all localities using the cuneiform script, are questions
which can only be answered when the other documents of that period are
available for comparison.

(M22) The documents of each group have marked characteristics in form of
script, in orthography, in language. So great are the differences that a
slight acquaintance with these characteristics will suffice to fix the
epoch of a given document. For the most part, however, these
characteristics are not such as can appear in translation. They will be
poin