Show V READI RE ADI T N ti LET L VR V R 0 YE alft dr langdon of the university of pennsylvania museum Is is fin finding ding some remarkable documents on cla clay y tablets dug out of babylonian rut ruins ns an interesting ining te resting ing light ht has been shed anthi on this s ancient d civilization vil of the mystic east undoubtedly the alika akka than dlan gentlemen of 2500 B 0 took down from the shelves shelie of his library a copy of the handy letter writer and sought the model upon on which he might build the important communication V he be had in hand to his fils wife he made little aen hen if va scra scratches scratched tche and scrawls li abat that great ij I scholars tell us read beloved light of mines eyes thy extravagances are beyond all tile the patience of man behold thy slave la Is returning without the shekels thou so BO brazenly hast demanded ever thy devoted husband husban d or to a slave overseer who had bad wittingly or unwittingly done him in sama household deal he styluses stylus ed in hot haste it Is with sorrow that thy stupidity Is borne upon my consciousness thou thon hast bast cheated me to in scales and in price to t thee ee t thou iou art not worth three bekas a week 11 which Is probably wh what A t a slaves food cost then this according to 11 may y bosman writing in the now new york sun she continues at all events the great wealth of tablet records dug up in mesopotamia in recent years and clea cleaned ned and deciphered shows so many little familiar mill ar intimate touches and such an abundance of letter writing on all subjects under the sun that the possibility of the existence of ept epistolary olary guides then must be borne upon bour aurla 1 ness too 3 fe vs an interesting lot of deciphering tablets Is being accomplished by dr sa s1 Stephen Langdon who n ho came in september from oxford england to be curator of the babylonian division athe university of pennsylvania museum in philadelphia he Is a young man still but lie he la is the only man living who has seen and handled bandied al all the thousands of tablets unearthed by university of Penns pennsylvania vi museum expeditions above the city of nip pu pur both those retained by the authorities at constantinople stantin ople and those sent to philadelphia there are only about 15 men in the world who can read Su merlan and babylonian characters and he Is one of them thanks to the war which has left oxford a dull dead spot america has secured him for one year he will decipher as many as aa possible of the thousands of tablets that have been cleaned at the university of pennsylvania museum will publish translations of all important ones now or later and will classify and catalogue tile tho collection n stupendous i d ou task in 2500 1100 B 0 papyrus and paper for writing were ere unknown meni mend scratched with a 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 middle and the next tablet on 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 don to posterity just as later inter monks spent their days and their nights copying laboriously and preserving old books for the archives of the monastery the work of the amanuenses was placed on shelves in a library neat little rows and piles of clay books men alen digging years inter have found them and other men have spent their lives in studying them that they might tell us ug what the tablets say tile the books cover a wide field and comprise odes epics religious hymns dictionaries scientific 6 pamphlets the old babylonian and merlan Su temples were ere also gref great industrial commercial agricultural and stock centers and abe they y a vast number of documents relating to these there various interests millions of tablets have been found recording sales ot of cattle slaves and staple goods marriage contracts and agreements divorce decrees wills for innumerable things from jewelry and chattels cliette ls there are homans womans ns dresses to human tile the timekeeper timekeepers time keepers heeper slips of the temple workers and bookkeeping accounts doctor docto r langdon has found that one big banking house did business in tho the city of babylon for GOO COO years the great bulk of tile the tablets have been found on the site of the ancient item temple plo of nipper L in Baby babelonia babylonia lonia this temple was both tl a religious center ind a college designed prIm primarily arlly for the education of pr priests IestA but the ra range dge of text textbooks books unearthed yn there shows that instruction began ift at tl a primary stage and continued through elementary and grammar grades to the regulation college course ns babylonians conceived it and to theological classes the textbooks textbook s show a high order of intellectuality indeed the resemblances of these people to Us of today bring th alio e unchangeableness unchangeable nes of the great civilization so called boys exercise boo books IRS have been found folind repeatedly in this anil and tn in other collections they were school slates but made of wet day ilk like present fellow marked on them with little lay clay nid nn d the a n stylus and v when ben he made n mistake t a 46 blotted it out with his thumb and range of astonish the quality mathe abound they on books S h one Is to 2400 and I 1 tabea tile he taught au ht transactions in theli their financial 2500 2 BOO times a number do calculations Sumer fans had to lt Ss I 1 doctor langdon has h as just found their in plume lume used in the ille study of 0 too 0 a andona tile the books one dealing law aw with the use of the ticul ind ad e par A rachi race abat t has ar arrived ve at the prepo 7 V g ilk fn an aal yal 4 A ca Y cg I 1 tit d 1 lot 1 41 y t e va I 1 I 1 I 1 ei 11 nr P Is by no means primitive 1 the date of this book Is 2300 10 i geography was t taught wea r a astronomy str onomy and history in Is the oldest history yet found a tablet giving the list of Babylon babylonian aby lonian lan kings going back to the flood floia the claim Is that it Is a record of years but this may be disputed since the names of the monarchs which seem to be those of men who successively may be of meri mentho iwho ruled simultaneously in kingdoms that were adjacent A conservative estimate Is that this history covers years there Is u book on botany teaching the people how to raise the date palm an important crop of the times agricultural books abound for the temple bad a collegiate department just jus t as have cornell and other american universities where scientific farming was taught the babylonians as Is well known were remarkable engineers and past masters in the field of irrigation it is not surprising that doctor langdon has found many records of this in the muse museums u ms babylonian Babylon lan collection we learn again of canals being dug and of a tablet that chronicles the opening of a great waterway like the panama canal the celebration over it the presence of the king and the arido fit in the great skill of its engineers further documents are reported verifying cus assertions that the babylonian woman received an education equal to mans took her place with him in certain lines and was compensated with the same wage ps as he books had no cases and when found are often crumbled broken cracked or so badly chipped that parts of the translation must be guessed at or omitted entirely others fortunately are found intact letters on the other hand were sent in envelopes ve lopes also of clay when the tablet letter had been duly inscribed and signed it was rolled in a fine clay powder and slipped into a hollow clay pocket more afore clay dust was then shaken in so that layers of powder were packed about the contents of the pocket and the letter could not get rubbed or scratched the clay opening was then sealed and stamped with the senders ring afterward the address was added find and a slave dispatched with it later we know that babylonian and Su merlan governments jsu supported sported regular postal systems it Is quite possible that that regime was in existence in 2300 B 0 many letters are found with seals unbroken and these are marvello marvellously lasly preserved in their soft powdered pads becan only surmise the reason for their sealed state perhaps a man kept sealed scaled copies of the most important letters he be had to write duplicate copies of records and transactions have shave keen unearthed sometimes miles apart and the same practice could have held rationally of le letters some of these letters may never have been de delivered alv red thanks to ta an In inefficient effiel ent postal service in some particular locality or and this is more plausible plaus lle the breaking out of frequent revolutions could have conceivably crippled the babylonian post offices and left many letters forever undelivered indubitably the oldest undelivered vered letter in the world islai Is in the babylonian collection of the uni versify V of pennsylvania mu museum seii in its date would be b 2200 B C and doctor langdon opened find and I 1 I 1 read ll it only itis from a masterka master to his slave or to some underling de rii I 1 ng or employee employed obviously it Is only one of several letters elace it refers to previous correspondence spon dence and tb fo a previous transaction over which the writer ts Is perturbed its archaic su merlan meilan Is dictatorial overbearing i and pe peevish eAsh and rants of soffie some unsatisfactory flour deal that the underling has undertaken one on e corid wonders ers whatever became ofila of that flour I 1 gini V other tablets now being catalogued cataloguer catalo gued have pictures on them one a hunting scene reminds rem inda one of the prehistoric cave drawings found in france there Is another of a battle scene very much broken but rare and interesting the coming of doctor langdon to the university of Pennsyl pennsylvania vanK museum la 19 timely and fortunate the babylonian B bas had bad no cu since tha begin beginning nin F of the european war when dr krno left to join his big regiment at the G german berm I 1 I 1 f front the eckley B coxe jr expeditions expeditions ach which began operations in egypt in 1889 and have carried them on through various years since evelo finding localities of the war ridden land where ahey hey can still operate this year have sent back to the le museum mus eurn an incalculable treasure troye not dot 0 only in tablets but in all kl kinds ads of articles dug up from 1 he e dirt layers of biblical and pre ard biblical lands i all this accumulation a tion has not had the attention a it deserved doctor langgons Lang dons labors will be bent toward arranging the babylonian exhibit the collection Is the largest in the w world orld no other museum has such a quantity of sacred merlan Su documents which make this the most important babylonian collection in the world even though it Is not so large as that in the british museum the war which already has done so much damage bids fair to rob us of this comparative rea cent achievement the ability to decipher these tablets which tell of the lives lifes and histories of peoples who lived so many hundred years ago younger men like anre at the front and may never come back other well known egypto logiste are old men not enough young men will be left to carry on the work of translating the ancient cuneiform writings when the present scholars pass away the achievement way may lie die them and Akk adlan become a dead language for not enough young collegeman colle college gemen men are proposing to take taka up archaeology archeology arche there Is today no endowed sent eat of assyriology in any university the university of pennsylvania vania museum Is exerting every effort to secure such nn an endowment that other intellects of so sc high an order as doctor may be encouraged cou raged and helped to carry cairy on a work similar to ills his ach ealley et B coxe J jr died aled in philadelphia in september last and left an endowment fund of to carry on the work lie he has been equipping A expeditions to do in egypt so BO in many an y years autv one expedition can only scratch the surface of the myriad hills there and the countless burled and forg forgotten often cities that lie be beneath them SJ S J our only hope of getting the re rest s t of the tabi tablet burl buried esthere ed it herc there bays doctor tanga longdon on is to go goba baa to nipper again and again and dig tor for them en dow for these expeditions are another of the crying needs of scholars the world nt large will 11 lose if arche archaeological archeological excavations and re resean arc have to tobe be abandoned there bisno la no doubt that the general clat elates esthe the work done by museums find by schol s to biblical students alone there Is lo 10 pleasure find and satisfaction to be derived from acts unearthed of biblical nl had pre biblical peo peces 1 es there Js Is now complete agreement amo aloag ag arch I 1 that hammurabi Is as that samo of genesis if n contemporary of abraham Abr ahnin from chronological inferences it follows that abraham may well have bare attended school nt at the temple ln in nay that he st studied these very hooks that anre now in the Uni university versify of pennsylvania museum he may have read there these the nc count of the creation the dates d dovetail ove let me take tnt e out oia and touch one of those tablets let S said a religious man recently in the university unis ver sity of pennsylvania I 1 museum 1 I believe in ray my heart that the hand band of abraham must h haya a 0 held any or all of them thein nearly years ago 1 |