Babylonian Books.

In his third illustrated public lecture on Babylonian Books, Professor Lyon spoke of the script and the language.

The cuneiform script was employed by several nations in western Asia, including the Babylonians and Assyrians, the Armenians, the Cappadocians, and the Persians. It was at first a picture writing, like the Egyptians and the Chinese. Each sign stood for an object or idea. By a development some of the signs came to stand for syllables. Beyond this the Babylonians refused to go, but the Persians, on adopting the script, rejected most of the signs and reduced the rest to an alphabet of about forty-six letters. The place and date of the origin of the script are unknown. The oldest recovered specimens are from about 4000 B. C., and come from Tello in Southern Babylonia. The essential feature of the script, after the period of picture writing was past, is the wedge. These in combination make all the signs, several hundred in number. The script read at first downwards, but afterwards to the right. The wedges have but three directions, horizontal, perpendicular, or oblique, at an angle of about forty-five degrees. Any given Babylonian writing is composed of a mixture of the signs representing objects with those representing syllables. For our ease in consulting and learning the signs they can be arranged in groups and subgroups according to their varying degrees of complexity. The script is the chief difficulty in learning the Babylonian language, but by the aid of transliterations it is possible to learn grammar and vocabulary with acquiring the signs.

The language is the oldest branch of the great Semitic family and is a sister to the Hebrew. Arabic, Phoenician, Ethiopian, and Aramaean. As the Semites in general have marked physiognomic and mental traits, so the languages which they spoke are sharply distinguished from the other great groups of languages. The triliteralism of stems, simplicity of verb forms, peculiar mode of expressing the genitive relation, close union of the personal pronouns with noun or verb, absence of a neuter gender-these are some of the distinguishing traits of Semitic languages. The Babylonian is closely related to its sisters and especially to the Hebrew. A Hebrew scholar on first looking at a translated Babylonian writing recognizes many familiar words. If Sennacherib's letters to Hezekiah had been in the Assyrian language but in the Hebrew written character the receiver could have understood it with ease. There was no essential difference between the Ninevite and the Babylonian forms of language. After the Persian conquest of Babylon, in 538 B. C., the language continued to flourish till the beginning of our era. Those who used it held also to their ancient script, too conservative to adopt the alphabet. But it is a crowning glory of the Semitic peoples that one of their number invented the alphabet and thus placed the whole world under obligation for all coming time.