AHAB'S ARCHIVES,

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1032, 23 January 1911, Page 5

AHAB'S ARCHIVES,

ANCIENT WRITING TABLETS .UNEARTHED. By Ttlccnph—Press Association—Ceryrisht Berlin, January 20. News has been received of the discovery in Samaria of 100 clay tablets, apparently belonging to King Ahab.' One tablet contains a communication from an unknown Assyrian King to King Ahab, and. another is an inventory of Allah's palace furniture.

SOME FAMOUS FINDS. During the . last sixty years or so the discovery and decipherment of these ancient clay tablets and other monuments and inscriptions of 'bygone days have let a flood ot light on the history of antiquity. . Writings of various kinds have been discovered, but a very tine clay seems, to have.been the material in most general use. Great care was taken in its manufacture, and after it had been prepared a stylus was used ■ to impress the characters. These tablets were dried in the sun or baked in' a furnace, which made the writing so permanent that it could only be. destroyed by shattering the tablet into. fragments, tinme of these writings carry us Back" many, thousands of years before the Christian era, and. those relating to the reign of Ahab are of comparatively recent date. . The. most famous of these records are the. Babylonian "Epic of Creation," the (/-de of Hammurabi, and 1 the Tel-el-Am \rna discovery. The Creation tablets were discovered in> the library of Ashurbanipal (668-626 8.C.),.at Nineveh. This li.'lory, says Mr. J. E. Thomas, in his . work on "The Old Testament in the"liigbt x>f4he< Eeligion of Babylonia and Assyria, contained transcripts of earlier texts, and the contents of the' 1 tnb[ots.'. nluch farther than 700;. Professor' Sajrce" is of opinion that they are as old as '2200 or 2300 B.C. The tablets, relating; to the code of Hammurabi: weto discovered at Susa,, on tho bank's of the ' Eiiv phrates, at the close,of 1901. The Code which ;-wa£ Enacted by. Hammurabi,, the (ireat King of Babylon, dates from between 2250* B.C; and 1900 B.C. It is the oldest code of laws in tho world, and proves'that an advanced state of. civilisation existed in the South of Babylon about 2000 B.C. One provision of the code is'that if a patient dies through.an unsuccessful operation the surgeon must pay a heavy iine, and his license is forfeited. Tho Tel-el-Amarna tablets are really foreign office records—reports of viceroys and., political agents, and correspondence between the_ rulers .of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon—which had remained buried beneath the 'dustheaps of Tel-el-Amarr.a, on tho banks of the Nile; These tablets show, that,. centuries before tho Exodus, Canaan was a highly oivilised dependency of Egypt, and throws much interesting'light on the life of the people in those far off days.