RECENT CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS : HOLY WRIT CONFIRMED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9452, 24 August 1889, Page 1 (Supplement)

RECENT CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS : HOLY WRIT CONFIRMED.

At the annual meeting of the Victoria (Philosophical) Institute, held on July 2, at the Society of Arts House, under the presidency of Sir George Stokes, P.R.S., Rev. Dr. Wright read a valuable paper by Professor Sayee", describing the important cuneiform inscriptions which were discovered the winter before last at Tel-el-Amarr.a, Upper Egypt. The tale of these tablets is a truly wonderful one, showing that in the fifteenth century before our eraa century before the Exodus— literary intercourse was p-oin"- on throughout the civilised world of Western ,Asia, between Babylonia' and Egypt, and the smaller states of Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and even of Eastern Cappadocia. This intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language, and the complicated Babylonian script. In fact, Babylonian was as much the language of diplomacy and cultivated society throughout those regions as French has been in modern times. This influence explains, among other things, the existence of Babylonian names in Palestine while the Canaanite was still in the land." The newly-found tablets confirm the conclusions already arrived at by Egyptologists, that Palestine was Canaanite at the close of the eighteenth dynasty, the founder of the nineteenth dynasty being " the new king who knew not Joseph." The towns of the country were, moreover, garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and, though its governors bore Semitic names, they were officials of the Egyptian king. One of the most interesting passages in the paper dealt with the question of the antiquity of writing. It has long been tacitly assumed by the critical school that writino- was not only a rare art in Palestine before°the age of David, but was practically unknown. Little historical credence can be placed, it has been urged, in the earlier records of the Hebrew people, because they could not have been committed to writing until a period when the history of the past had become traditional and mythical. This assumption is now triumphantly shown to be opposed to facts. Long before the Exodus, Canaan had its libraries and scribes, its schools and literary men. The annals of the country, it is true, were not inscribed in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet or perishable papyrus ; the writing material was the imperishable claythe characters those of the cuneiform syllabary. A newlight is thus thrown on royal lists like that contained in Genesis xxxvi. Why should not this be an extract from the chronicles of Edom, originally written in the cuneiform syllabary of Babylonia ? In what is asserted by the critical school to be the oldest relic of Hebrew literature—the song of Deborahreference is made to the scribes of Zebulon "that handle the pen of the writer" (Judges v., 14), and we have now no longer any reason to interpret the words in a nonnatural sense, and transform the scribe into a military commander. Professor Sayce's paper concluded with some words on the rich reward which still awaits the explorer's toil beneath the soil of the Holy Land. Workmen and funds are found for exhuming the buried history of Greece, but little or nothing is done to secure the treasures that lie beneath the surface of the sacred land of our faith. The tablets of Tel-el-Amarna are, Professor Sayce holds, an earnest of what is yet to be unearthed in the Holy Land.