fortunately included vast numbers of written documents, inscribed
on tablets, prisms, and cylinders of terra-cotta. When
nineteenth-century scholarship had penetrated the mysteries of
the strange script, and ferreted out the secrets of an unknown
tongue, the world at last was in possession of authentic records
by which the traditions regarding the Babylonians and Assyrians
could be tested. Thanks to these materials, a new science
commonly spoken of as Assyriology came into being, and a most
important chapter of human history was brought to light. It
became apparent that the Greek ideas concerning Mesopotamia,
though vague in the extreme, were founded on fact. No one any
longer questions that the Mesopotamian civilization was fully on
a par with that of Egypt; indeed, it is rather held that
superiority lay with the Asiatics. Certainly, in point of purely
scientific attainments, the Babylonians passed somewhat beyond
their Egyptian competitors. All the evidence seems to suggest
also that the Babylonian civilization was even more ancient than
that of Egypt. The precise dates are here in dispute; nor for our
present purpose need they greatly concern us. But the
Assyrio-Babylonian records have much greater historical accuracy
as regards matters of chronology than have the Egyptian, and it
is believed that our knowledge of the early Babylonian history is
carried back, with some certainty, to King Sargon of Agade,[5]
for whom the date 3800 B.C. is generally accepted; while somewhat
vaguer records give us glimpses of periods as remote as the
sixth, perhaps even the seventh or eighth millenniums before our
era.

At a very early period Babylon itself was not a capital and
Nineveh had not come into existence. The important cities, such