It is but two years since that the French excavator, de Sarzec, discovered a library of 30,000 tablets at Tello in southern Chaldaea, which had already been formed when Gudea ruled over the city in B.C.2700, and was arranged in shelves one above the other.

At Niffer, in the north of Babylonia, the American excavators have found an even larger number of tablets, some of which go back to the age of Sargon of Akkad, or 6000 years ago, while fresh tablets come pouring into the museums of Europe and America from other libraries found by the Arabs at Bersippa and Babylon, at Sippara and Larsa.

The Babylonia of the age of Amraphel, the contemporary of Abraham, has, thanks to the recent finds, become as well known to us as the Athens of Perikles; the daily life of the people can be traced in all its outlines, and we even possess the autograph letters written by Amraphel himself.

The culture and civilisation of Babylonia were already immensely old.

The contracts for the lease and sale of houses or other estate, the documents relating to the property of women, the reports of the law cases that were tried before the official judges, all set before us a state of society which changed but little down to the Persian era.
Behind it lie centuries of slow development and progress in the arts of life.