country, it is true, were not inscribed in the letters of the Phœnician alphabet on perishable papyrus; the writing material was imperishable clay, the characters were those of the cuneiform syllabary. Though Kirjath-Sepher (i.e., Book-Town) was destroyed by the Israelites, other cities mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets, like Gaza, or Gath, or Tyre, remained independent, and we cannot imagine that the old traditions of culture and writing were forgotten in any of them. In what is asserted by the critical school to be the oldest relic of Hebrew literature, the Song of Deborah, reference 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 non-natural sense, and transform the scribe into a military commander (an officer who arranges men in a row instead of arranging letters and words). Only it is probable that the scribes still made use of the cuneiform syllabary, and not yet of the Phœnician alphabet. At all events the Tell-el-Amarna tablets have over-thrown the primary foundation on which much of this criticism was built, and have proved that the populations of Palestine, among whom the Israelites settled, and whose culture they inherited, were as literary as the inhabitants of Egypt or Babylonia.
But apart from such side-lights as these upon ancient history, the discovery of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets has a lesson for us of momentous interest. The collection cannot be the only one of its kind. Elsewhere, in Palestine and Syria as well as in Egypt, similar collections must still be lying under the soil. Burnt clay is not injured by rain and moisture, and even the climate of Palestine will have preserved uninjured its libraries of clay. Such libraries must still be awaiting the spade of the excavator on the sites of places like Gaza, or others whose remains are buried under the lofty mounds of Southern Judea. Kirjath-Sepher must have been the seat of a famous library,
