Woman and the Law in Babylonia and Assyria. individual goes to a certain town, or starts on a voyage or journey and is never after ward heard of. A genealogist becomes popular with his kin, near and distant, notwithstanding the fact that some are suspicious of his motives. The lawyer-genealogist discovers that he has many, many "cousins"—which is the conven ient term for kinsmen whose relationship is
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too remote to be otherwise expressed in a single word. The alert practitioner is happy to have some of them become his clients, but he is also sometimes made unhappy thereby. The writer has rendered legal services to "cousins" and has afterward been met with the compensation of words: "We did not know we had to pay!"
WOMAN AND THE LAW IN BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. BY R. VASHON ROGERS. GEOGRAPHICALLY, ethnologically and historically, the whole district be tween the two great rivers of Western Asia, the Tigris and the Euphrates, forms but one country. The ancients recognized this fact, and called it all Assyria, though Babylonia would have been a more accurate designation. Its primitive people who built its cities, originated its culture and invented the hieroglyphics out of which its cuneiform writing came, were of the Turanian family; the Highlanders were called Accadians; the Lowlanders were Sumerians, "the people of the two rivers." We are not bound to be lieve (as Berosius tells us) that kings reigned in this land 432,000 years before Noah's flood, but we do know that two thousand years before Christ, Sargon founded a library. Babylonia was the older State, but at last became a mere apanage of Assyria. In art, science and literature Assyria was the pupil and imitator of Babylonia. In ancient Babylonia the parents had the power of selling their children before they came of age, and where the parents were dead the same power was possessed, at least in Assyria, by a brother over his sister. In Babylonia the sons of well-to-do parents were sent to school at an early age, and the
girls shared in the lessons given their brothers. Much time was spent in learning to read and write. It took years of patient labor to learn the cuneiform system of writing: a vast number of characters had to be remembered, conventional signs differing often very little from one another; the styles of writing varied greatly, and the pupil had to learn them all; and each character had more than one phonetic value. The language of the Sumerians, who had invented these sym bols, had to be acquired to fully understand them. The children were well taught in the rudiments, judging from the few mistakes we find in spelling. The writing material was clay, and the cuneiform (or wedge-shaped letters) were en graved upon soft bricks of this common stuff by a stylus; the bricks were afterward baked in a kiln to dry them. Ofttimes the writing is so minute that a magnifying glass is neces sary to read it properly. Several tablets, or bricks, fastened together, formed a book, and of these books immense numbers have been found; in one place thirty-two thou sand of them were discovered, arranged in the order in which they had been placed 2700 B. C. Letters yet remain written by a lady in Babylonia to one of the Pharoahs of
