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Project Gutenberg's Babylonian and Assyrian Literature, by Anonymous
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Title: Babylonian and Assyrian Literature
Author: Anonymous
Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10887]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
- START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andy Schmitt and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE
COMPRISING THE EPIC OF IZDUBAR, HYMNS, TABLETS, AND CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY EPIPHANIUS WILSON, A.M.
REVISED EDITION
1901
SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
The great nation which dwelt in the seventh century before our era on the banks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in the plastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians sometimes wrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden tablets, or papyrus brought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive letters of a Phoenician character. But when they wished to preserve their written documents, they employed clay tablets, and a stylus whose bevelled point made an impression like a narrow elongated wedge, or arrow-head. By a combination of these wedges, letters and words were formed by the skilled and practis