accompanied to battle by his scribes. If Kirjath-sepher or 'Book-town,' in the neighbourhood of Hebron, was of Hittite origin, the Hittites would have possessed libraries like the Assyrians, which may yet be dug up. Kirjath-sepher was also called Debir, 'the sanctuary,' and we may therefore conclude that the library was stored in its chief temple, as were the libraries of Babylonia. There was another Debir or Dapur further north, in the vicinity of Kadesh on the Orontes, which is mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions; and since this was in the land of the Amorites, while Kirjath-sepher is also described as an Amorite town, it is possible that here too the relics of an ancient library may yet be found. We must not forget that in the days of Deborah, 'out of Zebulon,' northward of Megiddo, came 'they that handle the pen of the writer' (Judg. v. 14).
The inscriptions recently discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt have shown that in the century before the Exodus the common medium of literary intercourse in Western Asia was the language and cuneiform script of Babylonia. It was subsequently to this that the Hittites forced their way southward, bringing with them their own peculiar system of hieroglyphic writing. But the cuneiform characters still continued to be used in the Hittite region of the world. Cuneiform tablets have been purchased at Kaisarîyeh which come from some old library of Kappadokia, the site of which is still unknown, and Dr. Humann has lately discovered a long cuneiform inscription among the Hittite sculptures of Sinjirli in the ancient Komagênê. If the Hittite texts are ever deciphered, it will probably be through the help of the cuneiform script.
A beginning has already been made. Within a month
