The Ancient Empires of the East, Herodotus I

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APPENDIX
II.
intensely human than that of the Greeks, they were never led to
cultivate the gardens for which Babylon was renowned. It was
Babylonia, again, and not Assyria, that was famous for the manufac-
ture of dyed and variegated stuffs.
Iron was little used in the Accadian period, and we may infer
from the ideographs which represent it that the only iron known Avas
meteoric. On the other hand, besides stone implements, bronze and
copper weapons and tools were largely in use, and bronze bowls are
found in nearly all the early tombs, fashioned sometimes with consider-
able skill. With the Semitic period the employment of iron becomes
more common.
Of Babylonian and Assyrian music little is known beyond the fact
that there were different instruments for producing it.
Accad was the China of Western Asia. Almost everyone could
read and write. Clay was plentiful, and the writing-paper of the
Accadians was mostly of clay. The characters were impressed with a
metal stylus upon clay tablets (the laterculce codiles of Pliny), which
were then baked in the sun, or (in Assyria) in a kiln. Papyrus,
however, was also extensively used, though it has all now perished.
Indeed papyrus, or some similar vegetable substance, preceded clay as
a writing-material, the primitive hieroglyphics out of which the
cuneiform characters arose having been painted on it by the Accadians
before they left their original home in Elam. The hieroglyi)hics were
arranged in vertical columns like the Chinese. After their settlement
in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, and their adoption of clay as
a writing-material, the Accadians altered the arrangement of their
characters, the vertical lines becoming horizontal ones, and running
from left to right. By this process the old hieroglyphics were laid
upon their sides. At the same time the forms of the hieroglyphics
themselves underwent a change. It was difficult to make curved lines
upon the clay, while the impress of the stylus assumed a wedge-like
shape. The primitive pictures thus became cuneiform or wedge-shaped
characters, which had already come to be employed phonetically as
well as ideographically. When the Semites borrowed them, a great
extension was given to the phonetic element, the sounds which
expressed words in Accadian becoming mere phonetic values in the
Semitic syllabary. Hence the same character can denote more than
one syllabic sound, and at the same time can be used ideograjihically.
Long before the Semitic period, or even before the earliest period
of which we have contemporaneous record, the Accadian characters