Page:The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).djvu/45

Rh of Babylonian literature, and the language in which they were written remained the classical style in the country down to the Persian conquest. Thus it happens that texts of Rim-agu, Sargon, and Hammurabi, who were one thousand years before Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus, show the same language as the texts of these later kings, there being no sensible difference in style to match the long interval between them.

There is, however, reason to believe that, although the language of devotion and literature remained fixed, the speech of the bulk of the people was gradually modified; and in the time of Assurbanipal, when the Assyrians copied the Genesis legends, the common speech of the day was in very different style. The private letters and despatches of this age which have been discovered differ widely from the language of the contemporary public documents and religious writings, showinh the change the language had undergone since the style of these was fixed. We have a slightly similar case in England, where the language of devotion and the style of the Bible differ in several respects from those of the English of to-day.

These considerations show the difficulty of fixing the age of a document from its style, and the difficulty is further increased by the uncertainty which hangs over all Babylonian chronology.

Chronology is always a thorny subject, and dry and unsatisfactory to most persons beside; some