The Babylonian prose literature consists almost entirely of short chronicles and annals.  Royal inscriptions have been found covering the period from 3000 B.C. to 539 B.C.  There are eponym canons, statistical lists, diplomatic letters, military reports; but none of these rise to the dignity of history.  Several connected books of chronicles have indeed been found; there is a synchronistic book of annals of Babylonia and Assyria, there is a long Assyrian chronicle, and there are annalistic fragments.  But there is no digested historical narrative, which gives a clear picture of the general civil and political situation, or any analysis of the characters of kings, generals, and governors, or any inquiry into causes of events.  It is possible that narratives having a better claim to the name of history may yet be discovered, resembling those of the Biblical Book of Kings; yet the Book of Kings is scarcely history—­neither the Jews nor the Babylonians and Assyrians seem to have had great power in this direction.

One of the most interesting collections of historical pieces is that recently discovered at Amarna.  Here, out of a mound which represents a palace of the Egyptian King Amenhotep IV., were dug up numerous letters which were exchanged between the kings of Babylonia and Egypt in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and numerous reports sent to the Egyptian government by Egyptian governors of Canaanite cities.  These tablets show that at this early time there was lively communication between the Euphrates and the Nile, and they give a vivid picture of the chaotic state of affairs in Canaan, which was exposed to the assaults of enemies on all sides.  This country was then in possession of Egypt, but at a still earlier period it must have been occupied by the Babylonians.  Only in this way can we account for the surprising fact that the Babylonian cuneiform script and the Babylonian language form the means of communication between the east and west and between Egypt and Canaan.  The literary value of these letters is not great; their interest is chiefly historic and linguistic.  The same thing is true of the contract tablets, which are legal documents:  these cover the whole area of Babylonian history, and show that civil law attained a high state of perfection; they are couched in the usual legal phrases.

The literary monuments mentioned above are all contained in tablets, which have the merit of giving in general contemporaneous records of the things described.  But an account of Babylonian literature would be incomplete without mention of the priest Berosus.  Having, as priest of Bel, access to the records of the temples, he wrote a history of his native land, in which he preserved the substance of a number of poetical narratives, as well as the ancient accounts of the political history.  The fragments of his work which have been preserved (see Cory’s ’Ancient Fragments’) exhibit a number of parallels with the contents of the cuneiform tablets.  Though he wrote in Greek (he lived in the time of Alexander the Great), and was probably trained in the Greek learning of his time, his work doubtless represents the spirit of Babylonian historical writing.  So far as can be judged from the remains which have come down to us, its style is of the annalistic sort which appears in the old inscriptions and in the historical books of the Bible.