The language employed in the cuneiform documents was almost always that of Babylonia, which had become the common speech of diplomacy and educated society.  But at times the native language of the country was also employed, and one or two examples of it have been preserved.  The legends and traditions of Babylonia served as text-books for the student, and doubtless Babylonian history was carried to the West as well.  The account of Chedor-laomer’s campaign might have been derived in this way from the clay-books of ancient Babylonia.

Babylonian theology, too, made its way to the West, and has left records of itself in the map of Canaan.  In the names of Canaanitish towns and villages the names of Babylonian deities frequently recur.  Rimmon or Hadad, the god of the air, whom the Syrians identified with the Sun-god, Nebo, the god of prophecy, the interpreter of the will of Bel-Merodach, Anu, the god of the sky, and Anat, his consort, all alike meet us in the names sometimes of places, sometimes of persons.  Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing even in Beth-lehem the name of the primeval Chaldaean deity Lakhmu.  The Canaanitish Moloch is the Babylonian Malik, and Dagon was one of the oldest of Chaldaean divinities and the associate of Anu.  We have seen how ready Ebed-Tob was to identify the god he worshipped with the Babylonian Nin-ip, and among the Canaanites mentioned in the letters of Tel el-Amarna there is more than one whose name is compounded with that of a Babylonian god.

Writing and literature, religion and mythology, history and science, all these were brought to the peoples of Canaan in the train of Babylonian conquest and trade.  Art naturally went hand in hand with this imported culture.  The seal-cylinders of the Chaldaeans were imitated, and Babylonian figures and ornamental designs were borrowed and modified by the Canaanitish artists.  It was in this way that the rosette, the cherub, the sacred tree, and the palmette passed to the West, and there served to adorn the metal-work and pottery.  New designs, unknown in Babylonia, began to develop; among others, the heads of animals in gold and silver as covers for metal vases.  Some of these “vases of Kaft,” as they were called, are pictured on the Egyptian monuments, and Thothmes III. in his annals describes “the paterae with goats’ heads upon them and one with a lion’s head, the productions of Zahi,” or Palestine, which were brought to him as tribute.

The spoil which the same Pharaoh carried away from the Canaanitish princes gives us some idea of the art which they patronized.  We hear of chariots and tent-poles covered with plates of gold, of iron armour and helmets, of gold and silver rings which were used in the place of money, of staves of ivory, ebony, and cedar inlaid with gold, of golden sceptres, of tables, chairs, and footstools of cedar wood, inlaid some of them with ivory, others with gold and precious stones, of vases and bowls of all kinds in gold, silver,