The Chaldaean, like the Egyptian scribe, was the pivot on which the machinery of this double royal and seignorial administration turned.  He does not appear to have enjoyed as much consideration as his fellow-official in the Nile Valley:  the Chaldaean princes, nobles, priests, soldiers, and temple or royal officials, did not covet the title of scribe, or pride themselves upon holding that office side by side with their other dignities, as we see was the case with their Egyptian contemporaries.  The position of a scribe, nevertheless, was an important one.  We continually meet with it in all grades of society—­in the palace, in the temples, in the storehouses, in private dwellings; in fine, the scribe was ubiquitous, at court, in the town, in the country, in the army, managing affairs both small and great, and seeing that they were carried on regularly.  His education differed but little from that given to the Egyptian scribe; he learned the routine of administrative or judicial affairs, the formularies for correspondence either with nobles or with ordinary people, the art of writing, of calculating quickly, and of making out bills correctly.  We may well ask whether he ever employed papyrus or prepared skins for these purposes.  It would, indeed, seem strange that, after centuries of intercourse, no caravan should have brought into Chaldaean any of those materials which were in such constant use for literary purposes in Africa;* yet the same clay which furnished the architect with such an abundant building material appears to have been the only medium for transmitting the language which the scribes possessed.  They were always provided with slabs of a fine plastic clay, carefully mixed and kept sufficiently moist to take easily the impression of an object, but at the same time sufficiently firm to prevent the marks once made from becoming either blurred or effaced.  When a scribe had a text to copy or a document to draw up, he chose out one of his slabs, which he placed flat upon his left palm, and taking in the right hand a triangular stylus of flint, copper, bronze, or bone,** he at once set to work.  The instrument, in early times, terminated in a fine point, and the marks made by it when it was gently pressed upon the clay were slender and of uniform thickness; in later times, the extremity of the stylus was cut with a bevel, and the impression then took the shape of a metal nail or a wedge.

* On the Assyrian monuments we frequently see scribes taking a list of the spoil, or writing letters on tablets and some other soft material, either papyrus or prepared skin.  Sayce has given good reasons for believing that the Chaldaeanns of the early dynasties knew of the papyrus, and either made it themselves, or had it brought from Egypt.

** See the triangular stylus of copper or bronze reproduced by the side of the measuring-rule, and the plan on the tablet of Gudea, p. 248 of this volume.  The Assyrian Museum in the