Louvre possesses several large, flat styli of bone, cut to a point at one end, which appear to have belonged to the Assyrian scribes.  Taylor discovered in a tomb at Eridu a flint tool, which may have served for the same purpose as the metal or bone styli.

[Illustration:  268.jpg MANUSCRIPT ON PAPYRUS IN HEIROGLYPHICS]

They wrote from left to right along the upper part of the tablet, and covered both sides of it with closely written lines, which sometimes ran over on to the edges.  When the writing was finished, the scribe sent his work to the potter, who put it in the kiln and baked it, or the writer may have had a small oven at his own disposition, as a clerk with us would have his table or desk.  The shape of these documents varied, and sometimes strikes us as being peculiar:  besides the tablets and the bricks, we find small solid cones, or hollow cylinders of considerable size, on which the kings related their exploits or recorded the history of their wars or the dedication of their buildings.  This method had a few inconveniences, but many advantages.  These clay books were heavy to hold and clumsy to handle, while the characters did not stand out well from the brown, yellow, and whitish background of the material; but, on the other hand, a poem, baked and incorporated into the page itself, ran less danger of destruction than if scribbled in ink on sheets of papyrus.  Fire could make no impression on it; it could withstand water for a considerable length of time; even if broken, the pieces were still of use:  as long as it was not pulverized, the entire document could be restored, with the exception, perhaps, of a few signs, or ’some scraps of a sentence.  The inscriptions which have been saved from the foundations of the most ancient temples, several of which date back forty or fifty centuries, are for the most part as clear and legible as when they left the hands of the writer who engraved them or of the workmen who baked them.  It is owing to the material to which they were committed that we possess the principal works of Chaldaean literature which have come down to us—­poems, annals, hymns, magical incantations; how few fragments of these would ever have reached us had their authors confided them to parchment or paper, after the manner of the Egyptian scribes!  The greatest danger that they ran was that of being left forgotten in the corner of the chamber in which they had been kept, or buried under the rubbish of a building after a fire or some violent catastrophe; even then the debris were the means of preserving them, by falling over them and covering them up.  Protected under the ruins, they would lie there for centuries, till the fortunate explorer should bring them to light and deliver them over to the patient study of the learned.