Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1893 — The Age of Civilization. [ARTICLE]

The Age of Civilization.

The recent discovery in old Phoenicia of clay tablets, inscribed with writing, and evidently used for purposes of correspondence by the people who liv«d at the time of the exodus and before, makes it evident that civilization was at a much higher state in Syria and the adjacent countries in those days than modern scholars have been wont to suppose. Voltaire was no doubt a writer of great originality and acumen, though from our present standpoint, wonderfully ignorant of antiquity. He finds it hard to believe that Homer’s poems could have been written down before 500 B. C., and asserts that papyrus had hot been invented in Egypt tn the time of Moses, though we now possess in the maxims of Ptahhotep a manuscript as old as the pyramids. We find, on the contrary, that not only in Egypt or in Mesopotamia was the art of writing known in the time of Moses, but that the inhabitants of Palestine also could pen a brick epistle, which in the space of a few inches contained as much informatiun as can now be condensed into a sheet of note paper. Such letters were neither heavy nor bulky, and could be carried in* the turban or in the folds of the shirt bosom just as easily as paper letters are now so carried, with the additional advantage that they were imperishable, as is witnessed by the fact that they are now being read 3400 years after they were written.—[New Orleans Picavune.