THE present volume of Records of the Past possesses a melancholy interest. It contains the last literary monument of one of the most valued of my fellow-workers, M. Arthur Amiaud, who died suddenly just after completing the final pages of his translations of the inscriptions of Tel-loh. No other Assyrian scholar had so thoroughly mastered the secrets of the nonSemitic language of ancient Chaldæa, and the knowledge which has perished with him is for science an irreparable loss. The hand that traced the interpretation of the mysterious records of primeval Shinar was not permitted to revise it in proof.