"In my former letter on the new collection of antiquities from Babylon, acquired by Mr. George Smith for the trustees of the , I referred to the great light we might expect to gain from them on the chronology of the late Babylonian and Persian empires. The tablets are the commercial papers or cheques and notes of a Babylonian banking firm, trading under the name of the founder Egibi. This firm appears from its close connection with the Court to have been a sort of national bank of Babylonia... The tablets give us a complete succession of annual transactions, from the first of Nabuchadnessar to the thirty-fifth of Darius. There is one tablet dated in the fourth year Nabu pal uzur, (Nabopalassar)... [W]e are enabled to fix the date... B.C. 625 as the first year of this monarch. From this date, for more than a century, this bank appears to have carried on its business regularly, but in the month Ab, [the eleventh month, or July of the Jewish people...] B.C. 516, the revolt of Aracus against Darius took place, the firm of Egibi were unable to transact any business owing to the revolt at Babylon, and the history of this remarkable bank cannot be traced any further."