The captive women and children ride by in oxcarts on their way to slavery in Assyria, and a shepherd drives off the captured flocks. At the left an Assyrian officer reads from a tablet his notes of the spoil taken in the city. Two scribes write as he reads. The first (in front) holds in his left hand a thick clay tablet from which he has just lifted the stylus grasped in his right hand, as he pauses in his writing. The other scribe holds spread out on his left hand a roll of papyrus, on which be is busily writing with a pen held in his right hand. He is an Atamean (§ 205), writing Aramaic with pen and ink. We see here, then, the two different
methods of writing practiced at this time in Western Asia— the outgoing Asiatic clay tablet and the incoming Egyptian paper, pen, and ink.