abylonia and Assyria he no longer, it is true, speaks
at first hand. But he has thoroughly studied the latest and best
authorities on the subject, and has weighed their statements with the
judgment which comes from an exhaustive acquaintance with a similar
department of knowledge.

Naturally, in progressive studies like those of Egyptology and
Assyriology, a good many theories and conclusions must be tentative and
provisional only. Discovery crowds so quickly on discovery, that the
truth of to-day is often apt to be modified or amplified by the truth
of to-morrow. A single fresh fact may throw a wholly new and unexpected
light upon the results we have already gained, and cause them to assume
a somewhat changed aspect. But this is what must happen in all sciences
in which there is a healthy growth, and archaeological science is no
exception to the rule.

The spelling of ancient Egyptian proper names adopted by Professor
Maspero will perhaps seem strange to many. But it must be remembered
that all our attempts to represent the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian
words can be approximate only; we can never ascertain with certainty how
they were actually sounded. All that can be done is to determine what
pronunciation was assigned to them in the Greek period, and to work
backwards from this, so far as it is possible, to more remote ages.
This is what Professor Maspero has done, and it must be no slight
satisfaction to him to find that on the whole his system of
transliteration is confirmed by the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna.

The difficulties attaching to the spelling of Assyrian names are
different from those which beset our attempts to reproduce, even
approximately, the names of ancient Egypt. The cuneiform system of
writing was syllabic, each character denoting a syllable, so that we
know what were the vowels in a proper name as well as the consonants.
Moreover, the pronunciation of the consonants resembled that of the
Hebrew consonants, the transliteration of which has long since become
conventional. When, therefore, an Assyrian or Babylonian name is written
phonetically, its correct transliteration is not often a matter
of question. But, unfortunately, the names are not always written
phonetically. The cuneiform script was an inheritance from the
non-Semitic predecessors of the Semites in Babylonia, and in this script
the characters represented words as well as sounds. Not unfrequently
the Semitic Assyrians con