med the
Egyptian race of a later day. But they had already made Egypt what it
has been throughout the historical period. Under the direction of the
Asiatic immigrants and of the eugineering science whose first home had
been in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, they accomplished those great
works of irrigation which confined the Nile to its present channel,
which cleared away the jungle and the swamp that had formerly bordered
the desert, and turned them into fertile fields. Theirs were the hands
which carried out the plans of their more intelligent masters, and
cultivated the valley when once it had been reclaimed. The Egypt
of history was the creation of a twofold race: the Egyptians of the
monuments supplied the controlling and directing power; the Egyptians of
the neolithic graves bestowed upon it their labour and their skill.

The period treated of by Professor Maspero in these volumes is one for
which there is an abundance of materials sucli as do not exist for
the earlier portions of his history. The evidence of the monuments is
supplemented by that of the Hebrew and classical writers. But on this
very account it is in some respects more difficult to deal with, and the
conclusions arrived at by the historian are more open to question and
dispute. In some cases conflicting accounts are given of an event which
seem to rest on equally good authority; in other cases, there is a
sudden failure of materials just where the thread of the story becomes
most complicated. Of this the decline and fall of the Assyrian empire
is a prominent example; for our knowledge of it, we have still to depend
chiefly on the untrustworthy legends of the Greeks. Our views must be
coloured more or less by our estimate of Herodotos; those who, like
myself, place little or no confidence in what he tells us about Oriental
affairs will naturally form a very different idea of the death-struggle,
of Assyria from that formed by writers who still see in him the Father
of Oriental History.

Even where the native monuments have come to our aid, they have not
unfrequently introduced difficulties and doubts where none seemed to
exist before, and have made the task of the critical historian harder
than ever. Cyrus and his forefathers, for instance, turn out to have
been kings of Anzan, and not of Persia, thus explaining why it is that
the Neo-Susian language appears by the side of the Persian and the
Babylonian as one of the three official languages of th