and its wealth of
suggestion, the _Golden Bough_ stands forth as perhaps the most notable
contribution of the age to our knowledge of the evolution of the human
race.

Among the most sensational events of the nineteenth century was the
resurrection of the Ancient East. We now know that Greece and Rome, far
from standing near the beginning of recorded history, were the heirs of
a long series of civilizations. Our whole perspective has been changed
or should be changed by the discovery. The ancient world thus revealed
by the partnership of philology and archaeology ceases to be merely the
vestibule to Christian Europe, and becomes in point of duration the
larger part of human history.

The story opens with Champollion's decipherment of the bilingual tablet
discovered more than a century ago at the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. The
key once fitted to the lock, the whole civilization of ancient Egypt lay
open to the explorer. A secure chronological basis was supplied by
Lepsius, and systematic excavation was commenced by Mariette, who was
named by the Khedive Director of Antiquities and established the Cairo
Museum. The work of the three great founders of Egyptology has been
carried forward during the last half-century by an international army of
scholars. The interpretation of the ancient scripts has reached a
technical mastery unknown to the pioneers, and the genius of Brugsch
unlocked the door to demotic, which Champollion had never thoroughly
mastered. But the triumphs of philology have been surpassed by the
conquests of the spade. The closest friend of Mariette's later years was
Maspero, who succeeded him as Director of Antiquities, and whose most
sensational find was the tombs of the Kings near Thebes. Equally eminent
as excavator, philologist, and historian, Maspero was the first to
popularize Egyptology in France, as Flinders Petrie, the greatest
excavator since Mariette, has popularized it in England. Until twenty
years ago the curtain rose on the pyramid-builders of the Fourth
dynasty. We have now not only recovered the earlier dynasties, but
neolithic and palaeolithic Egypt emerges from the primitive cemeteries.
The immense accession of new material has enabled Eduard Meyer to
construct something like a definite chronology; but though marvellous
progress has been made in our knowledge of the Early, Middle, and New
Empires, a great gap remains between the sixth and the eleventh
dynasties, and the period of the Hyks