os is still tantalizingly obscure.
Egyptian history in the light of the latest discoveries may be best
studied in the judicial pages of Breasted, the foremost of American
Egyptologists.

The revelation of Assyrian civilization through Rawlinson's decipherment
of cuneiform and the excavations of Botta and Layard in the middle of
the nineteenth century was followed by a concerted attack on Babylonia.
It was clear from the Nineveh tablets that most of the literary
treasures of Assyria were merely copies of Babylonian originals; and
when in 1877 de Sarzec, French Vice-Consul at Basra, bored into the
mounds at Tello, the ancient Lagash, in Southern Babylonia, the most
eager anticipations were surpassed. Texts had been found which Rawlinson
pronounced to be pre-Semitic; but for the purpose of history the
Sumerians were discovered at Tello. When de Sarzec died in 1901 he had
opened a new chapter of history. The palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib,
at which the world had marvelled in the 'forties, appeared relatively
modern beside the vast antiquity of the Chaldean city. The chain of
human experience lengthened before our eyes when it was realized that as
Assyrian culture derived from Babylonia, so a large part of Babylonian
culture, including the art of writing, was inherited by the Semites from
the Sumerians.

While de Sarzec was busy at Tello, an American expedition was sent to
Nippur under the lead of Peters and Hilprecht; and the long array of
magnificent volumes which embody the results of the mission, including
the thousands of tablets found in the temple library, constitutes the
most important source of our knowledge of Northern Babylonia. Still more
recently a German mission under Koldewey commenced the systematic
excavation of Babylon itself; but its operations were interrupted by the
outbreak of the Great War. Though no monuments have been brought to
light in Babylonia comparable in magnificence to those of Khorsabad and
Nineveh, Babylonian culture towers above its neighbour. Since the
discovery in the royal library of Nineveh of a cylinder containing the
story of the Flood, no find has aroused such world-wide interest as that
of the Code of Hammurabi, unearthed by de Morgan at Susa in 1901. The
massive block of diorite, eight feet high, containing 282 paragraphs of
laws, revealed in a flash a complex, refined, and orderly civilization.
After expelling the Elamites about 2250 B.C. Hammurabi united North and
South Bab