ylonia into a single State, and, desiring that uniform laws
should prevail, issued the code which bears his name. During the last
decade the exploration of Assyria has been resumed after a long
interval, and the city of Assur, the first capital, has been unearthed
by the German Oriental Society. We thus learn of Assyria before the days
of its greatness, when it was still a subject province under Babylonian
Viceroys.

The history of the lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates, which
was almost a blank half a century ago, may now be tentatively
reconstructed. The vast mass of official correspondence, judicial
decisions, and legal documents, taken in conjunction with the evidences
of religion, science, and art, reveal a startlingly modern society a
thousand years before Rameses and two thousand years before Pericles.
Babylonia proves to have been to the ancient East what Rome was one day
to be to Europe. The Tel-el-Amarna letters prove the unchallenged
supremacy of its culture over vast areas, and the revelation of the
religious debt of the Jews sets the Old Testament in a new frame. So
rapid is the pace of excavation and interpretation that all but the most
recent narratives of the Ancient East are out of date. If we master
Leonard King's sumptuous volumes on Babylonia and the latest edition of
the first volume of Eduard Meyer's incomparable _History of Antiquity_,
we need go no farther afield.

Scarcely if at all less remarkable has been the discovery of an advanced
civilization in Crete in the second and third millenniums before Christ.
While in Egypt and Mesopotamia the frontiers of knowledge were pushed
back, in Crete an unknown world was brought to light. Its romantic
interest was intensified by the establishment of an historic foundation
for one of the most celebrated legends of the ancient world. How the
Minotaur devoured the tribute of youths and maidens in the labyrinth,
how Ariadne, daughter of Minos, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a
sword to slay the Minotaur and a thread to retrace his steps, was known
to every Greek child and has thrilled the imagination of the centuries.
The exploration of the city called by Homer 'Great Knossus' was among
the ambitions of Schliemann; but it was carried out by Sir Arthur Evans,
whose labours have outlined a series of chapters in Cretan history
extending two thousand years before the destruction of the palace about
the year 1400. Though the Minoan language stil