l defies attack, the
frescoes, sculptures, and objects of art tell their tale of a luxurious
and peace-loving community, closely connected with Egypt and forming one
of the main sources of the Greek culture of a later age.

Most of us are old enough to remember the thrill of excitement when Susa
and Knossus, if not Tello or Thebes, yielded up their romantic secrets;
but the generation now growing to manhood may experience similar
emotions as it watches the ghost of the Hittite Empire materialize
before its eyes. The meagre references in the Old Testament have been
supplemented by Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions, revealing an
important Power in Northern Syria and Asia Minor for a thousand years
before it was swallowed up by Assyria. During the last twenty years
Hittite remains, marked by crude vigour rather than by a sense of
beauty, have been discovered all over Asia Minor and in the northern
reaches of the great Mesopotamian plain. In 1911 the British Museum
undertook the excavation of Carchemish on the Euphrates, the capital of
the North Syrian sector of the Empire; but the most precious results
have been achieved by Winckler at Boghaz Keui, the capital of the
Cappadocian portion of the Hittite dominions, which yielded a library of
20,000 tablets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, now stored in
the museum at Constantinople. A few bilingual inscriptions have
furnished valuable clues; but the world still eagerly awaits the coming
of a new Champollion to unlock the doors of the treasure-house. Winckler
himself died in 1913; but in 1915 the Austrian Professor Hrozny startled
the world by proclaiming his conviction that Hittite was an
Indo-European language. Whether or no his contention is confirmed,
orientalists of both hemispheres are hot in pursuit, and it is no rash
prophecy that within a decade scholars will read Hittite as they now
read cuneiform and hieroglyphics, and new chapters of incalculable
importance will be added to the story of the Ancient East.

The recovery of the political and religious history of the empires
surrounding Palestine has run parallel with the application of critical
methods to the Jewish scriptures. To read Ewald's _History of the People
of Israel_, which was regarded as dangerous by pious folk in the middle
of last century, is to realize the progress of Semitic studies. The
great revolution in our conception of the Old Testament which rendered
Ewald out of date was accomplishe