ies of Persia and Assyria,
and bringing to Europe ship-loads of recovered statues, marbles,
cylinders, mummies, obelisks, papyrii, covered with all manner of
pictures and inscriptions, civil, religious, and political, contemporary
with the Bible history, and setting the best scholars of Europe to
decipher and translate them. They are only, as yet, in the middle of
their labors, but already so much has been discovered as to warrant the
assertion that before they have finished they will furnish full
corroboration of all the great outlines of Old Testament history.

Egypt was the first to come forward in furnishing her quota of
commentary to the corroboration of the Books of Moses. Hengstenberg's
_Egypt and the Books of Moses_, Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, and
Osburn's _Monumental History of Egypt_, furnish almost a commentary upon
Moses' account of Egyptian affairs, confirming every biblical allusion
to Egypt as historically correct, and revealing to us even the natural
causes of the seven years high Nile and plenteous harvests; in the
overflow of the great central lake in Nubia wearing away the embankment;
and of the seven years subsequent low Nile and famine, by the drought
consequent on this immense drainage. The very titles of Joseph as,
"Director of the Full and Empty Irrigating Canals," "Steward of the
Granaries," etc. etc., are still to be read on his tomb at
Sakkarah,[133] and much more of the same sort.

F. Newman ridicules the Bible narrative of Shishak's expedition against
Rehoboam as a mere fictitious embellishment of an otherwise tame
narrative;[134] but Egyptologists, like Stuart, Poole, and Brugsch, have
examined the inscription of Shishak, at Karnak, and allege that it fully
corroborates the Scripture history.[135]

Some of the most obscure portions of the Bible, which have long been
stumbling-blocks to commentators and historians, are now thus
illuminated by the light of modern discoveries of monuments and
inscriptions found in the ruins of the ancient cities of Persia and
Assyria, upon which they in turn cast such light as to enable the
discoveries of Layard and Rawlinson to assume an intelligible coherency.
The tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis, written a thousand years
before Herodotus or Manetho, and which Rationalistic commentators were
so long "unable to verify by their own consciousness," and which were
therefore consigned to the realm of mythology, are now acknowledged by
the first sch