rds of Scripture. Cyrus, we know now upon his own authority, was a
polytheist, and not a Zoroastrian; he was king of Elam, not of Persia. It
was Elam, and not Persia, as Isaiah's prophecies declared, which invaded
Babylon. Babylon itself was taken without a siege, and Mr. Bosanquet may
therefore have been right in holding that the Darius of Daniel was Darius
the son of Hystaspes.

Hardly less interesting has been the discovery of the inscription of
Siloam, which reveals to us the very characters used by the Jews in the
time of Isaiah, perhaps even in the time of Solomon himself. The discovery
has cast a flood of light on the early topography of Jerusalem, and has
made it clear as the daylight that the Jews of the royal period were not
the rude and barbarous people it has been the fashion of an unbelieving
criticism to assume, but a cultured and literary population. Books must
have been as plentiful among them as they were in Phoenicia or Assyria; nor
must we forget the results of the excavations undertaken last year in the
land of Goshen. Pithom, the treasure-city built by the Israelites, has
been disinterred, and the date of the Exodus has been fixed. M. Naville
has even found there bricks made without straw.

But the old records of Egypt and Assyria have a further interest than a
merely historical one. They tell us what were the religious doctrines and
aspirations of those who composed them, and what was their conception of
their duty towards God and man. We have only to compare the hymns and
psalms and prayers of these ancient peoples--seeking "the Lord, if haply
they might feel after Him and find Him"--with the fuller lights revealed in
the pages of the Old Testament, to discover how wide was the chasm that
lay between the two. The one was seeking what the other had already found.
The Hebrew prophet was the forerunner and herald of the Gospel, and the
light shed by the Gospel had been reflected back upon him. He saw already
"the Sun of Righteousness" rising in the east; the psalmist of Shinar or
the devout worshipper of Asshur were like unto those "upon whom no day has
dawned."

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.

_How the Cuneiform Inscriptions were deciphered.--Grotefend's
guess.--Lassen and Rawlinson's studies.--Discoveries of Botta,
Layard, George Smith, and Rassam.--Certainty of our present
knowledge._

The decipherment of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped inscriptions of Assyria
has been one