its beginnings. The Mayan empire had already broken up. And even as we
write, the archaeological history of the other hemisphere is being
repeated here; on the heels of Manabi comes the Chimu Valley, and soon
it will be with America as with Egypt--one will not be able to print an
up-to-date work on its early history, for new discoveries will carry it
back further, and to greater scope, before the previous ones can be
edited and gotten to press. Compare the few pages of earliest Egypt in
Sharpe's history, with Flinders Petrie's work of a decade or so ago, and
that with the situation today.

It is a simple fact that decipherment and publication all over the world
can no longer keep pace with discovery; and the time has come for
archaeology to begin to survey these remnants, engineering works that
would tax any modern nation with all our appliances, vast ruined
cities, one above the other, innumerable languages and writings, the
traces of peoples whose very names are lost to history--as a whole, and
to ask itself how long it must have taken for all these works to be
accomplished, let alone for the birth and decay of the civilizations
that supported them, and gave environment for the development of such
technical skill as could finish the enormous bulk of the Great Pyramid
with an accuracy beyond the fineness of our best instruments to measure.
For not only mere bulk is to be considered--though there is enough of
that scattered over the earth to keep all the possible available
craftsmen of the world a wholly incommensurate time achieving them, but
the ability to conceive and carry out such works. What _sort_ of people
leveled Monte Alban for its crown of pyramids, dreamed and executed the
stucco modelings of Palenque, built the temple of Boro Budur in Java,
cut the Bamian statues of the Hindu Kush, and so on, and so on, for page
after page? If they had such appliances as we have, they must be ranked
at least in our class for having them; if they did them without our
great engines, what sort of men were they? And if they could do these
things without our appliances, is it not a fair inference that they
could easily have made the tools, or others better perhaps?

One fact is becoming more prominent with every advance of archaeology
over the world, a fact of the greatest linguistic interest, namely that
ancient civilizations and empires, as a whole, _lasted longer_ than ours
of today. Consider how many different and successiv