ucher de
Perthes and others, and it had to do chiefly with the finding of
implements of human construction associated with the remains of extinct
animals in the beds of caves, and with the recovery of similar
antiquities from alluvial deposits the great age of which was
demonstrated by their depth. Every item of the evidence was naturally
subjected to the closest scrutiny, but at last the conservatives were
forced reluctantly to confess themselves beaten. Their traditional
arguments were powerless before the array of data marshalled by the new
science of prehistoric archaeology. Looking back even at the short
remove of a single generation, it is difficult to appreciate how
revolutionary was the conception of the antiquity of man thus
inculcated. It rudely shocked the traditional attitude of scholarship
towards the history of our race. It disturbed the most cherished
traditions and the most sacred themes. It seemed to threaten the very
foundations of religion itself. Yet the present generation accepts the
antiquity of man as a mere matter of fact. Here, as so often elsewhere,
the heresy of an elder day has come to seem almost an axiomatic truth.

If we go back in imagination to the beginning of the Victorian era and
ask what was then known of the history of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and
Asia Minor, we find ourselves confronted with a startling paucity of
knowledge. The key to the mysteries of Egyptian history had indeed been
found, thanks to the recent efforts of Thomas Young and Champollion, but
the deciphering of inscriptions had not yet progressed far enough to
give more than a vague inkling of what was to follow. It remained, then,
virtually true, as it had been for two thousand years, that for all that
we could learn of the history of the Old Orient in pre-classical days,
we must go solely to the pages of the Bible and to a few classical
authors, notably Herodotus and Diodorus. A comparatively few pages
summed up, in language often vague and mystical, all that the modern
world had been permitted to remember of the history of the greatest
nations of antiquity. To these nations the classical writers had
ascribed a traditional importance, the glamour of which still lighted
their names, albeit revealing them in the vague twilight of tradition
rather than in the clear light of history. It would have been a bold,
not to say a reckless, dreamer who dared predict that any future
researches could restore to us the lost know