the
cuneiform texts. Meanwhile, the material found by Botta and Layard, and
other successors, in the ruins of Nineveh, has been constantly augmented
through the efforts of companies of other investigators, and not merely
Assyrian, but much earlier Babylonian and Chaldaean texts in the
greatest profusion have been brought to the various museums of Europe
and America. The study of these different inscriptions has utterly
revolutionized our knowledge of Oriental history. Many of the documents
are strictly historical in their character, giving full and accurate
contemporary accounts of events that occurred some thousands of years
ago. Exact dates are fixed for long series of events that previously
were quite unknown. Monarchs whose very names had been forgotten are
restored to history, and the records of their deeds inscribed under
their very eyes are before us,--contemporary documents such as neither
Greece nor Rome could boast, nor any other nation, with the single
exception of Egypt, until strictly modern times. There are, no doubt,
gaps in the record; there are long periods for which the chronology is
still uncertain. Naturally there is an increasing vagueness as one
recedes farther into the past, and for the earlier history of Chaldaea
there is great uncertainty. Nevertheless, the Assyriologist speaks with
a good deal of confidence of dates as remote as 3800 B.C., the time
ascribed to King Sargon, who was once regarded as a mythical person, but
is now known to have been an actual monarch. Indeed, there are tablets
in the British Museum labelled 4500 B.C.; and later researches,
particularly those of the expedition of the University of Pennsylvania
at Nippur, have brought us evidence which, interpreted with the aid of
estimates as to the average rate of accumulation of dust deposits, leads
to the inference that a high state of civilization had been attained in
Mesopotamia at least 9000 years ago.

While the Assyriologists have been making these astonishing revelations,
the Egyptologists have not been behindhand. Such scholars as Lepsius,
Brugsch, de Rouge, Lenormant, Birch, Mariette, Maspero and Erman have
perfected the studies of Young and Champollion; while at the same time
these and a considerable company of other explorers, most notable of
whom are Gardner Wilkinson and Professor Flinders Petrie, have brought
to light a vast accumulation of new material, much of which has the
highest importance from the standpoint o