5000 B.C., must have felt themselves at a pinnacle of civilization and
culture. As Professor Mahaffy has suggested, the era of the Pyramids may
have been the veritable autumn of civilization. Where, then, must we
look for its springtime? The answer to that question must come, if it
come at all, from what we now speak of as prehistoric archaeology; the
monuments from Memphis and Nippur and Nineveh, covering a mere ten
thousand years or so, are the records of recent history.

Archaeology and Bible history.

The efforts of the students of Oriental archaeology have been constantly
stimulated by the fact that their studies brought them more or less
within the field of Bible history. A fair proportion of the workers who
have delved so enthusiastically in the fields of Egyptian and Assyrian
exploration would never have taken up the work at all but for the hope
that their investigations might substantiate the Hebrew records. For a
long time this hope proved illusory, and in the case of Egyptian
archaeology the results have proved disappointing even up to the very
present. Considering the important part played by the Egyptian sojourn
of the Hebrews, as narrated in the Scriptures, it was certainly not an
over-enthusiastic prediction that the Egyptian monuments when fully
investigated would divulge important references to Joseph, to Moses, and
to the all-important incidents of the Exodus; but half a century of
expectant attention in this direction has led only to disappointment. It
would be rash, considering the buried treasures that may yet await the
future explorer, to assert that such records as those in question can
never come to light. But, considering the fulness of the contemporary
Egyptian records of the XIXth dynasty that are already known, it becomes
increasingly doubtful whether the Hebrews in Egypt played so important
a part in history, when viewed from the Egyptian standpoint, as their
own records had seemed to imply. As the forgotten history of Oriental
antiquity has been restored to us, it has come to be understood that,
politically speaking, the Hebrews were a relatively insignificant
people, whose chief importance from the standpoint of material history
was derived from the geographical accident that made them a sort of
buffer between the greater nations about them. Only once, and for a
brief period, in the reigns of David and Solomon did the Hebrews rise to
anything like an equal plane of political importanc