ime of
Hezekiah, who, beginning at the two ends, did the fine engineering feat
of having their tunnels meet correctly in the solid rock. But when
Jerusalem is fully explored, and the northern capitals of Bethel and
Tirzah and Samaria, and a hundred other mounds that mark the site of
Jewish, Israelite, Philistine, and Amorite cities, we may expect
marvellous discoveries that will illumine our Holy Scriptures.

And one region yet remains to be considered, the scattered coasts and
islands that owned the Greek speech, and that created the Greek
civilization. It is not the Greece of the Parthenon and Pericles that we
wish to discover, for that we fairly know; but the arts and the history
of those earlier Greeks and Trojans that Homer tells of, the age of
Agamemnon and Ulysses, of Helen and Hector and Priam, and of the yet
earlier tribes that sailed the Aegean, and settled the Mediterranean
islands, and sent their ships to the Egyptian coasts, and sought golden
fleeces on the Euxine Sea. All about the coast of Asia Minor they lived,
while that Hittite power was ruling the interior; and, intermixed with
Phoenician trading-posts, they held the great islands of Crete and
Cyprus and the shores of Sicily and Italy. What shall we call them? Were
they Dorians, or Heraclidae, Achaeans or Pelasgi? Were they of the same
race as the mysterious Etruscans, or shall we name them simply
Mycenaeans, as we call the art Mycenaean that ruled the islands and
coasts down to the Homeric age, and we know not how many centuries
earlier, but certainly as far back as the conquering period of the
Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty of Thothmes? Their soldiers and merchants
and their fine vases are pictured on the walls of Egypt, and their
pottery has long been studied; but we knew little of them until Dr.
Schliemann, the Greek merchant who achieved wealth in the United States,
bravely opened the great ruins of Troy, in the full patriotism of his
assurance that Homer's story of the Trojan war was history as well as
poetry. As he found one burnt and buried city under another,--for many
times was Troy destroyed,--and extended his investigations to Tiryns and
other ancient cities, one volume of splendid research followed another,
until the trader had compelled the unwilling scholar to confess that he
must dig for both history and art. To be sure, his interpretations were
quite too literal at first, but the whole world of classical scholarship
has learned from him