now know, were for the most part little else than fables. It was
impossible to distinguish between the true and the false; to determine
whether the Chaldæan fragments of Berossos were to be preferred to the
second and third hand accounts of Herodotus, or whether the Egyptian
chronology of Manetho was to be accepted in all its startling magnitude.
And when all was said and done, there was little that threw light on the
Old Testament story, much less that supplemented it.

But the latter part of the nineteenth century has witnessed discoveries
which have revolutionised our conceptions of ancient Oriental history,
and illuminated the pages of the Biblical narrative. While scholars and
critics were disputing over a few doubtful texts, the libraries of the
old civilised world of the East were lying underground, waiting to be
disinterred by the excavator and interpreted by the decipherer. Egypt,
Assyria, and Babylonia have yielded up their dead; Arabia, Syria, and
Asia Minor are preparing to do the same. The tombs and temples of Egypt,
and the papyri which have been preserved in the sandy soil of a land
where frost and rain are hardly known, have made the old world of the
Egyptians live again before our eyes, while the clay books of Babylonia
and Assyria are giving us a knowledge of the people who wrote and read
them fully equal to that which we have of Greece or Rome. And yet we are
but at the beginning of discoveries. What has been found is but an
earnest of the harvest that is yet in store. It is but two years since
that the French excavator, de Sarzec, discovered a library of 30,000
tablets at Tello in southern Chaldæa, which had already been formed when
Gudea ruled over the city in B.C. 2700, and was arranged in shelves one
above the other. At Niffer, in the north of Babylonia, the American
excavators have found an even larger number of tablets, some of which go
back to the age of Sargon of Akkad, or 6000 years ago, while fresh
tablets come pouring into the museums of Europe and America from other