thought, the spoken word, of man that is most intimately he; not his
face, nor his figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of
these writings is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an
unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like
a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able
thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the
luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient
writing fairly clear.[1]

[Footnote 1: See page 1 for an engraving and account of this famous
stone. It was found over a century ago and its value was instantly
recognized, but many years passed before its secrets were deciphered. It
contains an inscription repeated in three forms of writing: the early
Egyptian of the hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian (the demotic), and
Greek.]

Where this mode of communication fails, we turn to another which carries
us even farther into the past. The records which have been less
intentionally preserved, not only the buildings themselves, but their
decorations, the personal ornaments of men, idols, coins, every
imaginable fragment, chance escaped from the maw of time, has its own
story for our reading. In Egypt we have found deep-hidden, secret tombs,
and, intruding on their many centuries of silence, have reaped rich
harvests of knowledge from the garnered wealth. In Babylonia the rank
vegetation had covered whole cities underneath green hillocks, and
preserved them till our modern curiosity delved them out. To-day, he who
wills, may walk amid the halls of Sennacherib, may tread the streets
whence Abraham fled, ay, he may gaze upon the handiwork of men who lived
perhaps as far before Abraham as we ourselves do after him.