the rule of the world with Assyria and Egypt centuries before Agamemnon and Achilles, but so utterly buried and forgotten that not a line of its history was left, not even enough to let the sharpest scholar ask a question or suspect that it ever built capitals and fought victories and produced a civilization the harvest of which we still enjoy.  Nothing was left of them but their names in a Hebrew list of tribes,—­“Amorites and Jebusites and Hivites and Hittites.”

Yet all these lost tribes, nay, lost nations, had left their records behind them, only they were buried under ground and out of sight.  What a travesty it is on history and civilization, what an impeachment of the glory of these later Christian centuries, that the lands which these old empires crowded with a busy population should now be among the most desolate and inaccessible on the face of the earth!  There we see the curse of the Moslem religion, and still more of the Turkish government.  Wherever the Turk has carried the sword and the Koran, there is blight and death.  Only as soldiers and scholars of Europe have forced their way into these seats of ancient empires has it been possible to ask and learn what is buried beneath their gray desolation.

The man who did more than any other to awaken the interest of the world in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh.  But before his day another man had startled the world with what we may call the discovery of Egypt.  That man was Napoleon Bonaparte, the man whose sword was a ploughshare turning up the fallow fields of Europe, and sowing strange crops of tyranny and liberty, and whose ambition it was to set up a new throne in the land of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies.  The mighty ruins of Karnak and the imperishable pyramids filled him with amazement, and he set the scholars of France at work to publish in massive folios the wonders of that most ancient land.  Then was found the Rosetta Stone, with its inscription in two languages,—­Greek, which any scholar could read, and the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no living man could read.  But here was the key.  The words Ptolemy and Cleopatra were in the Greek text, and it was not hard to find what were the combinations of characters that stood for these words in the Egyptian.  The letters p, t, and l were in both names.  The hieroglyphic signs found in both names must be these three letters.  That beginning gave all the other signs in both words, and the rest of the alphabet soon followed.  Justly great is the fame of the Frenchman Champollion, who has the honor of having first deciphered and read this lost language, and opened to us the secret treasures of its history and religion.