To illustrate this fact, let us take the black obelisk of Shalmaneser II., found by Layard at Nimroud.  It is a column of basalt seven feet high and about two feet wide at the base, from which it narrows slightly, until near the top it is reduced by three steps.  On the four sides is engraved in five rows of bas-reliefs, twenty in all, the pictured history of the royal conquests, the submission of kings, and the presentation of tribute.  Above and below, and between, in two hundred and ten lines, was cut an inscription which explained the figures, and gave a full historical and, of course, contemporary and official account of the glorious events of the royal reign.  Not a line was defaced; at the British Museum it can be seen to-day as perfect as when engraved twenty-seven centuries ago.  Other monuments of Shalmaneser have been found.  One is a great monolith with a portrait of the king in all his fine array, and with one hundred and fifty-six lines of text.  Another is a series of splendid bronze plates that covered great wooden gates, on which, in repousse work, were pictures of the royal victories, and inscriptions explaining them.  The Bible tells us of the rivalries and jealousies of Ahab and Jehu, kings of Israel, and Benhadad and Hazael, kings of Damascus.  How surprising it is to find here not only the story of the successive campaigns of Shalmaneser against these same kings, the number of their chariots and soldiers, but to see pictured before us the tribute sent by Jehu.  We learn that Shalmaneser reigned from 859 to 825 B.C., and we have the record of all his successive campaigns, the first twenty-six of which he led in person.  There is not another country of which, before the invention of printing, we have so minute a history; and all had been lost, except the mention of a name or two, whether historical or legendary we hardly knew, until Layard and his fellow-explorers opened the mounds of Assyria.

But enough for Layard.  He is only one, though the principal one, of all the explorers of the buried records of the empires of the Tigris and Euphrates.  And Babylonia and Assyria are not the only countries that history required us to explore.  Greece and its neighboring states and islands have not even yet been fairly investigated.  Much of Asia Minor is still a virgin field.  Syria and Palestine have hardly been scratched with the spade.  More has been done in Egypt, but more yet is to be done.  And when we go into the further east of Persia and Old Elam, not to speak of the yet farther east of Central Asia, now just beginning to yield strange treasures to daring travellers, and ancient India and China,—­how ancient we know not at all,—­there is field for centuries of further research.  For we must go back past empires and kingdoms and tribal conditions to the very beginning of the human race on the earth, even if so it be, to the first Pithecanthropus which men of science tell us was the link which connected Homo sapiens with the race of primitive simians.  And all this, it may well be, is preserved in undecaying records just a few feet under the ground, if one only knew where to dig for it; nay, we now know where to dig for the most and best of it, and we only await the Stratford Cannings, who will give the money, and the Austen Layards, who have the enthusiasm for the work.