After Layard and Rassam, after Rawlinson and Botta, George Smith took flying trips to the site of Nineveh twice that he might gather the remaining fragments of the great library of Asshurbanabal, and he died in the field far from home.  It was he that found among Layard’s tablets the Babylonian account of the Deluge, so much like that in the Bible.  He was the first of a second generation who, following Rawlinson and Oppert, decipherers as well as explorers, were able to read as they found.  I can only mention the names of the Englishmen Taylor and Loftus; of the Frenchmen, Place and De Sarzec; and, later, the Americans, Peters, Hilprecht, and Haynes, who have so faithfully explored the extremely archaic mound of Niffer, which I had the honor to recommend for excavation after I had visited the mounds of Southern Babylonia in the winter of 1884-85.  And now the Germans, with scientific as well as commercial and political purpose, with their railroad to pass down the valley through Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, which gives them predominant influence, have sent expeditions well equipped with scholars and engineers to the choicest sites in Babylonia, to Warka, the ancient Erech, and to Babylon itself; and with Teuton thoroughness they are excavating the most famous of ancient ruins and gathering fresh treasures of archaeological research.  Nor have they left the land of the Hittites unexplored, for Germany claims the first rights, politically, in all Anatolia, the right of succession and possession when the Turk is expelled, and German archaeological science is bound to be first on that field.

And now what have we found as the fruit of all this labor of exploration?  Is it worth the labor and the expense?

Let us look first—­it can be only a glance—­at Egypt, for Egypt was the land first and most persistently explored.  The French Government for scores of years has been at work there.  Germans and Italians have explored the ruins; two English societies have for years kept expeditions in the field; and just now a Californian university sends an American Egyptologist to uncover the tombs and read the hieroglyphs of the kings.  Not only are the figured monuments of Egypt published in princely folios, but its records have been translated and its lost history recovered to the world’s knowledge.  Instead of the bare “Pharaoh” of the Bible, a common designation for all the kings, and in place of a bare list of names and dynasties copied from Manetho, and so altered and corrupted in the copying as to be neither Greek nor Egyptian, we have, on scarab, or gravestone, or pyramid, or rock-sepulchre wall, in his own spelling, the name of almost every king from the latest time of the Ptolemies back to the first king of the first dynasty, five thousand—­or was it six thousand?—­years before Christ.  And not their names only, but the very pictures of their wars.  We see how they went up the Nile and fought the blacks of Abyssinia, and brought back the spoils of Punt We see them sending