Whence came that first dynasty?  Who invented writing?  Were they autochthons?  Hardly.  These are questions left for further explorers to answer.  Probably those first messengers of civilization came from the East, perhaps from Arabia, perhaps from Babylonia, or perhaps the first Babylonians and Egyptians formed a common stock somewhere near the mouth of the Euphrates.  Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief river of Paradise.  Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known portion of the inhabited earth,—­was it from Arabia that the wiser, stronger multitude came that first overran the valleys of both the Nile and the Euphrates, bringing to Egypt and Chaldea arts and letters?  We do not know.  Some future explorer must teach us.  But the German Glaser has within these few years brought back from hazardous journeys a multitude of inscriptions that tell of kingdoms that fringed its southern coast and extended we know not how far into the interior in those early days when one of the queens of Sheba brought presents to Solomon, and when, earlier still, we are told there were dukes of Edom before there was any king in Israel.  They say that a railroad is to be built to Mecca; Arabia is not to be always a closed land, neighbor as it is to Egypt.  We shall know one of these days whether, as scholars suspect, out of Arabia and across the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, where, at the southern end of the Red Sea, Africa almost touches Asia, there came that mighty flood of more forceful men, bred in the deserts and hills, who, passing down the Nile, first brought history to Egypt; and whether it was this same Semitic people, as scholars suspect again, that spread resistlessly eastward to the Euphrates valley, and did an equal service in conquering and assimilating the black aborigines of these swamps and lagoons.  The spade will tell us.

Or was it still further east, in the highlands of Persia, that men first learned how to write and record history?  We cannot go back so far in the history of Babylonia—­Professor Hilprecht dares to carry us seven thousand years before Christ—­that we do not find its kings fighting against Elam.  And only in the last decade of the Nineteenth century the Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite lands.  What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery!  For Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments and records that printing-presses have yet issued?  And from that time to this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special convention, the care of its monuments and their exploration to French savants?  And before Layard removed a basketful