of the earth that covered the palace of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago?  And so to France was given the right, for the honor and enrichment of the Louvre, to explore Persia; and De Morgan went to Susa, to Shushan, the palace of Xerxes and Darius, of Ahasuerus and Esther, in search of what was far earlier than they, for another Frenchman and his wife, M. and Mme. Dieulafoy, had already excavated the noble palace of these Persian kings.  Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly earlier remains.  There is the column set up, if we can believe the Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon,—­and it is not incredible,—­three thousand eight hundred years before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies.  It is a noble composition, with archaic writing, and a stately figure of the king climbing the mountains and slaying his enemies; it shows an art that might well have developed into the best that Greece has produced.  But De Morgan has only begun to scratch the surface of the mounds of Elam, and a multitude of scholars believe that out of Elam came the first civilization of Chaldea.  We shall find out yet; for the record is in the earth, and only waits the man who will dig it out, and then the man who will read it.

We are tempted to go further east and recall that in India, the land where Alexander made his most distant conquests, a multitude of English scholars have been searching the ruins of old temples for the earliest memorials of the worship of Buddha.  Just now they have found his birthplace and precious relics.  But that takes us too far afield, and would tempt us to further excursions in Burmah and China.  We must come back to Western Asia and the shores of Europe.

As has been indicated, the greatest puzzle of ancient history is that of the Hittite empire, which seems to have ruled all Asia Minor at some uncertain time, and to have extended over Syria and Palestine.  No sooner had the greatest Egyptian kings, Thothmes and Rameses, ventured their armies into Asia, perhaps in vengeance on the incursions of Ionian pirates, perhaps in requital of the tyrannies of the hated Shepherd Kings, than they learned of the Hittites on the shores of the Euphrates.  Then, a century or two later, a mass of official correspondence sent by the Kings of Palestine and Syria, dug up in Egypt, reports that the Hittites had appeared as invaders from the north and beseeches military aid.  But the power of Egypt had waned, and the Hittites were supreme until the Assyrians began and carried on for five centuries the uncertain war which ended in the utter overthrow