Somewhere, perhaps in the earliest of these, he began to build rude houses.  In the next, he drew pictures.  During the latest, his pictures grew into an alphabet of signs, his structures developed into vast and enduring piles of brick or stone.  Buildings and inscriptions became his relics, more like to our own, more fully understandable, giving us a sense of closer kinship with his race.

SOURCES OF EARLY KNOWLEDGE

There are three different lines along which we have succeeded in securing some knowledge of these our distant ancestors, three telephones from the past, over which they send to us confused and feeble murmurings, whose fascination makes only more maddening the vagueness of their speech.

First, we have the picture-writings, whether of Central America, of Egypt, of Babylonia, or of other lands.  These when translatable bring us nearest of all to the heart of the great past.  It is the mind, the thought, the spoken word, of man that is most intimately he; not his face, nor his figure, nor his clothes.  Unfortunately, the translation of these writings is no easy task.  Those of Central America are still an unsolved riddle.  Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able thought.  Yet they are not fully understood.  In Egypt we have had the luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient writing fairly clear.[1]

[Footnote 1:  See page 1 for an engraving and account of this famous stone.  It was found over a century ago and its value was instantly recognized, but many years passed before its secrets were deciphered.  It contains an inscription repeated in three forms of writing:  the early Egyptian of the hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian (the demotic), and Greek.]

Where this mode of communication fails, we turn to another which carries us even farther into the past.  The records which have been less intentionally preserved, not only the buildings themselves, but their decorations, the personal ornaments of men, idols, coins, every imaginable fragment, chance escaped from the maw of time, has its own story for our reading.  In Egypt we have found deep-hidden, secret tombs, and, intruding on their many centuries of silence, have reaped rich harvests of knowledge from the garnered wealth.  In Babylonia the rank vegetation had covered whole cities underneath green hillocks, and preserved them till our modern curiosity delved them out.  To-day, he who wills, may walk amid the halls of Sennacherib, may tread the streets whence Abraham fled, ay, he may gaze upon the handiwork of men who lived perhaps as far before Abraham as we ourselves do after him.