etta-stone, the long-lost hieroglyphic language of Egypt, and has
thus found a key by which it has begun--but only as yet begun--to unlock
the rich treasure-stores of ancient knowledge which have for ages lain
concealed among the monuments and records scattered along the valley of
the Nile. It has copied, by the aid of the telescope, the trilingual
arrow-headed inscriptions written 300 feet high upon the face of the
rocks of Behistun; and though the alphabets and the languages in which
these long inscriptions were "graven with a pen of iron and lead upon
the rocks for ever," had been long dead and unknown, yet, by a kind of
philological divination, Archaeology has exorcised and resuscitated both;
and from these dumb stones, and from the analogous inscriptions of Van,
Elwend, Persepolis, etc., it has evoked official gazettes and royal
contemporaneous annals of the deeds and dominions of Darius, Xerxes, and
other Persian kings. By a similar almost talismanic power and process,
it has forced the engraved cylinders, bricks, and obelisks of the old
cities of Chaldea and Babylonia--as those of Wurka, Niffer, Muqueyer,
etc.--to repeat over again to this present generation of men the names
of the ancient founders of their public buildings, and the wars and
exploits of their ancient monarchs. It has searched among the shapeless
mounds on the banks of the Tigris, and after removing the shroud of
earth and rubbish under which "Nineveh the Great" had there lain
entombed for ages, it has brought back once more to light the riches of
the architecture and sculptures of the palaces of that renowned city,
and shown the advanced knowledge of Assyria--some thirty long centuries
ago--in mechanics and engineering, in working and inlaying with metals,
in the construction of the optical lens, in the manufactory of pottery
and glass, and in most other matters of material civilisation. It has
lately, by these and other discoveries in the East, confirmed in many
interesting points, and confuted in none, the truth of the Biblical
records. It has found, for instance, every city in Palestine and the
neighbouring kingdoms whose special and precise doom was pronounced by
the sure word of Prophecy, showing the exact state foretold of them
twenty or thirty centuries ago,--as Askelon tenantless, the site of
ancient Gaza "bald," old Tyre "scraped" up, and Samaria with its
foundations exposed, and its "stones poured down in heaps" into the
valley below. It