ch
nations as the Egyptians and the Babylonians. It has come to be fully
accepted that when we use such a phrase as "the age of the world" we are
dealing with a period that must be measured not in thousands but in
millions of years; and that to the age of man must be allotted a period
some hundreds of times as great as the five thousand and odd years
allowed by the old chronologists. This changed point of view, needless
to say, has not been reached without ardent and even bitter controversy.
Yet the transformation is unequivocal; and the revised conception no
longer seems to connote the theological implications that were at first
ascribed to it. It has now become obvious that the data afforded by the
Hebrew writings should never have been regarded as sufficiently accurate
for the purpose of exact historical computations: that, in short, no
historian working along modern scientific lines could well have made the
mistake of supposing that the genealogical lists of the Pentateuch
afforded an adequate chronology of world-history. But it should not be
forgotten that to many generations of close scholarship these
genealogical lists seemed to convey such knowledge in the most precise
terms, and that at so recent a date as, for example, the year in which
Queen Victoria came to the throne, it was nothing less than a rank
heresy to question the historical accuracy and finality of chronologies
which had no other source or foundation.

This changed point of view regarding the chronology of history may
without hesitation be ascribed to the influence of evidence obtained in
a single field of inquiry, the field, namely, of archaeology. No doubt
the evidence as to the age of the earth and as to the antiquity of man
was gathered by a class of workers not formally included in the ranks of
the archaeologist: workers commonly spoken of as palaeontologists,
anthropologists, ethnologists and the like. But the distinction scarcely
covers a real difference. The scope of the archaeologist's studies must
include every department of the ancient history of man as preserved in
antiquities of whatever character, be they tumuli along the Baltic,
fossil skulls and graven bones from the caves of France, the flint
implements, pottery, and mummies of Egypt, tablets and bas-reliefs from
Mesopotamia, coins and sculptures of Greece and Rome, or inscriptions,
waxen tablets, parchment rolls, and papyri of a relatively late period
of classical antiquity. If at