st. Uncontrolled by external testimony, critical scepticism played
havoc with the historical narratives that had descended to it, and
starting from the assumption that the world of antiquity was illiterate,
refused to credit such records of the past as dwarfed the proportions of
Greek history, or could not be harmonised with the canons of the critic
himself. It was quite sufficient for a fact to go back to the second
millennium B.C. for it to be peremptorily ruled out of court.

The discoveries of Oriental archaeology have come with a rude shock to
disturb both the conclusions of this imperfectly-equipped criticism and
the principles on which they rest. Discovery has followed discovery,
each more marvellous than the last, and re-establishing the truth of
some historical narrative in which we had been called upon to
disbelieve. Dr. Schliemann and the excavators who have come after him
have revealed to an incredulous world that Troy of Priam which had been
relegated to cloudland, and have proved that the traditions of Mykenaean
glory, of Agamemnon and Menelaos, and even of voyages to the coast of
Egypt, were not fables but veritable facts. Even more striking have been
the discoveries which have restored credit to the narratives of the Old
Testament, and shown that they rest on contemporaneous evidence. It was
not so long ago that the account of the campaign of Chedor-laomer and
his allies in Canaan was unhesitatingly rejected as a mere reflection
into the past of the campaigns of later Assyrian kings. Even the names
of the Canaanite princes who opposed him were resolved into etymological
puns. But the tablets of Babylonia have come to their rescue. We now
know that long before the days of Abraham not only did Babylonian armies
march to the shores of the Mediterranean, but that Canaan was a
Babylonian province, and that Amraphel, the ally of Chedor-laomer,
actually entitles himself king of it in one of his inscriptions. We now
know also that the political condition of Babylonia described in the
narrative is scrupulously exact. Babylonia was for a time under the
domination of the Elamites, and while Amraphel or Khammurabi was allowed
to rule at Babylon as a vassal-prince, an Elamite of the name of Eri-Aku
or Arioch governed Larsa in the south. Nay more; tablets have recently
been found which show that the name of the Elamite monarch was
Kudur-Laghghamar, and that among his vassal allies was Tudkhula or
Tidal, who seems to ha