but shadows on a screen, just seen and disappearing. What kings and
kingdoms came before them and passed away? Has history no record? Not a
word. Only black vacuity has been left behind them. And there was that
other empire of the East, that of the Hittites, which we now know ruled
Asia Minor and Syria and contested the rule of the world with Assyria
and Egypt centuries before Agamemnon and Achilles, but so utterly buried
and forgotten that not a line of its history was left, not even enough
to let the sharpest scholar ask a question or suspect that it ever built
capitals and fought victories and produced a civilization the harvest of
which we still enjoy. Nothing was left of them but their names in a
Hebrew list of tribes,--"Amorites and Jebusites and Hivites and
Hittites."

Yet all these lost tribes, nay, lost nations, had left their records
behind them, only they were buried under ground and out of sight. What
a travesty it is on history and civilization, what an impeachment of the
glory of these later Christian centuries, that the lands which these old
empires crowded with a busy population should now be among the most
desolate and inaccessible on the face of the earth! There we see the
curse of the Moslem religion, and still more of the Turkish government.
Wherever the Turk has carried the sword and the Koran, there is blight
and death. Only as soldiers and scholars of Europe have forced their way
into these seats of ancient empires has it been possible to ask and
learn what is buried beneath their gray desolation.

The man who did more than any other to awaken the interest of the world
in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator
of Nineveh. But before his day another man had startled the world with
what we may call the discovery of Egypt. That man was Napoleon
Bonaparte, the man whose sword was a ploughshare turning up the fallow
fields of Europe, and sowing strange crops of tyranny and liberty, and
whose ambition it was to set up a new throne in the land of the Pharaohs
and Ptolemies. The mighty ruins of Karnak and the imperishable pyramids
filled him with amazement, and he set the scholars of France at work to
publish in massive folios the wonders of that most ancient land. Then
was found the Rosetta Stone, with its inscription in two
languages,--Greek, which any scholar could read, and the Egyptian
hieroglyphics, which no living man could read. But here was the key. The
words _Ptole