my_ and _Cleopatra_ were in the Greek text, and it was not
hard to find what were the combinations of characters that stood for
these words in the Egyptian. The letters _p, t_, and _l_ were in both
names. The hieroglyphic signs found in both names must be these three
letters. That beginning gave all the other signs in both words, and the
rest of the alphabet soon followed. Justly great is the fame of the
Frenchman Champollion, who has the honor of having first deciphered and
read this lost language, and opened to us the secret treasures of its
history and religion.

But with the exploration of Egypt the scholarship of the world was
satisfied for fifty years. No one seemed to think to ask what might be
hid under the soil of nearer Palestine and Syria and Asia Minor; much
less did they seek to uncover the buried capitals of Assyria and
Babylonia. Scholarship was devoted to books, to old manuscripts in
convent libraries, to recovering what the wise men of Greece and Rome
had written, and trying to wrest new facts out of their blundering old
compilations of ancient history. It did not occur to them that a hundred
kings and ten thousand merchants and priests might have left the stories
of their conquests or contracts or liturgies, unrotted in the wet soil,
imperishably preserved to be the record of commerce and empires as old
and as great as those of Egypt, but far deeper covered with oblivion.
But there they were, kept safe for twenty, thirty, fifty centuries,
until the man should come whose mission it was to find them.

More than one such man came in the middle of the last century, but one
man is pre-eminent, and typical of all the rest, Sir Austen Henry
Layard. Before him one Frenchman, M. Paul Emile Botta, had made a fine
dash on a palace city a dozen miles north of Nineveh, and had opened
wonders such as the world had never seen before. But the man whose
energy was fullest of impulse, whose enthusiasm compelled British
Ambassadors and Ministers and Parliaments to do his bidding, who aroused
the world to the importance of the exploration and disinterment of the
monuments of Babylonia and Assyria, was the Englishman Layard.

He had a youthful passion for adventure, and slender means to gratify
it. I wish you could see him as he is pictured in the volume which gives
the story of his early adventures, before he had settled on his life-work
of exploration. There he stands clad in his Bakhtiyari costume, the
dress of a moun