full historical and, of course, contemporary and
official account of the glorious events of the royal reign. Not a line
was defaced; at the British Museum it can be seen to-day as perfect as
when engraved twenty-seven centuries ago. Other monuments of Shalmaneser
have been found. One is a great monolith with a portrait of the king in
all his fine array, and with one hundred and fifty-six lines of text.
Another is a series of splendid bronze plates that covered great wooden
gates, on which, in repousse work, were pictures of the royal victories,
and inscriptions explaining them. The Bible tells us of the rivalries
and jealousies of Ahab and Jehu, kings of Israel, and Benhadad and
Hazael, kings of Damascus. How surprising it is to find here not only
the story of the successive campaigns of Shalmaneser against these same
kings, the number of their chariots and soldiers, but to see pictured
before us the tribute sent by Jehu. We learn that Shalmaneser reigned
from 859 to 825 B.C., and we have the record of all his successive
campaigns, the first twenty-six of which he led in person. There is not
another country of which, before the invention of printing, we have so
minute a history; and all had been lost, except the mention of a name or
two, whether historical or legendary we hardly knew, until Layard and
his fellow-explorers opened the mounds of Assyria.

But enough for Layard. He is only one, though the principal one, of all
the explorers of the buried records of the empires of the Tigris and
Euphrates. And Babylonia and Assyria are not the only countries that
history required us to explore. Greece and its neighboring states and
islands have not even yet been fairly investigated. Much of Asia Minor
is still a virgin field. Syria and Palestine have hardly been scratched
with the spade. More has been done in Egypt, but more yet is to be done.
And when we go into the further east of Persia and Old Elam, not to
speak of the yet farther east of Central Asia, now just beginning to
yield strange treasures to daring travellers, and ancient India and
China,--how ancient we know not at all,--there is field for centuries of
further research. For we must go back past empires and kingdoms and
tribal conditions to the very beginning of the human race on the earth,
even if so it be, to the first _Pithecanthropus_ which men of science
tell us was the link which connected _Homo sapiens_ with the race of
primitive simians. And all this, it