may well be, is preserved in
undecaying records just a few feet under the ground, if one only knew
where to dig for it; nay, we now know where to dig for the most and best
of it, and we only await the Stratford Cannings, who will give the
money, and the Austen Layards, who have the enthusiasm for the work.

After Layard and Rassam, after Rawlinson and Botta, George Smith took
flying trips to the site of Nineveh twice that he might gather the
remaining fragments of the great library of Asshurbanabal, and he died
in the field far from home. It was he that found among Layard's tablets
the Babylonian account of the Deluge, so much like that in the Bible. He
was the first of a second generation who, following Rawlinson and
Oppert, decipherers as well as explorers, were able to read as they
found. I can only mention the names of the Englishmen Taylor and Loftus;
of the Frenchmen, Place and De Sarzec; and, later, the Americans,
Peters, Hilprecht, and Haynes, who have so faithfully explored the
extremely archaic mound of Niffer, which I had the honor to recommend
for excavation after I had visited the mounds of Southern Babylonia in
the winter of 1884-85. And now the Germans, with scientific as well as
commercial and political purpose, with their railroad to pass down the
valley through Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, which gives them predominant
influence, have sent expeditions well equipped with scholars and
engineers to the choicest sites in Babylonia, to Warka, the ancient
Erech, and to Babylon itself; and with Teuton thoroughness they are
excavating the most famous of ancient ruins and gathering fresh
treasures of archaeological research. Nor have they left the land of the
Hittites unexplored, for Germany claims the first rights, politically,
in all Anatolia, the right of succession and possession when the Turk is
expelled, and German archaeological science is bound to be first on
that field.

And now what have we found as the fruit of all this labor of
exploration? Is it worth the labor and the expense?

Let us look first--it can be only a glance--at Egypt, for Egypt was the
land first and most persistently explored. The French Government for
scores of years has been at work there. Germans and Italians have
explored the ruins; two English societies have for years kept
expeditions in the field; and just now a Californian university sends an
American Egyptologist to uncover the tombs and read the hieroglyphs of
the kings. N