ourneys a multitude
of inscriptions that tell of kingdoms that fringed its southern coast
and extended we know not how far into the interior in those early days
when one of the queens of Sheba brought presents to Solomon, and when,
earlier still, we are told there were dukes of Edom before there was any
king in Israel. They say that a railroad is to be built to Mecca; Arabia
is not to be always a closed land, neighbor as it is to Egypt. We shall
know one of these days whether, as scholars suspect, out of Arabia and
across the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, where, at the southern end of the
Red Sea, Africa almost touches Asia, there came that mighty flood of
more forceful men, bred in the deserts and hills, who, passing down the
Nile, first brought history to Egypt; and whether it was this same
Semitic people, as scholars suspect again, that spread resistlessly
eastward to the Euphrates valley, and did an equal service in conquering
and assimilating the black aborigines of these swamps and lagoons. The
spade will tell us.

Or was it still further east, in the highlands of Persia, that men first
learned how to write and record history? We cannot go back so far in the
history of Babylonia--Professor Hilprecht dares to carry us seven
thousand years before Christ--that we do not find its kings fighting
against Elam. And only in the last decade of the Nineteenth century the
Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite
lands. What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery! For
Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments
and records that printing-presses have yet issued? And from that time to
this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even
while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special convention,
the care of its monuments and their exploration to French savants? And
before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace
of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the
friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is
it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre
the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago?
And so to France was given the right, for the honor and enrichment of
the Louvre, to explore Persia; and De Morgan went to Susa, to Shushan,
the palace of Xerxes and Darius, of Ahasuerus and Esther, in search of
what was far earl