ier than they, for another Frenchman and his wife, M.
and Mme. Dieulafoy, had already excavated the noble palace of these
Persian kings. Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly
earlier remains. There is the column set up, if we can believe the
Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of
Babylon,--and it is not incredible,--three thousand eight hundred years
before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of
his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies. It
is a noble composition, with archaic writing, and a stately figure of
the king climbing the mountains and slaying his enemies; it shows an art
that might well have developed into the best that Greece has produced.
But De Morgan has only begun to scratch the surface of the mounds of
Elam, and a multitude of scholars believe that out of Elam came the
first civilization of Chaldea. We shall find out yet; for the record is
in the earth, and only waits the man who will dig it out, and then the
man who will read it.

We are tempted to go further east and recall that in India, the land
where Alexander made his most distant conquests, a multitude of English
scholars have been searching the ruins of old temples for the earliest
memorials of the worship of Buddha. Just now they have found his
birthplace and precious relics. But that takes us too far afield, and
would tempt us to further excursions in Burmah and China. We must come
back to Western Asia and the shores of Europe.

As has been indicated, the greatest puzzle of ancient history is that of
the Hittite empire, which seems to have ruled all Asia Minor at some
uncertain time, and to have extended over Syria and Palestine. No sooner
had the greatest Egyptian kings, Thothmes and Rameses, ventured their
armies into Asia, perhaps in vengeance on the incursions of Ionian
pirates, perhaps in requital of the tyrannies of the hated Shepherd
Kings, than they learned of the Hittites on the shores of the Euphrates.
Then, a century or two later, a mass of official correspondence sent by
the Kings of Palestine and Syria, dug up in Egypt, reports that the
Hittites had appeared as invaders from the north and beseeches military
aid. But the power of Egypt had waned, and the Hittites were supreme
until the Assyrians began and carried on for five centuries the
uncertain war which ended in the utter overthrow of the Hittites and all
their allies in a great battle