412 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



The orientalist, if he be something more than a philologist, may 

 be compared with the explorer who pushes out to that distant hori- 

 zon, and is able to determine on the ground whether the phantom 

 mountains really exist. Such investigation is, however, relatively 

 recent and the historical critic could hardly anticipate that it was 

 coming. He seemed to be quite safe in sweeping away all early 

 human tradition. It dealt with a world of gods, demi-gods and 

 heroes; it was dominated by the whims and caprices of angi-y or 

 jealous divinities, and it was filled with impossible wonders and 

 prodigies. How could a soundly critical historian accept narratives 

 which seemed so manifestly impossible? We must grant that under 

 the circumstances rejection complete and unqualified seemed the only 

 safe course. 



Such critical negation was supreme when 50 years ago arche- 

 ology began to reveal with startling vividness the facts and the daih^ 

 equipment of human life in the very ages with which the rejected 

 traditions dealt. In the seventies of last century the excavations of 

 an untrained observer from the outside disclosed an astonishing 

 vision of pre-Greek civilization at Tiryns, Mycenae, and Troy. The 

 incredulity with which these discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann 

 were greeted by the classicists was highly characteristic. His exca- 

 vations recovered and exhibited to the incredulous eyes of the de- 

 structive critics the whole material equipment of daily life from the 

 very age of the Trojan war (or wars), and from the very city in and 

 around which that w^ar was waged. 



Similar revelations, involving far earlier periods of time, rapidly 

 disclosed the successive stages of the human career from a remote 

 antiquity, reaching well back of the beginnings of the world as dated 

 by an alleged " Biblical " chronology. In dealing with the traditions 

 of these earlier ages, the orientalists soon developed a similar school 

 of negative criticism. Such traditional accounts were promptly 

 thrown into the discard. Maspero's bulky historj'^ of the oriental 

 peoples, still a standard work on most modern library shelves, tells 

 us that ISIenes, the first king of the First Dynasty of Egypt, was a 

 purely mythical or legendary figure. Xevertheless we now possess 

 his tomb, and in our collections at the University of Chicago we 

 have a piece of his personal ornaments, a gold bar bearing his name 

 in hieroglyphic — the oldest piece of inscribed jewelry in existence. 

 Since 1804 thousands of prehistoric graves have been excavated 

 along the margin of the Nile Valle}', revealing to us the successive 

 stages of human advance for many centuries before the once legend- 

 ary Menes. 



Much the same process is going on in the investigation of Baby- 

 lonian history. Even the mythical hero Gilgamesh, the original of 



