ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE 225 



portion or another of this field of inquiry ; but the 

 principles and the spirit of history were perfectly appre- 

 hended, and Polybius must be said to have carried the 

 system of written history to its complete development 

 as a whole. 



The next step came with the Renascence, when the 

 older documents were sought out and history was com- 

 piled not only from what was personally known and in 

 hand, but from early or even contemporary documents. 

 These documents were in the first place copies of older 

 historians. Then the contemporary evidences of inscrip- 

 tions on stone and on coins were pressed into use. In 

 the last generation or two, the older inscriptions of Egypt 

 and Assyria have been brought into the scope of history, 

 and we now read the contemporary accounts of the 

 main events of from three to six thousand years ago. 

 At this stage it might be supposed that our knowledge 

 must come to an impassable barrier, and that beyond the 

 reach of written record we cannot stretch our vision. 



The new conception, which perhaps first came ob- 

 viously forward in the discoveries of prehistoric man, 

 is that of materialized history in place of written history. 

 The permanence of the traces of man and of the results 

 of his acts and works has never been grasped till the 

 present generation. Even to this day the sites of 

 ancient cities and palaces are raked to pieces and 

 destroyed in the search for inscriptions, regardless of 

 the great amount of history shown in the material 

 remains, often much wider and fuller than any that is 

 recovered from inscriptions. 



The first use to which material history is applied is 

 the confirmation and illustration of what is already 

 recorded. To produce something which tallies with 

 the statements of an author an Assyrian cylinder 



