212 SIR W. M. EAMSAY^ ON EXPLORATION OF ASIA MINOE^ AS BEARING' 



brought out clearly that St. Luke was a historian of the best type,, 

 and that both the Gospel and the Acts were trustworthy documents. 

 The New Testament historians followed the precedent established 

 by those to whom we owe the great historical records contained in 

 the Old Testament. The Church at large owed a great debt tO' 

 Professor Ramsay, not only for such books as Paul the Traveller,. 

 but also for the toil and travel endured in Asia Minor, which had 

 made the publication of these books possible. 



Mr. Martin L. Rouse. — I congratulate myself upon having, on. 

 the strength of an old-time school friendship, invited Sir William- 

 Ramsay to read a paper to our Society ; since we have thus been 

 able to hear from his own lips one so brimful of delightful learning 

 and overflowing with confirmations of momentous truth. 



The destructive critics might all well change their tone, as they 

 see arch[eology push the art of writing further and further back 

 into the first ages of human history. In 1896 Professor Flinders 

 Petrie gave a public lecture to the British Association, when assem- 

 bled in Liverpool, entitled " Man before Writing." Treating the- 

 hieroglyphs as the earliest sort of writing known to the Egyptians, 

 he proceeded to show that this began with the delineation of 

 objects familiar to them both among plants and animals and among 

 their own buildings and implements, thus proving both the earliness^ 

 of their artistic skill and of their industrial ingenuity. But at 

 Dover, in 1899, the same eminent explorer read a paper to the same- 

 learned body upon an alphabet consisting of " a large series of 

 signs," which was " used in Egypt about 2500 B.C., and which was- 

 now shown — by such signs having existed as far back as 5000 B.C. — 

 to be independent of the hieroglyph system or any derivatives of 

 this, while similar signs " found " in Crete showed the system to have 

 extended to the Mediterranean about 2000 B.C." 



The Tell Amarna tablets, along with those other cuneiform 

 tablets more recently found in the north of Canaan, prove that as 

 early as the time of Joshua, every Canaanite sheikh was familiar 

 with writing, and probably that many a sheikh's M'ife was also,, 

 since we find in the former collection two letters from a Lady 

 Basmath, who had been forced to flee afar from the invading 'Abiri ; 

 while in the Sinaitic mines and their adjoining temples, Professor 

 l^ctrie, as he reported last year, has found many Semitic inscriptions 

 of the workmen of the Pharaoh:? contemporary with Moses. 



