The outstanding feature of our time has been the immense increase in the material available for the knowledge and interpretation of every stage and chapter in the life of humanity.  Primitive civilization has been definitely brought within the circle of historical study.  The discoveries of Boucher des Perthes, Pitt-Rivers, and their successors have thrown back the opening of the human drama tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, and we recreate prehistoric man from skull and weapon, language and legend.  Anthropology has become a science, and the habits and beliefs of our savage ancestors have been rendered intelligible by the piercing insight of Tylor and Sir James Frazer.  In its boundless erudition, its constructive imagination, and its wealth of suggestion, the Golden Bough stands forth as perhaps the most notable contribution of the age to our knowledge of the evolution of the human race.

Among the most sensational events of the nineteenth century was the resurrection of the Ancient East.  We now know that Greece and Rome, far from standing near the beginning of recorded history, were the heirs of a long series of civilizations.  Our whole perspective has been changed or should be changed by the discovery.  The ancient world thus revealed by the partnership of philology and archaeology ceases to be merely the vestibule to Christian Europe, and becomes in point of duration the larger part of human history.

The story opens with Champollion’s decipherment of the bilingual tablet discovered more than a century ago at the Rosetta mouth of the Nile.  The key once fitted to the lock, the whole civilization of ancient Egypt lay open to the explorer.  A secure chronological basis was supplied by Lepsius, and systematic excavation was commenced by Mariette, who was named by the Khedive Director of Antiquities and established the Cairo Museum.  The work of the three great founders of Egyptology has been carried forward during the last half-century by an international army of scholars.  The interpretation of the ancient scripts has reached a technical mastery unknown to the pioneers, and the genius of Brugsch unlocked the door to demotic, which Champollion had never thoroughly mastered.  But the triumphs of philology have been surpassed by the conquests of the spade.  The closest friend of Mariette’s later years was Maspero, who succeeded him as Director of Antiquities, and whose most sensational find was the tombs of the Kings near Thebes.  Equally eminent as excavator, philologist, and historian, Maspero was the first to popularize Egyptology in France, as Flinders Petrie, the greatest excavator since Mariette, has popularized it in England.  Until twenty years ago the curtain rose on the pyramid-builders of the Fourth dynasty.  We have now not only recovered the earlier dynasties, but neolithic and palaeolithic Egypt emerges from the primitive cemeteries.  The immense accession of new material has enabled Eduard Meyer to construct something like a definite chronology; but though marvellous progress has been made in our knowledge of the Early, Middle, and New Empires, a great gap remains between the sixth and the eleventh dynasties, and the period of the Hyksos is still tantalizingly obscure.  Egyptian history in the light of the latest discoveries may be best studied in the judicial pages of Breasted, the foremost of American Egyptologists.