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116 light of civilization which now illumines all the world. Still more ancient are the Assyrian and Babylonian stone figures and winged lions,—with those wonderful cuneiform inscriptions which it was the triumph of modern research to decypher. How wonderful the history of this discovery! At the commencement of this century it was not even known that these arrow heads were a written alphabet! And when that discovery was made it was not known how those letters should be read, whether from right to left or from top to bottom! Slowly and patiently did the antiquarians conquer these and similar difficulties one after the other, until that strange character was strange no more and records of the old Assyrian kings shed a flood of light on the history of the almost forgotten past. Some of these inscriptions are of an age, a thousand or twelve hundred or even fourteen hundred years before Christ,—a date when the faintest day-light of civilization had not yet dawned on the remotest corner of Europe. But what is this date again, compared to the antiquities of the remarkable land of the Nile? Strange stones with strange hieroglyphics, two thousand and two thousand five hundred years before Christ, crowd these halls of the British Museum. Imagination can scarcely compass the ancient age of the Sisostrises of Egypt with their wonderful civilization and religion. An Aryan race too had developed a civilization of their own in that ancient age, four thousand years ago, on the banks of the Indus, and chanted those beautiful hymns to the rising sun and to the raging storm which are now the oldest heritage of the Aryan nations of the earth. But the Hindus un-