in Greek. It is upon the left leg of one of the gigantic figures, and below the knee. It is just such an inscription as an American Vandal will occasionally cut into a famous statue or edifice abroad. It records the names of certain Greek mercenaries in the employ of a certain Egyptian king, Psammeticus. The Greek characters are of antique style. The letter Omicron answers both for Omicron and Omega, and so we are assured that its date must be before the year 540-for from this time inscriptions have the Omega-Omega being the last in order of the Greek alphabet, simply because it was the last the last letter invented and added.

If we can only learn the date of this Egyptian King Psammeticus, we can fix more narrowly the time of the inscription. There were unfortunately four Psammeticuses who might possibly be referred to. But Herodotus mentions an expedition to Ethiopia by Psammeticus the Second, and it was probably this expedition on which the Greek mercenaries were employed. Now Psammeticus the Second reigned from 594 to 589 before Christ. Sometime before 589 B. C., therefore, this specimen of Greek epigraphy must have been written. Of the mercenaries some were Ionians and some were Dorians, yet all of them used the Ionic form of the alphabet. This presupposes time for the Ionic alphabet to become generally used in Greece, and makes it certain that writing was a common art by the middle of the seventh century.

The argument is far stronger than this mere statement of dates would seem to indicate. We have been adducing the evidence of inscriptions upon stone or metal. But these imply the long-continued previous

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existence of the easier writing upon leather or parchment. Archilochus, a poet of about 700 B. C., speaks of "a grievous scytale"-the scytale being the staff on which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip could not be read until the leather was rolled again upon another staff of the same size; since only the writer and the receiver possessed staves of the proper size, the scytale answered all the ends of a message in cypher; so we get back a hundred years earlier and still find writing among the Greeks. Hesiod dates from about 750 B. C., and Hesiod enjoins that children be not taught letters before seven years old; and yet we are a hundred years later than the time of Homer.

How can we bridge that gulf? Shall we consult Homer himself? Shall we infer from the tablet which Homer represents Bellerophon as carrying from King Proetus to Iobates, that the author of the "Iliad" at least was familiar with writing? When we read that there were "written in the folded tablet many 'soulharassing things," it seems difficult to believe that any mere signs or picture-writing can be meant. Yet this is the clearest allusion to writing in the Homeric poems, and of itself it would be far from proving that the poems themselves were written. Even though this were the case, it would be rather for the help of the composer than of the reader, and the poet would not be any more likely to tell us about the mysteries of his art than the modern extemporaneous preacher or orator is apt to speak of the elaborate writing which precedes his public efforts.

We frankly confess, therefore, that we have no great

amount of direct testimony to the existence of writing among the Greeks so early as 850 B. C. But there is an indirect argument from what we know of other peoples with whom the Greeks had intercourse. The Latin race was by no means so quick-witted as the Greek, yet Niebuhr tells us that there were written books under the Tarquins, that is, about 750 B. C., although the oldest Latin inscriptions are several centuries later. The most ancient Hebrew epigraphy, the inscription on the Moabite stone, does not date back farther than to two hundred years after David and seven hundred years after Moses. Yet Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and during the Egyptian nineteenth dynasty, which covered Moses' time, there were "houses of books," that is, there was literature enough to fill whole libraries.

The recent excavations of Tel el-Amarna have brought to light a multitude of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters which record the correspondence of an Egyptian with a Babylonian king. We learn from them, to quote the words of Professor Sayce, that "in the fifteenth century before our era-a century before the Exodus active literary intercourse was going on throughout the civilized world of Western Asia between Babylon and Egypt and the smaller states of Palestine, of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and even of Eastern Cappadocia. This intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language and the complicated Babylonian script. This implies that all over the civilized East there were libraries and schools where the Babylonian language and literature were taught and learned. Babylonian appears to have been as much the language of

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diplomacy and cultivated society as French has become in modern times."

But after all, the common language of Egypt was Egyptian, and this use of Babylonian in the fifteenth century B. C. may be characteristic of the period of the shepherd kings, during which the old Semitic stock got possession for a time of the wealth of the Nile valley. Mr. Petrie, in his recent excavations in the Fayum, eighty miles southwest of Cairo, has unearthed a town of the nineteenth dynasty, or of the thirteenth century B. C. On the pottery of this town Cypriote or Greek letters are incised. Another town of pyramid builders, belonging to the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties, yielded pottery marked with similar Cypriote letters. He declares that all the evidence points to a use of this alphabet before 2000 B. C.

Dr. Howard Osgood, in his article entitled "The Oldest Book in the World," published in the "Bibliotheca Sacra" for October, 1888, takes us back to an earlier time, at least three thousand years before Christ, and gives the translation of a book of proverbs which might almost have formed the model for Solomon. The Proverbs of Ptah-hotep are in Egyptian. Renouf, in his "Hibbert Lectures," declares that in the fourth dynasty, as early as 3124 B. C., there was in Egypt "a universally diffused system of writing and a common use of papyrus." While Professor Hommel of Munich has found proofs of high civilization in Arabia as far back as 2000 B. C., the recent explorations of Professor Hilprecht of the University of Pennsylvania have brought to light at Nippur in Babylonia an inscription which he regards as earlier than 4000 B. C.

Yet there are Old Testament critics who tell us that Moses, who lived about 1500 B. C., and who was educated in the court of the Egyptian king, could not possibly have known how to write; Solomon, who lived about 1000 B. C., could not possibly have been enough in advance of his time-the time required by the hypothesis of natural evolution-to write a book of proverbs. Professor Sayce, referring to those who have formed opinions adverse to the historical character of the Pentateuch, says well that "the Tel el-Amarna tablets have already overthrown the primary foundation on which much of this criticism has been built"; and Professor Hommel declares his conviction that "Arabia itself will furnish us the direct proofs that the modern destructive criticism of the Pentateuch is absolutely erroneous."

Let us apply all this to our present subject. The age of Homer was six hundred and fifty years after the time alluded to by Professor Sayce; eleven hundred and fifty years after the time mentioned by Professor Hommel; twenty-two hundred and fifty years after that spoken of by Monsieur Renouf; and thirty-one hundred and fifty years after that given us by Professor Hilprecht. The Greeks were a seafaring people, who inhabited not only the Argive peninsula with its manifold harbors, but also the islands of the Egean and the Adriatic; records. lately recovered seem to prove that gean Greeks visited Egypt as early as three thousand years before Christ; in the nature of things the winds and the waves must have driven Greeks over the sea to Egypt and Egyptians over the sea to Greece; the Homeric poems themselves speak of such intercourse, besides intimating that there was a coastwise commerce by way of Pho