19. When we attempt to realize the prodigious vastness and remoteness of the horizon thus opened before us, a feeling akin to awe overcomes us. Until within a very few years, Egypt gloried in the undisputed boast of being the oldest country in the world, i.e., of reaching back, by its annals and monuments, to an earlier date than any other. But the discoveries that are continually being made in the valley of the two great rivers have forever silenced that boast. Chaldea points to a monumentally recorded date nearly 4000 B.C. This is more than Egypt can do. Her oldest authentic monuments,--her great Pyramids, are considerably later. Mr. F. Hommel, one of the leaders of Assyriology, forcibly expresses this feeling of wonder in a recent publication:[BK] "If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand B.C., in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture adopted by them,--a culture, moreover, which appears to have sprouted in Accad as a cutting from Shumir--then the latter must naturally be far, far older still, and have existed in its completed form IN THE FIFTH THOUSAND B.C.--an age to which I now unhesitatingly ascribe the South-Babylonian incantations." This would give our mental vision a sweep of full six thousand years, a pretty respectable figure! But when we remember that these first known settlers of Shumir came from somewhere else, and that they brought with them more than the rudiments of civilization, we are at once thrown back at least a couple of thousands of years more. For it must have taken all of that and more for men to pass from a life spent in caves and hunting the wild beasts to a stage of culture comprising the invention of a complete system of writing, the knowledge and working of metals, even to the mixing of copper and tin into bronze, and an expertness in agriculture equal not only to tilling, but to draining land. If we further pursue humanity--losing at last all count of time in years or even centuries--back to its original separation, to its first appearance on the earth,--if we go further still and try to think of the ages upon ages during which man existed not at all, yet the earth did, and was beautiful to look upon--(_had_ there been any to look on it), and good for the creatures who had it all to themselves--a dizziness comes over our senses, before the infinity of time, and we draw back, faint and awed, as we do when astronomy launches us, on a slender thread of figures, into the infinity of space. The six ages of a thousand years each which are all that our mind can firmly grasp then come to seem to us a very poor and puny fraction of eternity, to which we are tempted to apply almost scornfully the words spoken by the poet of as many years: "Six ages! six little ages! six drops of time!"[BL] FOOTNOTES: [BJ] Maspero, "Histoire Ancienne," p. 173.