I have said that outside of her people I found very little in Aleppo to attract attention. I, of course, visited the great mediæval castle--called the Citadel--that dominates the city and from the summit of which one has a magnificent view of the surrounding country. But this impressed me far less than a small block of basalt which I saw in the south wall of a mosque near the Citadel and which bears a curious inscription like those which have, during the last few decades, been brought to light in ever-increasing numbers throughout the greater part of both Syria and Anatolia. By the superstitious natives it is held in great veneration, for it is supposed to offer a sovereign remedy for all ophthalmic affections. We were assured that the smoothness of the stone’s surface was due to the frequent practice of the afflicted of rubbing their eyes upon it.[284] The character of this inscription was not new to me for I had seen many similar ones in the Imperial Museum of Constantinople and elsewhere, but its location in this commercial capital of the Near East transported me in fancy back to a period antedating the time when the Patriarch Abraham, according to tradition, was wont to milk his flocks in a cave of the citadel and distribute the milk in alms among the poor.[285] Then Aleppo was in the possession of a power that ranked with Egypt and Assyria; a power which, nearly two thousand years B. C., overthrew the first Babylonian dynasty and made an alliance, on equal terms, with Rameses II, the greatest of the Pharaohs; a power which, in its palmy days, bore rule over the greater part of Syria and Asia Minor. Until lately it was believed by scholars that there were only two great civilizations in the ancient East--Egypt and Babylonia. But recent discoveries in Sinjerli, Boghaz-Keui, and many other places have proved conclusively that there was a third civilization which was synchronous with those of the Nile and the Tigris and which, in the days of its splendor, prevailed from Nineveh to Smyrna and Ephesus and from the headwaters of the Orontes to the lower reaches of the Halys. Far back in the Mycenean period, when the Cyclops, according to legend, were building the massive acropolis of Tiryns, and when, as far as “the first pale glimmer of Greek tradition” will enable us to judge, the people of Greece “were awakening to intellectual life,” this third civilization--until a half century ago entirely unsuspected--was erecting monuments which are to-day the amazement of the learned world and which have prepared it for revelations as startling as any of those that followed the decipherment of the Rosetta stone by Champollion or the unlocking of the secrets of the cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia by Grotefend and Rawlinson.