had marked for its site twelve years ago, has been brought to light,—a great civilization will loom up from past millenniums before our astonished eyes. For four thousand years the documents which contain this precious information have disappeared from sight, forgotten in the destroyed rooms of ancient Nippur. Abraham was about leaving his ancestral home at Ur when the great building in which so much learning had been stored up by previous generations collapsed under the ruthless acts of the Elamite hordes. But the light which begins to flash forth from the new trenches in this lonely mound in the desert of Iraq will soon illuminate the world again. And it will be no small satisfaction to know that it was rekindled by the hands of American explorers." {17} ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia: German exploration of the ruins of Babylon. An expedition to explore the ruins of Babylon was sent out by the German Orient Society, in 1899, under the direction of Dr. Koldewey, an eminent architect and archæologist, who had been connected with previous works of excavation done in Babylonia and northern Syria. In announcing the project, in the "Sunday School Times" of January 28, 1899, Professor Hilprecht remarked: "These extended ruins will require at least fifty years of labor if they are to be excavated as thoroughly and systematically as the work is done by the American expedition at Nippur, which has employed in its trenches never less than sixty, but frequently from two hundred to four hundred, Arabic workmen at the same time during the last ten years. Certain parts of the ruins of Babylon have been previously explored and excavated by Layard, Rawlinson, and the French expedition under Fresnel and Oppert, to which we owe the first accurate details of the topography of this ancient city." Writing somewhat more than a year later from Nippur, after having visited the German party at Babylon, Professor Hilprecht said of its work: "The chief work of the expedition during the past year was the exploration of the great ruin heap called El-Kasr, under which are hidden the remains of the palace of Nebuchadrezzar, where Alexander the Great died after his famous campaign against India. Among the few important antiquities so far obtained from this imposing mound of Ancient Babylon is a new Hittite inscription and a neo-Babylonian slab with an interesting cuneiform legend. Very recently, Dr. Koldewey, whose excellent topographical surveys form a conspicuous part of the results of the first year, has found the temple of the goddess Nin-Makh, so often mentioned in the building inscriptions of the neo-Babylonian rulers, and a little terra-cotta statue of the goddess. The systematic examination of the enormous mass of ruins covering Ancient Babylon will require several decenniums of continued hard labor.