Now, those who would pursue the study of a nation’s history cannot be content with the mere perusal of such literary records as it may have left behind. It needs brief consideration to realise that this leaves us equipped with very little real knowledge of an ancient race, inasmuch as the range of literature is necessarily limited, and deals with only a few sides of the national character: its military history, its political constitution, or its intellectual and philosophical bent—in short, its external and public life alone. He who would thoroughly investigate the history of a nation instinctively desires something more; he will seek to gain a comprehensive acquaintance with its social life, its religious beliefs, its artistic and intellectual attainments, and generally to estimate the extent of its culture and civilisation. But to do this it is necessary not only to be thoroughly conversant with its literary and historical records, but to turn attention also to its _monuments_. It need hardly be said that the word “monument” is here used in the quasi-technical sense current among archaeologists (witness the German use of the word _Denkmäler_), and that it must bear here a much wider signification than is generally accorded to it nowadays. It may, in fact, be applied to any object which has come down to us as a memorial and evidence of a nation’s productive capacity or as an illustration of its social or political life. The student of antiquity can adopt no better motto than the familiar line of Terence: Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto. For the very humblest product of the human brain or hand, a potsherd or a few letters scratched on a stone, may throw the most instructive light on the history of a race. In no instance is this better seen than in the case of Assyria, where almost all that we know of that great and wonderful people is derived from the cuneiform inscriptions scratched on tablets of baked clay. Or, again, we may cite the stone and bronze implements of the primitive peoples of Europe as another instance where “the weak and base things of the world and the things that are despised” have thrown floods of light on the condition of things in a period about which we should have been completely in the dark so long as we looked only to literary records for our information. Nothing is so common that it may be overlooked, and we may learn more from a humble implement in daily use than from the finest product of a poetic or artistic intellect, if we are really desirous of obtaining an intimate acquaintance with the domestic life of a people.