Of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, no definite historical record can be found earlier than from fifteen hundred to two thousand years before Christ. The Hittite civilization and influence we find at their height at about the same time, but here we can get no inkling of a greater antiquity for man than that given in the Middle Egyptian Empire. In the cities of Troy and Mycenæ, we find civilization at its crest some five hundred years later, and it is not until we come to Arabia that we again find evidence of such high antiquity as we find in Chaldea and Egypt. The old kingdom of Saba was built upon the ruins of a still older, known as Ma'in, and the former was in its decline as an empire at the beginning of the eighth century, B. C. Now, contemporary history shows that this country has gone through all the transformations which Egypt and Chaldea had, and if this is also true of the Ma'in kingdom, then a date of great antiquity must be given to it. But these are not certainties, while in the cases of Chaldea and Egypt there can be no mistake. The Israelite civilization was at its height under David and Solomon, about contemporaneously with that of Troy and Mycenæ, and even the Hebrew tradition does not attempt to antedate the year 2,000 B. C., so that we can obtain no information from this source. Greece flourished but five hundred years before the present era, and even if we regard Homer as authentic, no more remote date can be given to their earliest civilization than that of the attack by the Hellenes upon Troy, which was about 1,000 B. C. In the Western Hemisphere archeologists are every year making valuable discoveries in Mexico and Peru which will probably give a remote date for the civilizations which flourished in these countries long before the conquests of the Spaniards. The great pyramids of the Sun and Moon on the Mexican plateau and the similarity of their design and orientation with the Egyptian all point to an interchange of ideas between the East and the West in prehistoric time.