What new material may we draw from this ancient soil of Elam, to provide food for our chimæra-like appetite for universal knowledge; a soil where countless generations of human beings lie buried, piled on each other like so many geological stratifications, and surrounded by all the appurtenances of their earthly existence? The Greeks have merely transmitted to us baseless fables concerning the history of Elam. Ignoring all local traditions, the writers of the Macedonian period related that the mythical founder of this region was Memnon, son of Tithonus, and of Aurora; that he led a body of black warriors to the aid of Troy when besieged by the Greeks, and was slain in a duel by Achilles. Eos, or Aurora, wept for her son, and according to a pretty fiction it is the tears of this inconsolable mother which form the morning dew. Classical antiquity was cradled in such poetic stories of the mysterious regions of the rising sun, without any attempt to discover the actual facts. It is the Bible alone that has preserved the name of one of the kings of Susa, Chedorlaomer, a contemporary of Abraham. In the present day, however, the power of deciphering the Chaldæan cuneiform texts has rendered us acquainted with isolated episodes of the political relations between the Elamites and the Babylonians and Ninevites. In 1810 Macdonald Kinnear and Monteith accompanied General Malcolm on his mission to the Shah of Persia; in 1826 Sir Henry Rawlinson, and later again Sir A. H. Layard, visited the tells of Susa, and copied several inscriptions which had been laid bare by the heavy rains. As the monuments emerged from the rubbish, it became evident that only excavation could compel the mounds of Susa to yield the secrets they contained. These excavations were commenced in 1851 by Sir Kenneth Loftus and Colonel Williams, who cleared the wells of the palace of Darius I., son of Hystaspes. The researches were then abandoned, and it was only in 1885 that the French Government commissioned M. Dieulafoy to carry on the work begun by Loftus. He laid bare the _Apadana_ of Artaxerxes, and deposited in the Louvre Museum the magnificent Achæmenid fragments described in Chapter V. of this volume (p. 146 _et seq_). But various remains and fragments of inscriptions of an age far more remote showed that merely the surface of the ruins had been touched, and that it would be necessary to undertake systematic excavations of greater depth. A diplomatic treaty signed May 12th, 1895, renewed and confirmed in Paris in 1900 by the Shah of Persia, accorded to France the exclusive right to carry out archæological excavations over the whole extent of the Persian Empire. M. Jacques de Morgan was appointed Delegate-General of Antiquities in Persia, with a special mission to carry on the researches at Susiana.