But what was true in 1862 of Egypt is still very largely true of Assyria and Babylonia. We are beginning to know something about the history of Assyro-Babylonian architecture; we know a little about the early work of the Babylonians in metal and stone; but the history of Assyro-Babylonian pottery is still, speaking broadly, a blank. For most of his knowledge of the ancient Euphratean civilizations the archæologist has to turn to the inscriptions and written literature of which such vast quantities have survived, and hence, besides being an archæologist in the strict sense, he must be also a decipherer and a philologist. He is still precluded from appealing to the evidence which can be handled and felt. From the point of view of the archæologist written evidence is usually unsatisfactory because it admits of more than one interpretation. A translation which seems certain to one scholar may be questioned by another; an inference drawn from the words of a text by one student may be denied by another. The statements in the texts themselves may be contradictory, or their imperfection may lead to wrong conclusions. Above all, the evidence may come to the archæologist from a philologist whose bent of mind is literary rather than scientific, and who will therefore be unable either to appreciate or to understand scientific testimony. Nothing is more common than to come across literary critics who cannot be made to understand the nature of inductive proof. On the other hand, the decipherer of a lost language must necessarily be an archæologist as well. The clues he follows will be largely archæological, and he has to appeal to archæology at every step. The method he must pursue is the method of archæology and of other inductive sciences, and the materials he uses are in part the materials of archæology also. The philologist who knows nothing of history and geography, who is unable to follow a scientific argument and appreciate scientific reasoning, can never decipher; he may take the materials given him by the decipherer and work them into philological shape, but that is all. We must listen to him on questions of grammar and vocabulary; on questions of archæology his opinions are worth no more than those of the ordinary man.