It is always easier to ask questions than to answer them, in archæology as in other things. There are many details connected with the early relationship between the civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt which must be left to future research to discover. But of that relationship there can now be little question in the minds of those who are accustomed to deal with inductive evidence. There was intercourse in the prehistoric age between the two countries, and the civilizing influences, like the wheat and the language, came from the lands which bordered on the Euphrates. Civilized man made his way from the east, and dwelt in primeval days “in the land of Shinar.”[116] [Illustration: THE 1^{ST}. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE] CHAPTER V BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE A very few years ago Palestine was still archæologically an unknown land. Its history subsequent to the Israelitish conquest could be gathered from the Old Testament, and Egyptian papyri of the age of the Nineteenth dynasty had told us something about its condition immediately prior to that event. Thanks to the Palestine Exploration Fund, the country had been carefully surveyed, and the monuments still existing on its surface had been noted and registered. But the earlier history of the people, their races and origin, their social and religious life, and their relation to the rest of the world, were still a blank. Of the Canaan invaded by the children of Israel we knew nothing from an archæological point of view, and very little even of the Palestine that was governed by Israelitish judges and Jewish kings. The veil has at last been lifted which so long lay over the face of Palestine. Cuneiform texts have come to clear up its civil history, while the spade of the excavator has supplemented their evidence on the more purely archæological side. The history of Palestine can now be followed back not only into the neolithic, but even into the palæolithic age, and the source and character of Canaanite civilization have been in large measure revealed to us.