First and foremost among the materials which have made this possible are the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, which were discovered in 1887. Tel el-Amarna, about midway between Minia and Assiut, is the site of a city which sprang, like a meteor, into a brief but glorious existence under the so-called “heretic king” Amon-hotep IV. about B.C. 1400. Amon-hotep, under the guidance of his mother, had endeavoured to suppress the old state religion of Egypt, and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism. In spite of persecution, however, the adherents of the old faith proved too strong for the king; he was forced to leave Thebes, the capital of his fathers, and to build a new capital further north, where he changed his name to that of Khu-n-Aten, and called artists from the islands of the Mediterranean to adorn his palace. When moving from Thebes he naturally transferred to the new seat of government both the Foreign Office and its records in so far as they covered the reign of his father Amon-hotep III. and his own. For reasons unknown to us they do not extend further back. They were all in the cuneiform script, and for the most part in the Babylonian language. The fact came upon the historian with a shock of surprise, and had far-reaching consequences, historical as well as archæological. In the first place, they proved what had already been suspected, that under the Eighteenth dynasty Egypt possessed an Asiatic empire which stretched to the banks of the Euphrates. Then, secondly, they showed that Western Asia was at the time intersected by high-roads along which merchants and couriers were constantly passing, and an active literary correspondence was carried on. Thirdly--and this was the greatest surprise of all--they made it clear that this correspondence was in the script and language of Babylonia, and that it was shared in by writers of various nationalities and languages, of all classes of society and of both sexes. The Hittite and Cappadocian kings wrote to the Pharaoh in cuneiform characters, just as did the kings of Babylonia and Assyria. Arab shêkhs and Hittite condottieri joined in the correspondence, and politically-minded ladies did the same. Even the Egyptian Government was compelled to suppress all feelings of national vanity, and to conduct the whole of its correspondence with its own governors and vassals in Palestine or Syria in the foreign language and syllabary. There is no trace anywhere of the use of either the Egyptian language or the Egyptian mode of writing.