Our great grandfathers who accepted the chronology of the good Bishop Usher, by which the creation of the world was placed neatly and exactly at 4004 years before Christ, would never have dreamed of such periods of time as those the ethnologist, in his search for the natural history of man, compasses today in the annals of a single family, like the so-called, and at present discredited, Aryan. Nor yet would it have seemed possible to our grandfathers, that modern archæology would have made it possible for our savants and scientists to be today correcting the mistakes of Herodotus, and showing by their decipherings of new-found inscriptions and monuments, that before the earliest Greeks, the Egyptians, and even the Semitic peoples who inhabited Babylon and Assyria, there was another people,—a people whose origin it is not possible to place even now,—the Sumerians and Akkadians, who in the fourth millennial period B. C. were already a cultured and civilized people. Recent excavations have changed the entire historical attack. Instead of beginning with the Homeric Age as an age of legend, “civilization may now be traced beyond the Mycenæan epoch, through the different stages of Ægean culture back into the Neolithic Age.”[121] In Egypt we can now go back before the pyramid builders to the earliest dynastic kings, even to Neolithic Egyptians of whom there are no written records. Back of the known civilization of Assyria and Babylon, there has been discovered an even older civilization. “On the northern and eastern confines of the Babylonian culture-system, new nations pass within our ken; Vannic men of Armenia, ruled by powerful kings; Kassites of the Zagros, whose language seems to contain elements which if really Aryan are probably the oldest known monuments of Indo-European speech (c. 1600 B. C.); strange tongued Elamites, also, akin neither to Iranian nor Semite. Nor does it seem to us remarkable that we should read the trilingual proclamations of Darius Hystaspis to his peoples in their original tongues, although an eighteenth century philosopher would have regarded the prospect of our ever being able to do so as the wildest of chimeras!”[122] Recent excavations have established the fact that the earliest known civilization was in what afterwards came to be known as Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and that groups of people living in cities and calling themselves, in the lower section of the country, the Sumerians, and in the upper section, the Akkadians, dwelt in civilized state until they were conquered by the Semitic peoples. The Semites in their conquest of the Greeks, as we now know, took from the conquered the culture of the race that was physically weaker, as indeed the Gauls did from the Romans.