Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history contained in the Pentateuch has been shown by archæology to be authentic. And it must be remembered that Oriental archæology is still in its infancy. Few only of the sites of ancient civilisation have as yet been excavated, and there are thousands of cuneiform texts in the Museums of Europe and America which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for Biblical criticism, were found, and the disclosures made by the early contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of still more recent discovery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical genuineness of the Pentateuchal narratives; and it raises the presumption that with the advance of our knowledge will come further confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian’s path is clear; the Pentateuch has been tested by the comparative method of science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt with accordingly like other historical works. The philological theory with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and ‘redactors,’ must be put aside, along with all the historical consequences which it involves. But it does not follow that because the philological theory is untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because it has attempted to build up a vast superstructure on very imperfect and questionable materials; because, in short, it has attempted to attain historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one can study the Pentateuch in the light of other ancient works of a similar kind without perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its author—or authors—has made use of a large variety of older materials. Modern Oriental history has been written in the same manner; a book, for instance, like the Egyptian history of El-Maqrîzî, though the production of a single mind, nevertheless embodies older materials which have been collected from every side. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Chaldæan Epic of Gilgames, bears the same testimony. The growth of the Book of the Dead, the ritual which was needed by the souls of the Egyptian dead in their passage to the next world, can actually be traced.[139] It included and combined the doctrines of more than one school of early Egyptian theological thought, and in later days was extensively interpolated and modernised. Not only were glosses, once intended to explain the obscurities of the archaic phraseology, incorporated into the text, but even whole chapters were added to the work. The Epic of Gilgames similarly embodies other poems or portions of poems, of which the Episode of the Deluge is an example. Yet no