The greatest empire of the Bronze Age, Egypt, had fallen; Babylon showed evidence of decay; Palestine was at the zenith of her career; and Homeric Greece was laying the foundation for classic Greece, when this oldest of trees was sprouting from its tiny seed, unpacking its tender leaves, and taking its first feeble hold on life. The Trojan War (1194–1184 B. C.) was a very recent event, for prosperous and wealthy Troy had been destroyed by a few Greeks who resented her commercial rivalry. Homer was not yet born, hence the epic of the burning of Troy and the rescue of a beautiful woman had yet to be written by this poet of supreme genius. The Hebrew nation had not reached its golden age under Solomon, but David had vanquished the Philistines, united his people, driven the Canaanites out of Jerusalem and made himself King of an extensive empire. This, then, was the status of the civilized world around 1100 B. C. The code of Hammurabi was already more than a thousand years old; the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was almost as old as the Christian religion is today; the Great Wall of China had nearly nine hundred years to wait before its first stone would be laid (214 B. C.); while Rome, the Eternal City, lacked over three hundred and fifty years of its traditional founding (753 B. C.) While the Grizzly Giant was a sapling, a Sequoia of awkward and ungainly mien, bushy, bent, and crooked by the weight of winter snows, the Assyrians were gaining a great ascendency in the East. They had developed war to a high point of perfection by equipping an army for the first time with iron weapons and chariots drawn by horses. “Whenever they swept through a land they left a trail of ruin and desolation behind. Around smoking heaps which had once been towns, stretched lines of stakes on which were hung the bodies of rebellious rulers flayed alive; while all around rose mounds and piles of the slaughtered heaped to celebrate the great King’s triumph. Through the clouds of dust rising along the main roads of the Empire men of the subject kingdoms beheld great herds of cattle, horses, asses, flocks of sheep and goats, and long lines of camels laden with gold and silver, the wealth of the conquered, converging on the palace of Nineveh. Before them marched the chiefs of the plundered kingdoms carrying the severed heads of their former rulers about their necks.” And mothers prayed then as now that there would be no more War.