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Last came the serious acquisitions, the bulk of his library: solid and expensive works historians, archaeologists, travellers, with noble volumes of engravings, and unwieldy tomes of antique lore. Little enough of all this had Rolfe digested, but more and more he loved to have erudition within his reach.
This period no doubt approached the period of historical annals, and the iron men may have been the earliest Teutons of the North, our own forefathers; but of their race or mixture of races we have no certain evidence, and can only make approximate hypotheses, the division of "ages" by archaeologists, it should be remembered, being not in any way a fixed division of races, but only indicating the probability of different races at those different early periods.
The synthetic tendency among archaeologists has been reflected in anthropological research, which has begun to question the separate and independent origin, not only of the more useful arts and crafts, but also of many primitive customs and beliefs.
Were all its doors flung wide, For us to search its rooms? And we to see the race, from first to last, And how they lived and died." Sargon is the most ancient Chaldean monarch mentioned in the Bible, and hitherto archaeologists have agreed that he was a fiction; but the Professor has not only proven that he had a habitation as well as a name, but has catalogued some thirty of his predecessors.
Moreover, the appearance of an unique and previously unheard-of set of inscribed stones, in a site of the usual broch and crannog period, is not invariably ascribed to forgery, even by the most orthodox archaeologists. Thus Sir Francis Terry found unheard-of things, not to mention "a number of thin flat circular discs of various sizes" in his Caithness brochs.
Archaeologists would certainly appear to have been justified in hoping that the tombs thus scattered about all over the world would yield such useful information as to lead to some final conclusions. Unfortunately, however, this has not been the case.
These excavations, which are still in progress, show that the art of writing was known and practised independently in Crete before that cataclysmic overthrow of the early Greek civilization which archaeologists are accustomed to ascribe to the hypothetical invasion of the Dorians.
"Insufficient to convince most modern archaeologists that a crucifix in any sense now accepted was meant."
Alas! the births of the great slopes of antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the minute researches of patient archaeologists and impervious to the startling discoveries by experts of more or less palpable forgeries. Of these critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our own conclusions.
We know, for instance, from the recent researches of the archaeologists, that in all the documents of the ancient Egyptians, written in the demotic or common character of the country, the names of the gods were invariably denoted by symbols; and I have already alluded to the different modes by which the Jews expressed the tetragrammaton.
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