Excerpt from The Life of the Ancient East: Being Some Chapters of the Romance of Modern ExcavationThe sites chosen for study have not been taken at random, as might appear on a casual glance. Each one finds its place here because of some special contribution which it made in bygone days to human knowledge and culture, or else because of some special advance of our knowledge of the past which has resulted from its excavation. Thus, to take instances, Babylon has its place, not only because of its ancient greatness, but because of the inestimable value to the human race of its venerable system of Law, revealed by the discovery of the Code of Hammurabi, Abydos, not only because it was the chief seat of that form of faith which expressed the Egyptian's invincible yearning for immortality, but also because its excavation has given back to us the centuries which went before the dawn of History in Egypt and Gezer, because its very Obscurity has enabled it to pre serve for us, almost unbroken, the evidence of the strange sequence of races which strove for dominion in the most interesting land on earth.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.