The chain of documentary and circumstantial evidence which points to the preservation, substantially intact, of the Bible as an historic record of the highest possible trustworthiness is completed by the daily increasing store of monuments which are brought to light, especially in Palestine, Assyria, and Egypt. Up to the middle of the present century the largest part of our knowledge of the ancient nations was drawn from the Bible. It was the one great treasure-house wherein the history of the East was to be found. We had Greek and Roman and some Egyptian historians, but their knowledge was confined to their own people, and needed to be supplemented by the details related in the Pentateuch, in Josue, Judges, Ruth, the two Books of Samuel, the Books of Kings, Paralipomenon, Esdras, Tobias, Judith, Esther, and the Machabees, all of which are historical books containing facts, statistics, constitutions, and dynastic lines, without which profane history would still be a doubtful and barren field of study.
But, lately, the studious industry of scholarly men has gone over the ground of the old events, to test with the instruments of historic criticism the veracity, and, incidentally, the authenticity of the Bible record. Aided by the royal munificence of governments and private corporations, scholars went to search out and examine the monuments of antiquity in those parts where the Jewish race had dwelt during the periods recounted in the Bible. They found, mostly below the earth, and sometimes beneath the flood-beds of streams and lakes, traces in stone or clay or metal which pointed to their containing valuable information regarding the Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and other nations with whom the Hebrew people had come in contact. These traces were sometimes in signs and languages not understood or wholly unknown in our learned world, but with assiduous study the mysteries came, in course of time, to be unravelled. The story of these discoveries is in various ways extremely interesting, and we shall speak of them more in detail later on.
Besides the primitive inscriptions just referred to, a number of cities have been discovered which lay buried for many centuries beneath the ground upon which afterwards other races dwelt and built their homes. Excavations in Palestine go, day by day, to explain, where they do not simply corroborate, the statements of the Bible. The diggings about the supposed ancient site of Nineveh, in Babylonia, have unearthed the ruins of an immense library. Sir A. H. Layard, and subsequently Mr. George Smith and Hormuzd Rassam, have brought together a number of clay tablets which open an immense world of Assyrian and Babylonian literature, whose existence was hitherto known only by the indications given in the Book of Daniel and other historical portions of the Bible concerning the conquerors of the Jews. These discoveries, as Mr. A. H. Sayce remarks in his "Fresh Lights from Ancient Monuments" (page 17), have not only "shed a flood of light on the history and antiquity of the Old Testament, but they have served to illustrate and explain the language of the Old Testament as well."