THE STAGE OF THE DRAMA	117
making contact with civilizations that were neither living contemporaries
of their own society, whom it could meet in the flesh, nor dead predeces-
sors related to it by an unbroken tradition of the kind that linked the
Western Society with a dead antecedent Hellenic Civilization to which
it was 'affiliated' and also with a dead antecedent Syriac Civilization
with which it was in liaison through the Christian Church.
The first of these 'lost' or 'forgotten' civilizations to be retrieved by
Western ingenuity was the Egyptiac; and this was hardly an accident,
since the Egyptiac was, for several reasons, less difficult than other
castaways were to recapture. For one thing, the Egyptiac culture did
not have to be literally disinterred, since it had left physical monuments
that not only stood above ground but towered into the sky. The Pyramids
at Gizah did not have to wait for the arrival of a French expeditionary
force in a.d. 1798 to loom large in the minds of living men. Ever since
their erection in the third millennium b.c. they had made an over-
whelming impression on the imaginations of non-Egyptiac sight-seers;
and Western and Greek Orthodox Christian scholars who had never set
eyes on them were familiar with the fact of their existence—and with
the further fact that they were the abiding products of a now long since
extinct Egyptiac Civilization—thanks to the accounts of the Egyptiac
Society's culture and history in the records of an Hellenic Civilization
which, throughout its own life-span, had been in contact in the Space-
dimension with an Egyptiac Tithonus.1 One of the incidental products
of this Helleno-Egyptiac encounter had been the bilingual inscription
in the Greek Alphabet and in two Egyptiac scripts on 'the Rosetta
Stone' (incisus est 196 b.c.) which had given Modern Western scholars
their key to the deciphering of both the Hieroglyphic and the Demotic
Egyptiac characters; but the task of proceeding from the reading of
scripts to the interpretation of a dead language conveyed in them might
have been still more arduous than it actually was if in the nineteenth
century of the Christian Era a language descended from the demotic
Egyptian had not been still in daily use as the liturgical language of a
Coptic Monophysite Christian Church.
Western scholars had more ado to recapture a Babylonic and an ante-
cedent Sumeric Civilization whose still visible monuments were shape-
less mounds of disintegrating sun-dried brick that could not compare
with granite-built pyramids in knpressiveness; yet here, too, living
languages furnished valuable clues. The Achaemenian inscriptions in a
simplified version of the cuneiform script, which provided the keys for
this script's decipherment, conveyed a language of the Indo-European
family from which a still living Modern Persian was descended;2 the
Akkadian language, conveyed in parallel columns of cuneiform script in
the Achaemenian inscriptions, proved to be a member of the same
Semitic family as the already familiar Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew,
Amharic, and Ge'ez; an already acquired knowledge of Old Persian and
Akkadian made it possible to decipher the Elamite language, which was
the third of those employed in the Achaemenids' trilingual inscriptions,
 1	The doom of Tithonus has been observed in VI. vii. 47-53,
 2	See VI. vii. 347-8.