Dr. Winckler is facile princeps in the field of historical research covered by the following vol ume. He has not only the great advantages of being one of our foremost Semitic linguists, and a specialist in Assyriology but is also naturally endowed, as few men are, for the constructive work of the historiographer. Perhaps to no one of the present generation of Semitic scholars, more than to him, are the workers in the various fields of Semitic Literature and History indebted. He has been for a quarter of a century not merely a rehearser of verified facts in this new and difficult domain but an indefatigable discoverer of new facts which, with his brilliant historical imagination, he has always known how to illu minate. It was, therefore, a matter of self-congratula tion when the present editor secured his consent to revise his Geschichte in the light of the knowl edge gained since it was published in 1899 as a contribution to the Weltgeschichte of Dr. H. F.