The following pages consist chie?y of a memoir read before the Royal Historical Society, for the purpose of giving a brief sketch of the work carried on by myself and others, for the investigation of a great epoch of culture, which preceded the Assyrian, the Semitic, and the Greek, and which, accord ing to my views, extended to America, and closed the period of ancient intercourse between the Old World and the New. This essay will be found very imperfect and fragmentary, for it cannot deal with the whole of a subject so wide, and it cannot give exact information on new and obscure epochs, of which little is known, to which investigation is newly directed, and where the results present but a small relation to what remains to be discovered. Indeed, my chief object is to direct the attention of scholars as much as of the public, to these fields of research. It will be noticed that all kinds of names have been used, shifted, and changed, and this must necessarily be the case for what is new and undeterminate. Akkad and Sumerian are as yet con?icting terms, and some most distinguished Semitic scholars deny that there is any Akkad language of a Turan ian class. Shifting my ground as circumstances suggest and permit, I have adopted the term Khita, from Dr Birch, but I give it a much wider application.