Immediately upon the cessation of hostilities in the near east, Dr. James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago, at the head of an archaeological expedition, proceeded from Bagded to Aleppo, through the newly constituted Arab state, and now he returns to America with the announcement that he he has unearthed new tablets that "will make the Oriental Museum in the University of Chicago the finest of the kind in the United States." For a long time the University of Pennsylvania has held that place, its claims founded upon its discoveries in Babylonia and its possession of the Nippur tablets with their accounts of the creation of man and the flood. Dr. Breasted is well known among scholars, and he has the hustling qualities of a business man as well. He was the first American to traverse the Arab state and he encountered real risks in the journey. But he has his reward for chief among the finds he announces is a six-sided prism containing an Assyrian account of the destruction of the army of Sennacherib, a record which may solve one of the puzzles of the Old Testament history.

Just what happened to the Assyrian host has not been known. The record brought back by the American scholar is not yet completely translated. But the more announcement of the discovery is very interesting and whets the appetite anew for the kind of research in which American universities were engaging enthusiastically when the war interrupted it. To Chicago also will go a quantity of materials uncovered by Dr. Breasted in Egypt. The whole story of the finding and deciphering of these ancient records, the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Assyrian cuneifornt, and other difficult inscriptions, is one of the fascinating tales of the patience and ingenuity of scholarship. Boston Herald