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Show Bridging the Gap in Human History Investigation Throws Light on Civilizations of . the Long Past. tians fiOO years after (hp Pyramid age and two millennials B. C. revealed re-vealed n longing for felicity beyond the satisfactions of food and drink and shelter. In the spacious walls of the Oriental Ori-ental institute the East walks again in its beauty and majesty, but with sobering if not frightening suggestion sugges-tion to the present, which sees In every object reminders of a perished past of the death of civilizations that dreamed they were immortal. Tet every earthen fact is touched by the spirit of skill that begat it and is passed on as a symbol of struggle toward an ideal. The great winged bull that looks with steady gaze into a strange world may be but an early dream of human flight the man's face appearing above the wings, the strength of the bull suggesting the power of the motor that has taken the place of beasts of burden. Dedication of a building at the University of Chicago devoted to the investigation of early man a building build-ing which "finds no parallel in any other university, either in America or abroad" draws the Near East still nearer to the West. It is in the East that the origins of the civilization civiliza-tion we have inherited are for the most part hidden ; and the Oriental institute under western skies seeks now to help man in a literal sense to "orient" himself to get his bearings and see in true perspective the history his-tory of the human race. Especially is it to help bridge the gap between the savage of the paleontologist and the historian's story of the people who emerge in Europe as "civilized" beings. Dr. James H. Breasted, with his general headquarters in this building, build-ing, has an army of diggers not alone with spades, but also with modern excavating engineering, directed by an archeological staff, on a 3,000 mile front, stretching from Luxor In Egypt northward past Sinai, through Palestine and Syria vto the uplands of Anatolia, eastward and southward across Mesopotamia to Persepolis in Persia. Many other groups are making mak-ing independent research, but for the first time' a single organization is able to "control and correlate" research re-search and excavation throughout the lending early civilizations in a "single composite construction" of the pre-European course of human life, when for thousands of years man was advancing along a front as wide as the United States. Of special significance is the evidence evi-dence that in this period man in Egypt began "to bear remote voices that proclaimed the utter futility of material conquest." It was then that "conscience and character broke upon the world." The coffin lids of Egyp- |