Note on the Text

This ebook is transcribed from a 1926 edition published by Chatto & Windus, available from Google Books.[1] Every attempt has been made to retain original spelling and punctuation, even when internally inconsistent. The only changes that have been made are to the following passages:

‘military people, you know, and well connected.”’
Added missing opening quote.
‘Four days. three days . . . two days . . .’
Added missing elipses before “three.”
it is a sort of blurr
Changed to “blur.”
I could not, in the circumtances
Changed to “circumstances.”
not his proto-Hitite Script
Changed to “Hittite.”
Corrected several misspellings of “Yearsly” (from Yearsley), “Pincent” (from Pinsent), and “Howsteads” (from Howsteds).

New original cover art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain. It is a composite of the title page text and clothbound cover.

The translation of the opening epigraph—lines 146-149 of Book VI of Homer’s Iliad—is sourced from the Alexander Pope translation, available from Internet Archive:[2]

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise;
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these, when those are past away.

Iliad by Homer, trans. Alexander Pope [↩]

[1. https://books.google.com/books?id=osihAqjxClEC] [↩]

[2. https://archive.org/details/iliadofhomertran00homeuoft] [↩]