The Ancient East

In 1000 B.C. West Asia was a mosaic of small states and contained, so far as we know, no imperial power holding wide dominion over aliens. Seldom in its history could it so be described. Since it became predominantly Semitic, over a thousand years before our survey, it had fallen under simultaneous or successive dominations, exercised from at least three regions within itself and from one without.

SECTION 1. BABYLONIAN EMPIRE

The earliest of these centres of power to develop foreign empire was also that destined, after many vicissitudes, to hold it latest, because it was the best endowed by nature to repair the waste which empire entails. This was the region which would be known later as Babylonia from the name of the city which in historic times dominated it, but, as we now know, was neither an early seat of power nor the parent of its distinctive local civilization. This honour, if due to any one city, should be credited to Ur, whose also was the first and the only truly "Babylonian" empire. The primacy of Babylonia had not been the work of its aboriginal Sumerian population, the authors of what was highest in the local culture, but of Semitic intruders from a comparatively barbarous region; nor again, had it been the work of the earliest of these intruders (if we follow those who now deny that the dominion of Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-sin ever extended beyond the lower basins of the Twin Rivers), but of peoples who entered with a second series of Semitic waves. These surged out of Arabia, eternal motherland of vigorous migrants, in the middle centuries of the third millennium B.C. While this migration swamped South Syria with "Canaanites," it ultimately gave to Egypt the Hyksos or "Shepherd Kings," to Assyria its permanent Semitic population, and to Sumer and Akkad what later chroniclers called the First Babylonian Dynasty. Since, however, those Semitic interlopers had no civilization of their own comparable with either the contemporary Egyptian or the Sumerian (long ago adopted by earlier Semitic immigrants), they inevitably and quickly assimilated both these civilizations as they settled down.

At the same time they did not lose, at least not in Mesopotamia, which was already half Semitized, certain Bedawi ideas and instincts, which would profoundly affect their later history. Of these the most important historically was a religious idea which, for want of a better term, may be called Super-Monotheism. Often found rooted in wandering peoples and apt long to survive their nomadic phase, it consists in a belief that, however many tribal and local gods there may be, one paramount deity exists who is not only singular and indivisible but dwells in one spot, alone on earth. His dwelling may be changed by a movement of his people en masse, but by nothing less; and he can have no real rival in supreme power. The fact that the paramount Father-God of the Semites came through that migration en masse to take up his residence in Babylon and in no other city of the wide lands newly occupied, caused this city to retain for many centuries, despite social and political changes, a predominant position not unlike that to be held by Holy Rome from the Dark Ages to modern times.

Secondly the Arabs brought with them their immemorial instinct of restlessness. This habit also is apt to persist in a settled society, finding satisfaction in annual recourse to tent or hut life and in annual predatory excursions. The custom of the razzia or summer raid, which is still obligatory in Arabia on all men of vigour and spirit, was held in equal honour by the ancient Semitic world. Undertaken as a matter of course, whether on provocation or not, it was the origin and constant spring of those annual marches to the frontiers, of which royal Assyrian monuments vaingloriously tell us, to the exclusion of almost all other information. Chederlaomer, Amraphel and the other three kings were fulfilling their annual obligation in the Jordan valley when Hebrew tradition believed that they met with Abraham; and if, as seems agreed, Amraphel was Hammurabi himself, that tradition proves the custom of the razzia well established under the First Babylonian Dynasty.

Moreover, the fact that these annual campaigns of Babylonian and Assyrian kings were simply Bedawi razzias highly organized and on a great scale should be borne in mind when we speak of Semitic "empires," lest we think too territorially. No permanent organization of territorial dominion in foreign parts was established by Semitic rulers till late in Assyrian history. The earlier Semitic overlords, that is, all who preceded Ashurnatsirpal of Assyria, went a-raiding to plunder, assault, destroy, or receive submissive payments, and their ends achieved, returned, without imposing permanent garrisons of their own followers, permanent viceroys, or even a permanent tributary burden, to hinder the stricken foe from returning to his own way till his turn should come to be raided again. The imperial blackmailer had possibly left a record of his presence and prowess on alien rocks, to be defaced at peril when his back was turned; but for the rest only a sinister memory. Early Babylonian and Early Assyrian "empire," therefore, meant, territorially, no more than a geographical area throughout which an emperor could, and did, raid without encountering effective opposition.

Nevertheless, such constant raiding on a great scale was bound to produce some of the fruits of empire, and by its fruits, not its records, we know most surely how far Babylonian Empire had made itself felt. The best witnesses to its far-reaching influence are first, the Babylonian element in the Hittite art of distant Asia Minor, which shows from the very first (so far as we know it, i.e. from at least 1500 B.C.) that native artists were hardly able to realize any native ideas without help from Semitic models; and secondly, the use of Babylonian writing and language and even Babylonian books by the ruling classes in Asia Minor and Syria at a little later time. That governors of Syrian cities should have written their official communications to Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Babylonian cuneiform (as the archives found at Amarna in Upper Egypt twenty years ago show us they did) had already afforded such conclusive proof of early and long maintained Babylonian influence, that the more recent discovery that Hittite lords of Cappadocia used the same script and language for diplomatic purposes has hardly surprised us.

It has been said already that Babylonia was a region so rich and otherwise fortunate that empire both came to it earlier and stayed later than in the other West Asian lands which ever enjoyed it at all. When we come to take our survey of Western Asia in 400 B.C. we shall see an emperor still ruling it from a throne set in the lower Tigris basin, though not actually in Babylon. But for certain reasons Babylonian empire never endured for any long period continuously. The aboriginal Akkadian and Sumerian inhabitants were settled, cultivated and home keeping folk, while the establishment of Babylonian empire had been the work of more vigorous intruders. These, however, had to fear not only the imperfect sympathy of their own aboriginal subjects, who again and again gathered their sullen forces in the "Sea Land" at the head of the Persian Gulf and attacked the dominant Semites in the rear, but also incursions of fresh strangers; for Babylonia is singularly open on all sides. Accordingly, revolts of the "Sea Land" folk, inrushing hordes from Arabia, descents of mountain warriors from the border hills of Elam on the south-eastern edge of the twin river basin, pressure from the peoples of more invigorating lands on the higher Euphrates and Tigris--one, or more than one such danger ever waited on imperial Babylon and brought her low again and again. A great descent of Hatti raiders from the north about 1800 B.C. seems to have ended the imperial dominion of the First Dynasty. On their retirement Babylonia, falling into weak native hands, was a prey to a succession of inroads from the Kassite mountains beyond Elam, from Elam itself, from the growing Semitic power of Asshur, Babylon's former vassal, from the Hittite Empire founded in Cappadocia about 1500 B.C., from the fresh wave of Arabian overflow which is distinguished as the Aramaean, and from yet another following it, which is usually called Chaldaean; and it was not till almost the close of the twelfth century that one of these intruding elements attained sufficient independence and security of tenure to begin to exalt Babylonia again into a mistress of foreign empire. At that date the first Nebuchadnezzar, a part of whose own annals has been recovered, seems to have established overlordship in some part of Mediterranean Asia--Martu, the West Land; but this empire perished again with its author. By 1000 B.C. Babylon was once more a small state divided against itself and threatened by rivals in the east and the north.

SECTION 2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT

During the long interval since the fall of the First Babylonian Dynasty, however, Western Asia had not been left masterless. Three other imperial powers had waxed and waned in her borders, of which one was destined to a second expansion later on. The earliest of these to appear on the scene established an imperial dominion of a kind which we shall not observe again till Asia falls to the Greeks; for it was established in Asia by a non-Asiatic power. In the earlier years of the fifteenth century a Pharaoh of the strong Eighteenth Dynasty, Thothmes III, having overrun almost all Syria up to Carchemish on the Euphrates, established in the southern part of that country an imperial organization which converted his conquests for a time into provincial dependencies of Egypt. Of the fact we have full evidence in the archives of Thothmes' dynastic successors, found by Flinders Petrie at Amarna; for they include many reports from officials and client princes in Palestine and Phoenicia.

If, however, the word empire is to be applied (as in fact we have applied it in respect of early Babylonia) to a sphere of habitual raiding, where the exclusive right of one power to plunder is acknowledged implicitly or explicitly by the raided and by surrounding peoples, this "Empire" of Egypt must both be set back nearly a hundred years before Thothmes III and also be credited with wider limits than those of south Syria. Invasions of Semitic Syria right up to the Euphrates were first conducted by Pharaohs in the early part of the sixteenth century as a sequel to the collapse of the power of the Semitic "Hyksos" in Egypt. They were wars partly of revenge, partly of natural Egyptian expansion into a neighbouring fertile territory, which at last lay open, and was claimed by no other imperial power, while the weak Kassites ruled Babylon, and the independence of Assyria was in embryo. But the earlier Egyptian armies seem to have gone forth to Syria simply to ravage and levy blackmail. They avoided all fenced places, and returned to the Nile leaving no one to hold the ravaged territory. No Pharaoh before the successor of Queen Hatshepsut made Palestine and Phoenicia his own. It was Thothmes III who first reduced such strongholds as Megiddo, and occupied the Syrian towns up to Arvad on the shore and almost to Kadesh inland--he who by means of a few forts, garrisoned perhaps by Egyptian or Nubian troops and certainly in some instances by mercenaries drawn from Mediterranean islands and coasts, so kept the fear of himself in the minds of native chiefs that they paid regular tribute to his collectors and enforced the peace of Egypt on all and sundry Hebrews and Amorites who might try to raid from east or north.

In upper Syria, however, he and his successors appear to have attempted little more than Thothmes I had done, that is to say, they made periodical armed progresses through the fertile parts, here and there taking a town, but for the most part taking only blackmail. Some strong places, such as Kadesh, it is probable they never entered at all. Their raids, however, were frequent and effective enough for all Syria to come to be regarded by surrounding kings and kinglets as an Egyptian sphere of influence within which it was best to acknowledge Pharaoh's rights and to placate him by timely presents. So thought and acted the kings of Mitanni across Euphrates, the kings of Hatti beyond Taurus, and the distant Iranians of the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia.

Until the latter years of Thothmes' third successor, Amenhetep III, who ruled in the end of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth, the Egyptian peace was observed and Pharaoh's claim to Syria was respected. Moreover, an interesting experiment appears to have been made to tighten Egypt's hold on her foreign province. Young Syrian princes were brought for education to the Nile, in the hope that when sent back to their homes they would be loyal viceroys of Pharaoh: but the experiment seems to have produced no better ultimate effect than similar experiments tried subsequently by imperial nations from the Romans to ourselves.

Plate 2: ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMENHETEP III

Beyond this conception of imperial organization the Egyptians never advanced. Neither effective military occupation nor effective administration of Syria by an Egyptian military or civil staff was so much as thought of. Traces of the cultural influence of Egypt on the Syrian civilization of the time (so far as excavation has revealed its remains) are few and far between; and we must conclude that the number of genuine Egyptians who resided in, or even passed through, the Asiatic province was very small. Unadventurous by nature, and disinclined to embark on foreign trade, the Nilots were content to leave Syria in vicarious hands, so they derived some profit from it. It needed, therefore, only the appearance of some vigorous and numerous tribe in the province itself, or of some covetous power on its borders, to end such an empire. Both had appeared before Amenhetep's death--the Amorites in mid Syria, and a newly consolidated Hatti power on the confines of the north. The inevitable crisis was met with no new measures by his son, the famous Akhenaten, and before the middle of the fourteenth century the foreign empire of Egypt had crumbled to nothing but a sphere of influence in southernmost Palestine, having lasted, for better or worse, something less than two hundred years. It was revived, indeed, by the kings of the Dynasty succeeding, but had even less chance of duration than of old. Rameses II, in dividing it to his own great disadvantage with the Hatti king by a Treaty whose provisions are known to us from surviving documents of both parties, confessed Egyptian impotence to make good any contested claim; and by the end of the thirteenth century the hand of Pharaoh was withdrawn from Asia, even from that ancient appanage of Egypt, the peninsula of Sinai. Some subsequent Egyptian kings would make raids into Syria, but none was able, or very desirous, to establish there a permanent Empire.

SECTION 3. EMPIRE OF THE HATTI

Plate 3: HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY 13TH CENTURY B.C.

The empire which pressed back the Egyptians is the last but one which we have to consider before 1000 B.C. It has long been known that the Hittites, variously called Kheta by Egyptians and Heth or Hatti by Semites and by themselves, developed into a power in westernmost Asia at least as early as the fifteenth century; but it was not until their cuneiform archives were discovered in 1907 at Boghazkeui in northern Cappadocia that the imperial nature of their power, the centre from which it was exerted, and the succession of the rulers who wielded it became clear. It will be remembered that a great Hatti raid broke the imperial sway of the First Babylonian Dynasty about 1800 B.C. Whence those raiders came we have still to learn. But, since a Hatti people, well enough organized to invade, conquer and impose its garrisons, and (much more significant) its own peculiar civilization, on distant territories, was seated at Boghazkeui (it is best to use this modern name till better assured of an ancient one) in the fifteenth century, we may reasonably believe Eastern Asia Minor to have been the homeland of the Hatti three centuries before. As an imperial power they enter history with a king whom his own archives name Subbiluliuma (but Egyptian records, Sapararu), and they vanish something less than two centuries later. The northern half of Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and probably almost all Asia Minor were conquered by the Hatti before 1350 B.C. and rendered tributary; Egypt was forced out of Asia; the Semitic settlements on the twin rivers and the tribes in the desert were constrained to deference or defence. A century and a half later the Hatti had returned into a darkness even deeper than that from which they emerged. The last king of Boghazkeui, of whose archives any part has come to light, is one Arnaunta, reigning in the end of the thirteenth century. He may well have had successors whose documents may yet be found; but on the other hand, we know from Assyrian annals, dated only a little later, that a people, possibly kin to the Hatti and certainly civilized by them, but called by another name, Mushkaya or Mushki (we shall say more of them presently), overran most, if not all, the Hatti realm by the middle of the twelfth century. And since, moreover, the excavated ruins at both Boghazkeui, the capital of the Hatti, and Carchemish, their chief southern dependency, show unmistakable signs of destruction and of a subsequent general reconstruction, which on archaeological grounds must be dated not much later than Arnaunta's time, it seems probable that the history of Hatti empire closed with that king. What happened subsequently to surviving detachments of this once imperial people and to other communities so near akin by blood or civilization, that the Assyrians, when speaking generally of western foes or subjects, long continued to call them Hatti, we shall consider presently.

SECTION 4. EARLY ASSYRIAN EMPIRE

Remains Assyria, which before 1000 B.C. had twice conquered an empire of the same kind as that credited to the First Babylonian Dynasty and twice recoiled. The early Assyrian expansions are, historically, the most noteworthy of the early West Asian Empires because, unlike the rest, they were preludes to an ultimate territorial overlordship which would come nearer to anticipating Macedonian and Roman imperial systems than any others precedent. Assyria, rather than Babylon or Egypt, heads the list of aspirants to the Mastership of the World.

There will be so much to say of the third and subsequent expansion of Assyria, that her earlier empires may be passed over briefly. The middle Tigris basin seems to have received a large influx of Semites of the Canaanitic wave at least as early as Babylonia, and thanks to various causes--to the absence of a prior local civilization as advanced as the Sumerian, to greater distance from such enterprising fomenters of disturbance as Elam and Arabia, and to a more invigorating climate--these Semites settled down more quickly and thoroughly into an agricultural society than the Babylonians and developed it in greater purity. Their earliest social centre was Asshur in the southern part of their territory. There, in proximity to Babylonia, they fell inevitably under the domination of the latter; but after the fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon and the subsequent decline of southern Semitic vigour, a tendency manifested itself among the northern Semites to develop their nationality about more central points. Calah, higher up the river, replaced Asshur in the thirteenth century B.C., only to be replaced in turn by Nineveh, a little further still upstream; and ultimately Assyria, though it had taken its name from the southern city, came to be consolidated round a north Mesopotamian capital into a power able to impose vassalage on Babylon and to send imperial raiders to the Mediterranean, and to the Great Lakes of Armenia. The first of her kings to attain this sort of imperial position was Shalmaneser I, who early in the thirteenth century B.C. appears to have crushed the last strength of the north Mesopotamian powers of Mitanni and Khani and laid the way open to the west lands. The Hatti power, however, tried hard to close the passages and it was not until its catastrophe and the retirement of those who brought it about--the Mushki and their allies--that about 1100 Tiglath Pileser I could lead his Assyrian raiders into Syria, and even, perhaps, a short distance across Taurus. Why his empire died with him we do not know precisely. A new invasion of Arabian Semites, the Aramaeans, whom he attacked at Mt. Bishri (Tell Basher), may have been the cause. But, in any case, the fact is certain. The sons of the great king, who had reached Phoenician Aradus and there embarked vaingloriously on shipboard to claim mastery of the Western Sea, were reduced to little better than vassals of their father's former vassal, Babylon; and up to the close of the eleventh century Assyria had not revived.

SECTION 5. NEW FORCES IN 1000 B.C.

Thus in 1000 B.C., we look round the East, and, so far as our vision can penetrate the clouds, see no one dominant power. Territories which formerly were overridden by the greater states, Babylonia, Egypt, Cappadocia and Assyria, seem to be not only self-governing but free from interference, although the vanished empires and a recent great movement of peoples have left them with altered political boundaries and sometimes with new dynasties. None of the political units has a much larger area than another, and it would not have been easy at the moment to prophesy which, or if any one, would grow at the expense of the rest.

The great movement of peoples, to which allusion has just been made, had been disturbing West Asia for two centuries. On the east, where the well organized and well armed societies of Babylonia and Assyria offered a serious obstacle to nomadic immigrants, the inflow had been pent back beyond frontier mountains. But in the west the tide seems to have flowed too strongly to be resisted by such force as the Hatti empire of Cappadocia could oppose, and to have swept through Asia Minor even to Syria and Mesopotamia. Records of Rameses III tell how a great host of federated peoples appeared on the Asian frontier of Egypt very early in the twelfth century. Among them marched men of the "Kheta" or Hatti, but not as leaders. These strong foes and allies of Seti I and Rameses II, not a century before, had now fallen from their imperial estate to follow in the wake of newcomers, who had lately humbled them in their Cappadocian home. The geographical order in which the scribes of Rameses enumerated their conquests shows clearly the direction from which the federals had come and the path they followed. In succession they had devastated Hatti (i.e. Cappadocia), Kedi (i.e. Cilicia), Carchemish and central Syria. Their victorious progress began, therefore, in northern Asia Minor, and followed the great roads through the Cilician passes to end at last on the very frontiers of Egypt. The list of these newcomers has long interested historians; for outlandish as their names were to Egyptians, they seem to our eyes not unfamiliar, and are possibly travesties of some which are writ large on pages of later history. Such are the Pulesti or Philistines, and a group hailing apparently from Asia Minor and the Isles, Tjakaray, Shakalsha, Danaau and Washasha, successors of Pisidian and other Anatolian allies of the Hittites in the time of Rameses II, and of the Lycian, Achaean and Sardinian pirates whom Egypt used sometimes to beat from her borders, sometimes to enlist in her service. Some of these peoples, from whatever quarters they had come, settled presently into new homes as the tide receded. The Pulesti, if they were indeed the historic Philistines, stranded and stayed on the confines of Egypt, retaining certain memories of an earlier state, which had been theirs in some Minoan land. Since the Tjakaray and the Washasha seem to have sprung from lands now reckoned in Europe, we may count this occasion the first in history on which the west broke in force into the east.

Turn to the annals of Assyria and you will learn, from records of Tiglath Pileser I, that this northern wave was followed up in the same century by a second, which bore on its crest another bold horde from Asia Minor. Its name, Mushki, we now hear for the first time, but shall hear again in time to come. A remnant of this race would survive far into historic times as the Moschi of Greek geographers, an obscure people on the borders of Cappadocia and Armenia. But who precisely the first Mushki were, whence they had originally come, and whither they went when pushed back out of Mesopotamia, are questions still debated. Two significant facts are known about their subsequent history; first, that two centuries later than our date they, or some part of them, were settled in Cappadocia, apparently rather in the centre and north of that country than in the south: second, that at that same epoch and later they had kings of the name Mita, which is thought to be identical with the name Midas, known to early Greek historians as borne by kings of Phrygia.

Because of this last fact, the Mushki have been put down as proto-Phrygians, risen to power after the fall of the Cappadocian Hatti. This contention will be considered hereafter, when we reach the date of the first known contact between Assyria and any people settled in western Asia Minor. But meanwhile, let it be borne in mind that their royal name Mita does not necessarily imply a connection between the Mushki and Phrygia; for since the ethnic "Mitanni" of north Mesopotamia means "Mita's men," that name must have long been domiciled much farther east.

On the whole, whatever their later story, the truth about the Mushki, who came down into Syria early in the twelfth century and retired to Cappadocia some fifty years later after crossing swords with Assyria, is probably this--that they were originally a mountain people from northern Armenia or the Caucasus, distinct from the Hatti, and that, having descended from the north-east in a primitive nomadic state into the seat of an old culture possessed by an enfeebled race, they adopted the latter's civilization as they conquered it and settled down. But probably they did not fix themselves definitely in Cappadocia till the blow struck by Tiglath Pileser had checked their lust of movement and weakened their confidence of victory. In any case, the northern storms had subsided by 1000 B.C., leaving Asia Minor, Armenia and Syria parcelled among many princes.

SECTION 6. ASIA MINOR

Had one taken ship with Achaeans or Ionians for the western coast of Anatolia in the year 1000, one would have expected to disembark at or near some infant settlement of men, not natives by extraction, but newly come from the sea and speaking Greek or another Aegean tongue. These men had ventured so far to seize the rich lands at the mouths of the long Anatolian valleys, from which their roving forefathers had been almost entirely debarred by the provincial forces of some inland power, presumably the Hatti Empire of Cappadocia. In earlier days the Cretans, or their kin of Mycenaean Greece in the latest Aegean age, had been able to plant no more than a few inconsiderable colonies of traders on Anatolian shores. Now, however, their descendants were being steadily reinforced from the west by members of a younger Aryan race, who mixed with the natives of the coast, and gradually mastered or drove them inland. Inconsiderable as this European soakage into the fringe of the neighbouring continent must have seemed at that moment, we know that it was inaugurating a process which ultimately would affect profoundly all the history of Hither Asia. That Greek Ionian colonization first attracts notice round about 1000 B.C. marks the period as a cardinal point in history. We cannot say for certain, with our present knowledge, that any one of the famous Greek cities had already begun to grow on the Anatolian coasts. There is better evidence for the so early existence of Miletus, where the German excavators have found much pottery of the latest Aegean age, than of any other. But, at least, it is probable that Greeks were already settled on the sites of Cnidus, Teos, Smyrna, Colophon, Phocea, Cyme and many more; while the greater islands Rhodes, Samos, Chios and Mitylene had apparently received western settlers several generations ago, perhaps before even the first Achaean raids into Asia.

The western visitor, if he pushed inland, would have avoided the south-western districts of the peninsula, where a mountainous country, known later as Caria, Lycia, and Pisidia, was held by primitive hill-men settled in detached tribal fashion like modern Albanians. They had never yet been subdued, and as soon as the rising Greek ports on their coasts should open a way for them to the outer world, they would become known as admirable mercenary soldiery, following a congenial trade which, if the Pedasu, who appear in records of Egyptian campaigns of the Eighteenth Dynasty, were really Pisidians, was not new to them. North of their hills, however, lay broader valleys leading up to the central plateau; and, if Herodotus is to be believed, an organized monarchical society, ruled by the "Heraclids" of Sardes, was already developed there. We know practically nothing about it; but since some three centuries later the Lydian people was rich and luxurious in the Hermus valley, which had once been a fief of the Hatti, we must conclude that it had been enjoying security as far back as 1000 B.C. Who those Heraclid princes were exactly is obscure. The dynastic name given to them by Herodotus probably implies that they traced their origin (i.e. owed especial allegiance) to a God of the Double War-Axe, whom the Greeks likened to Heracles, but we liken to Sandan, god of Tarsus and of the lands of the south-east. We shall say more of him and his worshippers presently.

Leaving aside the northern fringe-lands as ill known and of small account (as we too shall leave them), our traveller would pass up from the Lydian vales to find the Cappadocian Hatti no longer the masters of the plateau as of old. No one of equal power seems to have taken their place; but there is reason to think that the Mushki, who had brought them low, now filled some of their room in Asia Minor. But these Mushki had so far adopted Hatti civilization either before or since their great raiding expedition which Tiglath Pileser I of Assyria repelled, that their domination can scarcely have made much difference to the social condition of Asia Minor. Their capital was probably where the Hatti capital had been--at Boghazkeui; but how far their lordship radiated from that centre is not known.

In the south-east of Asia Minor we read of several principalities, both in the Hatti documents of earlier centuries and in Assyrian annals of later date; and since some of their names appear in both these sets of records, we may safely assign them to the same localities during the intermediate period. Such are Kas in later Lycaonia, Tabal or Tubal in south-eastern Cappadocia, Khilakku, which left its name to historical Cilicia, and Kue in the rich eastern Cilician plain and the north-eastern hills. In north Syria again we find both in early and in late times Kummukh, which left to its district the historic name, Commagene. All these principalities, as their earlier monuments prove, shared the same Hatti civilization as the Mushki and seem to have had the same chief deities, the axe-bearing Sandan, or Teshup, or Hadad, whose sway we have noted far west in Lydia, and also a Great Mother, the patron of peaceful increase, as he was of warlike conquest. But whether this uniformity of civilization implies any general overlord, such as the Mushki king, is very questionable. The past supremacy of the Hatti is enough to account for large community of social features in 1000 B.C. over all Asia Minor and north Syria.

SECTION 7. SYRIA

It is time for our traveller to move on southward into "Hatti-land," as the Assyrians would long continue to call the southern area of the old Hatti civilization. He would have found Syria in a state of greater or less disintegration from end to end. Since the withdrawal of the strong hands of the Hatti from the north and the Egyptians from the south, the disorganized half-vacant land had been attracting to itself successive hordes of half-nomadic Semites from the eastern and southern steppes. By 1000 B.C. these had settled down as a number of Aramaean societies each under its princeling. All were great traders. One such society established itself in the north-west, in Shamal, where, influenced by the old Hatti culture, an art came into being which was only saved ultimately by Semitic Assyria from being purely Hittite. Its capital, which lay at modern Sinjerli, one of the few Syrian sites scientifically explored, we shall notice later on. South lay Patin and Bit Agusi; south of these again, Hamath and below it Damascus--all new Aramaean states, which were waiting for quiet times to develop according to the measure of their respective territories and their command of trade routes. Most blessed in both natural fertility and convenience of position was Damascus (Ubi or Hobah), which had been receiving an Aramaean influx for at least three hundred years. It was destined to outstrip the rest of those new Semitic states; but for the moment it was little stronger than they. As for the Phoenician cities on the Lebanon coast, which we know from the Amarna archives and other Egyptian records to have long been settled with Canaanitic Semites, they were to appear henceforward in a light quite other than that in which the reports of their Egyptian governors and visitors had hitherto shown them. Not only did they very rapidly become maritime traders instead of mere local territorial centres, but (if we may infer it from the lack of known monuments of their higher art or of their writing before 1000 B.C.) they were making or just about to make a sudden advance in social development. It should be remarked that our evidence, that other Syrian Semites had taken to writing in scripts of their own, begins not much later at various points--in Shamal, in Moab and in Samaria.

This rather sudden expansion of the Phoenicians into a maritime power about 1000 B.C. calls for explanation. Herodotus thought that the Phoenicians were driven to take to the sea simply by the growing inadequacy of their narrow territory to support the natural increase of its inhabitants, and probably he was partly right, the crisis of their fate being hastened by Armaean pressure from inland. But the advance in their culture, which is marked by the development of their art and their writing, was too rapid and too great to have resulted only from new commerce with the sea; nor can it have been due to any influence of the Aramaean elements which were comparatively fresh from the Steppes. To account for the facts in Syria we seem to require, not long previous to this time, a fresh accession of population from some area of higher culture. When we observe, therefore, among the earlier Phoenician and south Syrian antiquities much that was imported, and more that derived its character, from Cyprus and even remoter centres of the Aegean culture of the latest Minoan Age, we cannot regard as fantastic the belief of the Cretan discoverer, Arthur Evans, that the historic Phoenician civilization, and especially the Phoenician script, owed their being in great measure to an immigration from those nearest oversea lands which had long possessed a fully developed art and a system of writing. After the fall of the Cnossian Dynasty we know that a great dispersal of Cretans began, which was continued and increased later by the descent of the Achaeans into Greece. It has been said already that the Pulesti or Philistines, who had followed the first northern horde to the frontiers of Egypt early in the twelfth century, are credibly supposed to have come from some area affected by Minoan civilization, while the Tjakaray and Washasha, who accompanied them, were probably actual Cretans. The Pulesti stayed, as we know, in Philistia: the Tjakaray settled at Dor on the South Phoenician coast, where Unamon, an envoy of Rameses XI, found them. These settlers are quite sufficient to account for the subsequent development of a higher culture in mid and south Syria, and there may well have been some further immigration from Cyprus and other Aegean lands which, as time went on, impelled the cities of Phoenicia, so well endowed by nature, to develop a new culture apace about 1000 B.C.

SECTION 8. PALESTINE

If the Phoenicians were feeling the thrust of Steppe peoples, their southern neighbours, the Philistines, who had lived and grown rich on the tolls and trade of the great north road from Egypt for at least a century and a half, were feeling it too. During some centuries past there had come raiding from the south-east deserts certain sturdy and well-knit tribes, which long ago had displaced or assimilated the Canaanites along the highlands west of Jordan, and were now tending to settle down into a national unity, cemented by a common worship. They had had long intermittent struggles, traditions of which fill the Hebrew Book of Judges--struggles not only with the Canaanites, but also with the Amorites of the upper Orontes valley, and later with the Aramaeans of the north and east, and with fresh incursions of Arabs from the south; and most lately of all they had had to give way for about half a century before an expansive movement of the Philistines, which carried the latter up to Galilee and secured to them the profits of all the Palestinian stretch of the great North Road. But about a generation before our date the northernmost of those bold "Habiri," under an elective sheikh Saul, had pushed the Philistines out of Bethshan and other points of vantage in mid-Palestine, and had become once more free of the hills which they had held in the days of Pharaoh Menephthah. Though, at the death of Saul, the enemy regained most of what he had lost, he was not to hold it long. A greater chief, David, who had risen to power by Philistine help and now had the support of the southern tribes, was welding both southern and northern Hebrews into a single monarchical society and, having driven his old masters out of the north once more, threatened the southern stretch of the great North Road from a new capital, Jerusalem. Moreover, by harrying repeatedly the lands east of Jordan up to the desert edge, David had stopped further incursions from Arabia; and, though the Aramaean state of Damascus was growing into a formidable danger, he had checked for the present its tendency to spread southwards, and had strengthened himself by agreements with another Aramaean prince, him of Hamath, who lay on the north flank of Damascus, and with the chief of the nearest Phoenician city, Tyre. The latter was not yet the rich place which it would grow to be in the next century, but it was strong enough to control the coast road north of the Galilean lowlands. Israel not only was never safer, but would never again hold a position of such relative importance in Syria, as was hers in a day of many small and infant states about 1000 B.C.: and in later times, under the shadow of Assyria and the menace of Egypt, the Jews would look back to the reigns of David and his successor with some reason as their golden age.

The traveller would not have ventured into Arabia; nor shall we. It was then an unknown land lying wholly outside history. We have no record (if that mysterious embassy of the "Queen of Sheba," who came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, be ruled out) of any relations between a state of the civilized East and an Arabian prince before the middle of the ninth century. It may be that, as Glaser reckoned, Sabaean society in the south-west of the peninsula had already reached the preliminary stage of tribal settlement through which Israel passed under its Judges, and was now moving towards monarchy; and that of this our traveller might have learned something in Syria from the last arrived Aramaeans. But we, who can learn nothing, have no choice but to go north with him again, leaving to our right the Syrian desert roamed by Bedawis in much the same social state as the Anazeh to-day, owing allegiance to no one. We can cross Euphrates at Carchemish or at Til Barsip opposite the Sajur mouth, or where Thapsacus looked across to the outfall of the Khabur.

SECTION 9. MESOPOTAMIA

No annals of Assyria have survived for nearly a century before 1000 B.C., and very few for the century after that date. Nor do Babylonian records make good our deficiency. Though we cannot be certain, we are probably safe in saying that during these two centuries Assyrian and Babylonian princes had few or no achievements to record of the kind which they held, almost alone, worthy to be immortalized on stone or clay--that is to say, raids, conquests, sacking of cities, blackmailing of princes. Since Tiglath Pileser's time no "Kings of the World" (by which title was signified an overlord of Mesopotamia merely) had been seated on either of the twin rivers. What exactly had happened in the broad tract between the rivers and to the south of Taurus since the departure of the Mushki hordes (if, indeed, they did all depart), we do not know. The Mitanni, who may have been congeners of the latter, seem still to have been holding the north-west; probably all the north-east was Assyrian territory. No doubt the Kurds and Armenians of Urartu were raiding the plains impartially from autumn to spring, as they always did when Assyria was weak. We shall learn a good deal more about Mesopotamia proper when the results of the German excavations at Tell Halaf, near Ras el-Ain, are complete and published. The most primitive monuments found there are perhaps relics of that power of Khani (Harran), which was stretched even to include Nineveh before the Semitic patesis of Asshur grew to royal estate and moved northward to make imperial Assyria. But there are later strata of remains as well which should contain evidence of the course of events in mid-Mesopotamia during subsequent periods both of Assyrian domination and of local independence.

Assyria, as has been said, was without doubt weak at this date, that is, she was confined to the proper territory of her own agricultural Semites. This state of things, whenever existent throughout her history, seems to have implied priestly predominance, in which Babylonian influence went for much. The Semitic tendency to super-Monotheism, which has already been noticed, constantly showed itself among the eastern Semites (when comparatively free from military tyranny) in a reversion of their spiritual allegiance to one supreme god enthroned at Babylon, the original seat of east Semitic theocracy. And even when this city had little military strength the priests of Marduk appear often to have succeeded in keeping a controlling hand on the affairs of stronger Assyria. We shall see later how much prestige great Ninevite war-lords could gain even among their own countrymen by Marduk's formal acknowledgment of their sovereignty, and how much they lost by disregarding him and doing injury to his local habitation. At their very strongest the Assyrian kings were never credited with the natural right to rule Semitic Asia which belonged to kings of Babylon. If they desired the favour of Marduk they must needs claim it at the sword's point, and when that point was lowered, his favour was always withdrawn. From first to last they had perforce to remain military tyrants, who relied on no acknowledged legitimacy but on the spears of conscript peasants, and at the last of mercenaries. No dynasty lasted long in Assyria, where popular generals, even while serving on distant campaigns, were often elevated to the throne--in anticipation of the imperial history of Rome.

It appears then that our traveller would have found Babylonia, rather than Assyria, the leading East Semitic power in 1000 B.C.; but at the same time not a strong power, for she had no imperial dominion outside lower Mesopotamia. Since a dynasty, whose history is obscure--the so-called Pashé kings in whose time there was one strong man, Nabu-Kudur-usur (Nebuchadnezzar) I--came to an inglorious end just about 1000 B.C., one may infer that Babylonia was passing at this epoch through one of those recurrent political crises which usually occurred when Sumerian cities of the southern "Sea-Land" conspired with some foreign invader against the Semitic capital. The contumacious survivors of the elder element in the population, however, even when successful, seem not to have tried to set up new capitals or to reestablish the pre-Semitic state of things. Babylon had so far distanced all the older cities now that no other consummation of revolt was desired or believed possible than the substitution of one dynasty for another on the throne beloved of Marduk. Sumerian forces, however, had not been the only ones which had contributed to overthrow the last king of the Pashé dynasty. Nomads of the Suti tribes had long been raiding from the western deserts into Akkad; and the first king set up by the victorious peoples of the Sea-Land had to expel them and to repair their ravages before he could seat himself on a throne which was menaced by Elam on the east and Assyria on the north, and must fall so soon as either of these found a strong leader.