The Ancient East

iens. Seldom in its history could it so be described. Since it became predominantly Semitic, over a thousand years before our survey,

. BABYLON

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

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

gour 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.

erlords, 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 aga

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 Pha

he 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 Sem

ASIATIC EMP

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

ollapse 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 m

ly 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 influen

as 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

EMPIRE OF EGYPT.

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 hun

EMPIRE OF

T ITS GREATEST EXTENT.

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; bu

EARLY ASS

ions 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 nea

y 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 op

NEW FORCES

padocia 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 som

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, a

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

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 necess

menia 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

6. ASI

e 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

, 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,

e 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 Piles

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 Tesh

ON 7.

nly 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

on 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 alread

N 8. P

nt 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 e

nth 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

9. MES

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

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 S

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